Facebook has announced its new Graph Search feature which allows logged in users to search for information across their friend profiles. Facebook even made it a point to set up a page about privacy in the graph search to try to head off concerns from users. In this case, Facebook…
Bruce Lawson tweeted out a seemingly random musing today that I have pondered myself — what if, while on a mobile device and surfing a RWD web site, I want the desktop version of a site? There are many reasons as a user that this might be the case, ranging…
Here’s the TL;DR: Google Maps sniffs a browser’s user agent string. If it finds Internet Explorer on Windows Phone, then it kicks it over to the m.google.com mobile home page. So let’s be clear. It’s 2013 and one of the biggest companies on the internet is using a sniffer to…
Every year I think people will start to get the hang of social media. After all, it’s really not much different from what we’ve done as a society forever, just more rapid-fire. Every year I am proven wrong. Perhaps we need to consider better behavior on social media as a…
Now that the (Western, my favorite) holiday season is upon us, the tradition of advent calendars whose chocolate is replaced with web-related tips and articles is back. This year’s crop is missing some from last year, but there’s still good stuff to be found. If you know of any others,…
When I saw main proposed as an element a few months ago (or content or maincontent as alternate names), I didn’t think the process to fold it into the HTML specification would move very quickly. Much to my surprise on the W3C HTML Working Group mailing list the main element…
We should be familiar with anti-patterns in user interface design — counter-intuitive or ineffective user interface techniques. Dark patterns are user interface design patterns that intentionally try to steer users into taking actions that are in the best interest of the site owner, not the user. Sadly, users encounter these…
Past Thanksgivings Three years ago I wrote a post describing how I used social media during my 2008 Thanksgiving dinner (mostly to keep my guests pacified in my tiny house while I considered cooking a turkey with a pencil torch). To my family it was novel to watch people across…
This image gleefully stolen from The Page That No One Will Ever See. Now it may be a seen page. Yesterday an eye-catching headline popped up in my Twitter feed: 6 Reasons Facebook and Twitter Are More Important Than a Website (which is a different message than the author’s “infographic”…
Google pushed out some updates recently which have had SEO experts and spammers, as well as the average web developer or content author, a bit confused. It seems that some sites have been losing traffic and attributing the change to the wrong update. It also seems that some of this…
On Saturday, October 20, 2012, I spoke at the first ever WordCamp Buffalo. I am a casual WordPress user, not a developer, though my decade-and-a-half experience with multiple blogs and content management systems (even writing our own CMS at Algonquin Studios) gives me plenty of insight into the overall process…
This past weekend I had the pleasure of participating in Buffalo’s first WordCamp for WordPress users. Before my presentation I made it a point to sit in on the other sessions that were in the same track as mine. When discussing SEO, all the sessions I saw mentioned only Google.…