This is where the site ended up. I can focus on blogging on that site again, now that I straightened that out.

Frankly, I'm tired of working on blog themes and it was refreshing to just strip all the visual artifice out of the skin so that the content came to the fore.

I'm going to be going through a career change in a week, so I expect to be blogging about blogging and interface design with a bit more vigor in the future. I also expect to strip out the design of this site once again so I can concentrate on the content.

Pursuant to that, I also expect that a little case study for how I built the themes for konigi and this site should be warranted. It's been an interesting 2 months living with that original fussy konigi design and ending up where it is now.

David Pogue's blog entry, "Are You Taking Advantage of Web 2.0?" starts out talking about why companies aren't using Web 2.0, but specifically he is discussing business blogging and the advantages of transparency and open communication with your customers.

We all know, intellectually, that no matter what image a corporation tries to project, it's made up of ordinary people with personalities, insecurities and lives. But because the marketing and P.R. teams work so hard to scrub, control and package a company's image, the public ordinarily sees none of that human side.

When a company embraces the possibilities of Web 2.0, though, it makes contact with its public in a more casual, less sanitized way that, as a result, is accepted with much less cynicism. Web 2.0 offers a direct, more trusted line of communications than anything that came before it.

This is Cluetrain Manifesto stuff. Read that if you want to be convinced of the bigger picture of transparent businesses.

PicApp lets you post stock photography like the photo above from vendors including Getty Images on your blog for free. Search for a photo and copy the embed code to insert the javascript code for the flash player. PicApp does a revenue share on adds clicked in the player with the stock photo houses.

I can deal with the ads and tools when you hover over the photo, but it's a shame about that ugly little illustrated character popping up in the corner. I'm very unlikely not to use the service unless I have to because of that alone. And the flashing Ad tab? Come on, guys.

The new fashion of complimentary comment spamming is kind of a pain to deal with. These are the comments that say things like the following:

"Great, article. I bookmarked it."

"Thanks for the info. Reading the blogs provide much needed support."

"Thanks for this post"

"Thank you for the wonderful Blog.."

Make no mistake about it. While the comments seem innocuous, they are spam. Following the URL associated with the user confirms that they're pointing to some spam farm. But the tough part, is that these are not spam farms for your typical, ahem, prescription medications for men. A lot of the sites these links are pointing to look like legitimate blogs, but they're not. Others look legit, but are in foreign languages, so I can't tell what they're hawking.

Monitoring the whole thing is rather a time suck, but I've gotten to the point where I'm just frustrated by having to see these things litter my comments. It's been a few good years having Akisment flag the comments that are clearly spam, but the clever tactics of this new phase of spammers looks too real, and might in fact be getting generated by this new workforce of human spammers I've been reading about.

So from now on, I'm going to actually hover over links for these short 1-3 sentence compliment spams, and if anything looks even remotely suspicious, it's getting marked as spam by my comment spam module. Hopefully, if more people do this work of crowdsourcing the spam marking, more of the culprits will get blacklisted and be prevented from re-appearing on our sites. Short, complimentary commenters beware. Your days are numbered, and you haven't defeated me yet.

After about a 4 year break from blogging about information architecture on iaslash (my last post there was 11/2003) I've decided to return to blogging on a wider range of user experience topics. The new blog is called Konigi. Here's a snapshot of how it looks today:

The word Konigi is a bit of a nonsensical riff on the Esperanto, "koni," which means to know. Before I started on this projectj I wanted to find a way to focus on doing some sort of personal knowledge management related to web design, and somehow I ended up doing this site. I can't tell you how happy I am to have finally found a way to combine my interest in KM, Design and UX, and Blogging into one project.

Herw's what you find on the site for now:

• Interface: A gallery of user interface and interaction examples that are both conventional and accepted solution as well as innovative examples that push the use of medium.
• Design: A gallery of sites that can be described as influential, innovative, and effective at representing their brand and purpose. Visitors may submit designs for inclusion. The submissions that get the most votes will be included among the featured sites.
• Notebook: This is the more traditional blog, pointing to UX resources. For now I'm going to keep the writing lean and succinct. This is also the place where I'll be posting the Collages (Command-Shift-5) I play with occassionally and post to Flickr.
• Function: This is a competitive analysis section that I'm working on and hope to release very soon. Hopefully these pages will start appearing in the Spring.

When I started this project a few months ago, I thought I'd simply be starting a blog or wiki, but somehow it evolved into a more focussed portal of sorts with lots of screenshots. I got my hands on Skitch and started posting screenshots to Flickr. I started a new job last year and found myself taking screenshots a lot more and write a lot less on urlgreyhot. All the little experiments using Skitch on Flickr forced me to organize things and separate these screens from those Ipost to urlgreyhot. This is where Konigi comes in. Hopefully it will keep this stream of screenshots in order so they're findable and reusable by others in the UX community who may be interested in them.

I'd love to hear your feedback.

Register here to get the free TeamPage5 installer. About TeamPage5:

Traction® TeamPage5™ is a free version of Traction Software's award winning TeamPage™ Server product. TeamPage5 supports up to 5 projects (blog / wiki spaces) and 5 named user accounts with individually defined permissions and identities. Projects can also be opened to Visitors (e.g. you can open any space so that anyone on your intranet can read, edit, comment or post). Registration for TeamPage5 provides a personal account on our support server to download software updates, read customer and product FAQ's, and participate in Traction's customer Forum.

Traction® TeamPage5™ is simple to download, install and manage. TeamPage software can be deployed on your intranet, corporate DMZ or on the public internet using a computer that supports Java server software, see TeamPage System Requirements. TeamPage5 provides a free way to create a collaborative communication hub which can scale to meet your future needs. You can easily upgrade to TeamPage15 or TeamPage at any time.

Excellent news for enterprises and now even individuals who are ready to take their knowledge management work to the next level.

You know how they say you should tell someone that you're planning to do something so that it becomes real like a contract? Like, if I say aloud to my friends and family, I'm going to run the NYC Marathon this year, then it makes it easier to stay committed to doing it and not backing out of the commitment. Well, I've been sitting on this design for my bike blog for a while, so I'm putting it up here to remind me to get it out.

And since Drupal 5 is out, I've got no reason to procrastinate anymore. Coming very soon.

InfoWorld has announced the 2007 Technology of the Year Awards for the applications they rated best and most innovative in each of 8 classes of information technology. Traction Software, who I began doing user experience consulting for last spring, won in the Data Management category for Best Enterprise Wiki.

Last year, Traction released version 3.7 of Traction TeamPage and Communicator, which introduced several very exciting new content management and theming enhancements and continued to focus on usability improvements. If you're in the market for an application that does enterprise collaboration tool the way you want to, you'll want to check out the Traction 3.7 feature set.

Congrats to all the recipients of the IW Technology of the Year Awards.

We're not talking freetagging here. This is graffiti. Except on Draw Here you're using mouse pointers to leave your mark on web pages instead of inking up walls or scratch tagging sgraffito.

Who knows what we'll see here. Some of it could be art or maybe just egotistic chicken scratch like mine above :).

Here's a helpful tip for anyone that needs to send automated emails for some reason. I've been using this method for a few years to automate emails I send out regularly for project work, e.g. status reports. Maybe this is useful to someone else as well?

This assumes you have some form of Unix, cron support and mailx installed. I think Mac OS X will give you all of these out of the box. I have the developer tools installed, so I'm not sure what the default configuration is any more.

Say for instance you regularly update your team by email with project status reports. You could create a cron job that says, "Mail me a project status report template every Friday that I can fill out, then send the reply to my team." No fancy software needed. You can do it all in email via a cron command. From your Unix prompt,

1) Input crontab -e and press enter

2) You're now in a text editor. Most likely it's vi. Enter the following:

0 0 * * 5 mailx -s "This is the subject" -r replyaddress@somedomain.com recipientaddress@somedomain.com < /path/to/somefile

3) Now you need to save. If your server's editor is vi, you'll need to type ":wq" to write and quit. Now you're done.

I'll deconstruct the crontab commands if you're unfamiliar:

0 0 * * 5 mailx = Tell mailx to send the message every Friday. Literally, this is saying, at :00 seconds on the 0 hour (midnight) on every month of the year on the 5th day (Friday). If you want to know more about the date/time intervals, check out this documentation

-s "This is the subject" = This is the option to include a subject in your email.

-r replyaddress@somedomain.com = This is the option to include a reply-to email address. When you hit reply in your email reader, to TO: address will now be whatever you've put here, e.g. the Team's email alias.

recipientaddress@somedomain.com = This is you obviously, but if you want this reminder to go out to everyone, this can be the team email alias.

< /path/to/somefile = This is the path to the message you want to send in the email. In my example, this would be the project status report template.

That's it. Easy, no? Email, in my opinion, isn't going away. I would guess that even though spam might make email a productivity drain, for most business users it's their number one productivity tool. I get the efficiency of using CMS rather than email. I don't need to be sold on that. But I need to use email with most of the groups I work with because there's no resistance to using email in those communities. With these groups, I'm not up to the task of introducing them to a new system.

But one strategy that could serve as a gateway to using CMS might be to couple scheduled email to the CMS. Perhaps you could CC the messages to a rich blogging system like Traction Software that accepts incoming email and the messages will be automatically posted to a web site. Traction would be cool because you can then email reply via Traction on the status report and the reply gets submitted back to the team via email and once again captured in the site. Anyway, this is just food for thought. I started out this post just wanting to capture my email scheduling process, but my posts on doing project work often seem to come back to how to integrate those processes with blogging.