Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Monday, 22nd January 2007

Twitter Updater (a WordPress plugin). “The Twitter Updater automatically sends a Twitter status update to your Twitter account when you create, publish, or edit your WordPress post.” Fantastic idea—I really want this for my own site. # 11:12 pm

On Space Art in Sebastopol... Awesome. Our giant mosaic space invaders are going to show up on Google Earth! # 10:44 pm

You need to lay out the user interface components visually, by hand, with total control over where they go. Automated LayoutManagers don’t cut it. A corollary of this is that you can’t move a UI layout from one platform to another and have the computer make everything fit. Computers don’t lay out interfaces by themselves any better than they can translate French to English by themselves.

Jens Alfke # 9:41 pm

In Which I Think About Java Again, But Only For A Moment. Convincing argument as to why desktop applications written in Java rarely have decent user interfaces. # 9:39 pm

The way you make users understand your program model is with metaphors. When you make things look, feel, and most importantly, behave like things in the real world, users are more likely to figure out how to use the program, and the app will be easier to use. When you try to combine two very dramatically different real-world items (email and appointments) into the same kind of thing in the user interface, usability suffers because there’s no longer a real-world metaphor that applies.

Joel Spolsky # 9:26 pm

Wikipedia nofollows links. Wikipedia’s high PageRank means this is likely to have a noticable knock-on effect on the rankings of many other sites. # 7:27 pm

Oxford Geek Nights. 8pm on the 7th of February 2007 at the Jericho Tavern in Oxford. Three 15 minute talks and a bunch of 5 minute microslots. I’ll be giving a talk on OpenID. # 7:22 pm

Ma.gnolia Blog: OpenID is Taking Off! Since November, 15% of new Ma.gnolia members signed up using an OpenID. # 6:41 pm

Group Membership Protocol. Martin Atkins’ proposal for a simple “is OpenID X a member of group Y?” protocol, useful for whitelists that can scale to handle large numbers of entries. # 8:27 am

Subtlety (via) Instantly create an RSS feed from a public subversion repository. # 8:20 am

Social whitelisting with OpenID

A key feature of OpenID is that it provides a globally unique identifier for every user, no matter what site or service they are using on the Web.

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