I got there through an intriguing ad in some blog sidebar. The landing page was the usual “We-haven’t-launched-yet-give-us-your-email”. The product didn’t necessarily interest me. But I gave them my email anyway. Why?

Cute form. On the other side of it they wanted me to take a 5 minute survey. Who do you know that has five minutes to spend on a survey for a company they’ve never heard of?

Got me again. Then they offered me early beta access if I put one of their badges on my blog.

How could I resist? The survey ended at http://www.mymint.com/blog/, where I read the whole front page.

These guys are good.

“The Irony mark (؟) is a punctuation mark that purports to indicate that a sentence should be understood at a second level. It is illustrated by a backward-facing question mark. An irony mark may sometimes be referred to as an irony point, snark or zing.” - Wikipedia

“The interrobang is a rarely used, nonstandard English-language punctuation mark intended to combine the functions of a question mark and an exclamation point. The typographical character resembles those marks superimposed one over the other, and the name interrobang comes from interro - from interrogative - and bang - used to amplify the exclamation.” - Wikipedia

Of course, these really won’t be useful until people understand what they mean. Toward this end I suggest we begin using them where applicable, with the hope that people will ask (or perhaps with an explanatory footnote). What do you think?

Well it’s been a busy 26 days here at Icecraft since my last post to Skin Deep. I’ve been hard at work on the Teamforge framework among other projects, and while it doesn’t look like much yet, I’m proud to announce that there is finally a site online at http://teamforge.org! This week I’ll be working to implement a search engine that saves your searches to build a customized feed of only the opportunities that interest you. A major source of frustration throughout my early freelancing career has been the time wasted jumping from site to site scanning visually through thousands of jobs that are of absolutely no interest to me, so in my opinion this is an exciting feature and a great way to kick off the site.

I’d like to take a moment to thank my friend Brian Callahan for his contributions to the new Icecraft logo. If you’re looking for a talented graphic designer, you owe this guy an email. Seriously.

As a final note: Under no circumstance should you ever give GoDaddy money. They are literally the worst shared hosting provider I’ve ever used in my life, and the worst company I have to deal with on a day to day basis (and that’s saying something - Verizon is my wireless provider!). I’m shocked and amazed every time something actually works the way I expect it to.

Flipping through my December edition of Photoshop User magazine tonight I came across this bit of misadvertising:

I dunno about you but I really resent the many hours I waste paging through irrelevant search results on stock photography websites. Can you think of a better way to emphasize this pain?

With multiline input fields text is word-wrapped and a vertical scrollbar appears if the allotted space is not enough, but when you outgrow the width of a single-line text input no horizontal scrollbar appears to help you out - at least, not in any browser I’m familiar with. Does that seem right to you?

I suggest something like this:

Zirr.us is a sexy newcomer to the web-based To-do list scene enjoyed by 37Signals and activeCollab, among others. But instead of listing, they’re tagging. Your default view is a cloud, with a slider to adjust the priority (size) of each task. I was initially very impressed by the simplicity and beauty of the website, and the potential of the idea. But I quickly discovered some quirks that sent me right back to Ta-da Lists for the mean time.

Hey InterfaceThis - listen up! Here’s what needs fixing before you’ll have me as a user.

• Stop poaching the Ctrl+T hotkey - Firefox, IE, and Opera all rely on Ctrl+T to open a new tab. This alone is a dealbreaker for me.
• When I reedit a task containing characters such as ” they are converted to their HTML entities. This is bad.
• When I mark a task as completed, where does it go?!
• If I set the priority too high, the phrase is truncated. Is there perhaps a better way to handle that? It seems backwards for the highest priority tasks to be the ones that are partially hidden.
• I would like to see some way to share certain tags in a non-writable mode with the public. This could be done simply by employing the use of a reserved tag (”public”?). “http://zirru.us/userid/public/taghere/” would be sweet.
• Why no RSS feed on your blog? I’d love to get updates - there’s no way I’ll remember to check back on my own. Update: I found the feed, it just wasn’t obvious.

I’m looking forward to seeing Zirrus mature over the next few months. Please don’t disappoint me!

In case I’m not the last person on earth to discover how to do this…..

IE7-rendered pages looking crisper than in Firefox? That’s Cleartype. And the rest of your XP desktop can take advantage of it too.

Links:

• Download Microsoft’s ClearType Tuner PowerToy.
• Learn how it works.
• Get out there on the web and enjoy your newfound readability.

Practically everyone on the web has, at some point in our browsing career, lost a login name or it’s password, requiring us to put ourselves through the terrifying automated reset-or-retrieval process. Usually this is about as difficult as clicking a link, waiting four seconds, and checking our inbox. We bang our heads against our keyboards as we cry out

“Why do I need a separate identity for every, single, site?!!“

[OpenID enters dramatically from stage left]

On Wednesday, Brady Forrest wrote:

“OpenID is an identity system that allows you to have one username and one password for multiple sites. Your username is an URL. The password is whatever you choose (and like all passwords you should keep it secret).”

“Identity is one of the last pieces of the Web 2.0 puzzle to become decentralized and fully owned by the user. Up till now we’ve had to rely on sites to control our identity; now with personal sites (mostly blogs) becoming common there is finally a mechanism for us to take our identities into our own hands.”

Hasn’t our online identity been in our own hands since we started using email? Some sites are trusting enough to believe us when we say we’re $celebrityOfWeek, while others send a verification email just to be sure. I don’t understand why we need another layer of identity at all. What happens when I forget my OpenID password? Does the service provider email it to me?

“Lately there have been a plethora of OpenID services launching. All users of SixApart’s Vox and LiveJournal users automatically have OpenIDs. If you want to use a hosted service JanRain’s MyOpenID just launched”

I thought OpenID was conceived to solve the “too many identities” problem. It seems to me this is just making a mess of a mess. Let’s suppose I’m writing a comment on your OpenID-enabled blog. Do I sign in with my Vox account, my Livejournal, or another? Half of your users may be internet geeks with this problem, while the other half has no idea what an OpenID is or where to get one.

This week I’m faced with deciding upon identity systems for several forthcoming web applications. I’d be thrilled if some enlightened commenter could show me that I’m making a mistake, but it looks like I’ll be sticking with my old friend, email, for now.

While a purist might keep faithfully hitting the refresh button on all the major browsers, tweaking his CSS until he turns #1f5acf in the face (or his startup budget runs out, whichever comes first), your time is worth more than that. A quick-and-easy solution for the rest of us is to serve up a different set of styles depending on the user agent. Many thanks to Gary White for his excellent browser-detection class.

I know this site has some nasty rendering bugs in Opera and IE6 (maybe Safari also, I haven’t tested it yet). Now that I’ve got the power of phpStyles on my side, I’ll see about getting those taken care of this week.

The other night my trusty feedreader alerted me to a Nitobi post demonstrating a fisheye menu (think Mac OS X dock) in javascript as a part of their upcoming library. A neat effect, to be sure…and useful as well; menu design is so often reduced to a balancing act between the number of items displayed and the actual visibility of each. I fully expect this type of widget to become much more common on the web as the major js animation toolkits begin to offer it.

Searching for a way to do this with script.aculo.us or moo.fx yielded no result, but I did come across another interesting (slightly lesser-known) toolkit - Dojo. I played with it for a few hours and loved it’s functionality, but decided to abandon it for philosophical reasons. I may see about implementing the fisheye widget in script.aculo.us if I ever have time…sooner or later someone has got to.

The above example pulls images from the Flickr API based on the tag you search for, sorted by interestingness. If you want to play around with the code on your own server, you need Dojo and phpFlickr in the same directory as the script. You can get a Flickr API key here. Enjoy!