links for 2009-11-20

What is sauce for the goose etc etc

Tonight we get a clip from the end of Dave Tennant's tenure in the TARDIS. Is it really only November 2005 when Children In Need featured a special scene bridging "The Parting Of The Ways" and "The Christmas Invasion"?

One thing that I think the modular personalised BBC homepage lacks is the ability to reflect zeitgeisty events. Children In Need might irritate a lot of people with forced joviality, but I rather liked the fact that the BBC site used to smack you round the face that it was on. Having one tab with a picture of Terry Wogan isn't quite the same somehow.

Oh. My. Word. Historical people as LEGO Minifigs. Chaucer looks mean. Could there possibly be a finer set of images on Flickr?

The BBC gets the headline keyword stuffing bug - don't suppose they'll be going as far as that 3AM Girls site though.

"As mobile UX designers, we have both opportunity and choice in front of us. The opportunity is to establish the foundation principles of a stable, yet still emerging, experiential space. The choice lies between getting caught up in the excitement of the fad du jour or asking ourselves the difficult question of what foundational principles am I following, or establishing, with the work that I am currently doing".

"We've all been through adolescence. And, as the London Cringe Night organisers recognise, most of us have the diaries, suicide notes and bad poetry to prove it. Sarah Brown found her old diaries and presumably decided the cringing she did while re-reading them to herself just wasn't strong enough. So she decided to read them out loud. To an audience. The Cringe Night was born".

"The defining characteristic of a password field is that it abstracts text as dots. While the intention of this behavior is understandable (it makes users feel secure and protects from prying eyes), the unintended effect is that it creates a usability problem. Users can't tell if they've entered a password incorrectly until after the site's validation informs them. It's like typing with your eyes closed".

Thoughts on how to make the "Login with my existing account" and "Sign up for a brand new account" more usable.

Infovore describes it thus: "It's a digital clock made out of scrollbars; divs being resized to force overflow and generate a scrollbar make up the seven-segment display. Bonkers."

"Here's an idea for an advert - what do you f***ing sell and what does it f***ing cost?" ROFL