Since there was much interest at a previous meeting in web sites I offered to give a talk about what a graphic designer, or any designer, should know about designing for the web. Just the basics. A fast overview. Nothing too in depth. Forty people showed up, and I ended up recording a screencast of the talk and distributing a PDF of it afterwards. I thought I’d put it up here so that those of you who missed it could see it, and perhaps benefit from it.

It’s a long talk: 1hr 40mins. I spliced it up into 3 parts, each a little over 30 minutes in length. They’re hosted out on Vimeo as part 1, 2 and 3. I’ve also embedded the first part down here for viewing. The video is available in HD, so be sure to maximize it to see the full quality of the slides (and my handsome face of course).

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating you play the system here… this post is just supposed to be about my experience with the XM Radio service person and what she offered. The first time I called the number from their website, I was asked to verify my account information and then I was transferred over to another department. At this point, I got cut off! I’m sure it was a technical mishap on their part, so I called back and just asked to be transferred again, which I was. The customer service rep was very nice and when I told her I was canceling because of budgetary reasons, she asked me if I had enjoyed the service.

“Of course I enjoy the service”, I said.But I still want to cancel. She asked if I would like 3 free months. I asked “Would I have to call back and cancel after 3 months?”. “Yes,” she said, “I would.” I declined — I just wanted to be done — I only ever listen to it in the car and it just seems like it’s not worth it.

After I hung up, I realized that I could have just taken the 3 free months if I had said yes. But, then again, I would have to remember to call them again and cancel. So that’s how I could’ve gotten 3 free months of XM/Sirius Radio.

WTF? Where did all the artcles go? Where was the clever commentary? Where were the gadgets of tomorrow I was looking to find? And WTF is all this advertising?? It seems that in the past few months, WIRED Magazine went from respected geek reading material to advertising super-bitch. So I wanted to see exactly how much advertising was in this latest issue. I sat down in my living room and ripped out every single page of the magazine. I sorted them into three piles:

• pages that have ads on both sides
• pages with ads on only one side
• pages with no ads anywhere

The results didn’t surprise me that much. Of the 120 physical pages that I pulled out of the magazine, 28 of them had zero advertising on them, 43 had advertising on BOTH sides and 49 had adverstising on one side and “content” on the other. And by “content” I mean something that wasn’t trying to sell me the latest version of Office, or a great James Bond watch, or whatever. It was either one of those articles I was looking for, or a table of contents for the magazine, or credits, or even a photo of a gadget propped up against a steel number.

And if you do the math, it turns out that the December 2008 WIRED magazine is:

• 43.8% “content”
• 56.2% advertising

I guess the only thing I’m wondering now is: why?

• Drupal and Joomla! content management systems
• CodeIgniter PHP framework
• RescueTime automated time management software
• ping.fm social network updating tool
• PublicRadioCamp a BarCamp being run by MPR this coming weekend
• VMware image with Drupal installed: there are other images listed on this page, including Joomla!
• Gridjit a social networking portal for viewing and posting to Twitter and FriendFeed
• MAMP – the Mac OS version of WAMP for a drop-in Apache, PHP and MySQL installation

If I think of any more, I’ll be sure to add them!

You can follow the fortunes here:

http://twitter.com/fortunetweet

And you can follow me here:

http://twitter.com/ten7

All in only 18 lines of code. Enjoy!

this minor release puts some shameless self-promotion on the gadget, as well as the ability to donate money to me via paypal. if you like the gadget, donate a few bucks to me to keep me motivated and to keep me updating GOINC with new features.

oh. and i also changed the font.

more on why i’m moving, and the ordeal that i had with bluehost in a later post. once i have all data off their servers. woooosh.

update: move is complete. all went well… stay tuned for reasons why a goooood web host is hard to find.

this is now goinc 1.1; url has not changed. please add a new module/gadget to your google homepage, if you are still using the old version – prior to 1.0, including 0.1 and 0.2.

the gadget url is

http://stegic.net/gm/goinc-xml/goinc.xml

as always, talk to me if you have any questions or concerns!

1. faster: true, asynchronous client-side data retrieval.
2. smaller: updated css to allow more data on screen, less clutter.
3. by user project selection: monitor users from different projects, not just one project at a time.

i’m labelling this 1.0, a jump from 0.2 – the functionality for goinc is pretty complete. i would like to add host per user information, but i might not get to that for a while. so, 1.0 it is.

the url of 1.0 is http://stegic.net/gm/goinc-xml/goinc.xml and is available immediately.

here’s a screenshot of what it looks like: