doodlehaus

Jakob Nielsen offers some eye-tracking study findings. The highlights are:

• Users won’t read your text thoroughly
• The first two paragraphs must state the most important information.
• Start subheads, paragraphs, and bullet points with information-carrying words

Read the article for more details.

Ever wonder what the Easter Bunny does the rest of the year? Well here you go.

A recent project requires me to create a form that posts information to another URL. No problem, you say? Well you must not be using ASP.NET/C#. Instead of just action=”http://www.offsite.net”, you have to do the following ridiculous prostrations. Isn’t that just grand. Tomorrow I’m going back to plain ‘ol ASP 3.0. Old-school. Keepin’ it real. Otherwise known as “avoiding an aneurism.”

Peace out yo.

Excellent column from Mark Hurst at goodexperience.com. I must say I share in his pain, watching someone hunt-and-peck their way through a techno-demonstration. “Learn to type” is great advice for those of you who spend all day at a keyboard (unless your one of those hyperactive hunt-and-peckers). I suppose many people would tell me to “learn to read faster” or “file those piles of paper.”

Speed reading, eh? I may give it a go.

I’ve always been intruigued by the notion of building a Linux system, not from a canned distro, but from the ground up. I always wanted to see what all the fuss was about and how hard it would be to compile everything (and if I could even get it working at all).

Well, a friend of mine turned me on to  “Linux From Scratch.”  A site where you can read all about building a Linux box DIY. They have a great step-by-step “book” and a LiveCD with all the packages you’ll need to get going.

I’m currently installing it on a Virtual PC (blasphemy, I know), and hope to do it on a real box in the future. There’s something pure and right about the command line. I’m sure any hard-core Penguins that read this will roll their eyes and shout “n00b!”

Have a look at evhead. It’s a good read with lots of good advice. Cheers!

Here are the origins of the HA! HA! guy.

This is clearly the funniest thing on the Internet. Okay, maybe not, but it makes me laugh.

Does search engine optimization have you befuddled? Then you should read this.

The bottom line is this: by designing to accessibility guidelines, using W3C standards and using semantic markup, you should score well with Google. Who says it doesn’t pay to be good?

Still tweaking the rest of the pages. I like the fixed-width look so much better. It really makes page layout much more fun and interesting. But that’s just me talking. Onward!

So there. Now I’ve got to fix my stylesheet. Hooray!