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The personal homepage of Michael Morisy, technology journalist.

Topic “web design”

Can you find the news on CBSNews.com?

Submitted by michael morisy on Fri, 2010-05-21 19:12

CBS Evening News is what many consider a serious news show, but I wouldn't have guessed it looking at an article landing page recently:

Or more clearly ...

That's a whole 80 words of text show up above the digital fold. Count 'em.

Compare this to the gorgeous, content rich NYTimes.com article page:
NYTimes

And that was a really good story CBS did, but it's buried under some dreck about Dancing with the Stars, flashing ads, celebrity gossip, say-nothing teaser headlines and Katie Couric's smiling mug, not to mention free ads for Twitter, Digg and Facebook.

Just a shame, that's all.

Gawker design thef-- I mean, inspiration

Submitted by michael morisy on Mon, 2010-03-29 05:15

One thing I've been mildly-yet-obsessively entranced with for a number of years is how nicely Gawker plays with thumbnails:
Gawker thumbnails screen shot
One of the minor irritations of modern web design is that, even you HTML the hell out a blog post to make it look perfect in terms of graphical layout, by the time you trim, sanitize and otherwise disembowel that HTML for your teaser text, at best you'll have something dull, at worst you'll have something that wreaks havoc on the rest of your page. Gawker, however, automatically crops and resizes a photo as needed to create interesting, all-purpose graphic work that can be popped in wherever it pleases.

I was so jealous of the effect that I began working on my own Drupal module to copy it until I realize that, not only does such a module exist, but it's one of Drupal's most popular: ImageCache.

Organic path creation

Submitted by michael morisy on Tue, 2010-01-12 03:11

I've been working on a (secret-ish!) side project recently that hopes to index a lot of profiles, and allow people to browse through and compare those profiles as convenient.

One thing I'm struggling with at this early stage is the taxonomy architecture. For example, one taxonomy will probably end up being based on geography. My first impulse was to structure the taxonomy like this:
USA
-Northeast
--New England
---Massachusetts
----Greater Boston Area
-----Somerville
-Southeast
--Etc, etc, etc.

I have since been informed that this is insane, or at least a moderately bad idea, particularly in Drupal. So my next idea might be equally insane: Just allow everything to be free tagged with vague prompts and a catch-all parent taxonomy, or perhaps assign some root taxonomies (location, genre, medium) with free tagging.

How would you build your iGoogle homepage without Google?

Submitted by michael morisy on Fri, 2009-06-12 20:11

For years, I've been telling people I want to get away from Google, but I keep finding myself using more and more Google products: Gmail, GoogleTalk, Gchat, Google Analytics, Google Docs, Picasa ... The list goes on and on. Oh yeah, and Google search.

But while Google's certainly convenient, I'm not really comfortable with having all my data in one company's hands, even if their motto is "Don't be evil." So I've started building my own iGoogle-like dashboard right on my very own site, using Drupal. It's been surprisingly easy, and with about 2 hours work, I could embed my RememberTheMilk to do list, package tracking, my upcoming stories for the week, check Facebook, and more:

iGoogleA Google-free iGoogle

And it's all within an interface I have complete control over, can back up easily, and can modify to the smallest detail. Drupal even makes it easy to sort things into neat columns.

Full disclosure: I'm kinda cheating a little bit, because I'm still using Google Gadgets for my webpage, but at least it's a step in the right direction, and much of that functionality wouldn't be hard to reproduce piecemeal in a 100% Google-free way.

So, what would you put in your own custom Google-free iGoogle page?

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