I first want to start out by thanking Matt for giving me this opportunity. With this opportunity comes great pressure following in Matt’s footsteps. By the nature of WebRevolutionary’s past readership, he truly has done a remarkable job here!

That paragraph was easy…now its on my shoulders to provide something here that readers actually want to read! I suppose I should start by telling folks who I am and what my plans are for WebRevolutionary. Before you turn-tail and run, you have to give me this! After this brief introduction, I promise to write about very pertinent nonsense.

As Matt mentioned, my name is Ed (Eddie) Harrison, and I too am a “web addict”. I am married with two beautiful girls. Originally from Cleveland, OH, I now reside in Las Vegas, NV. I have been fortunate enough to work on the net full-time for around nine years. In a nut-shell…I’m a bit creative, entrepreneurial, and always looking for the next easy big thing. Somewhat techie, but I don’t have enough energy to be bleeding edge. I own (and have owed) many websites. I have gone back and fourth between being poorish, and being fairly well off.

I am not going to bore readers here with a lot of details about my life and career path in this post. If you are interested in these nauseating details, you can read WebRevolutionary’s About page once I update it in a day or so. The main reason I will post more details there is because I hope to inspire others regarding the potential (and pitfalls) of being a web entrepreneur. It truly has been a ride!

At this point, I don’t have an exact blueprint for what WebRevolutionary is going to evolve into. But I do plan on continuing to provide more WordPress themes, some tech reviews, and some business and SEO discussions. I love involvement, and hope that readers comment and contact me with ideas and/or criticism. I would also like to have a few contributing writers. If your interested, send me your thoughts and qualifications via the “Contact” button at the top.

That’s it! Remember, I’d love to hear from you. ~Eddie

Here’s my idea for a little OS X application, Twitter in the Finder Bar (of course, I would call it something better than that ). As I’ve illustrated in the following image, this application would display the most recent Twitter post from your friends (vertically scrolling when a new one comes in) in the OS X Finder Bar.

Twitter is a service that is a perfect candidate to be condensed down into the Finder Bar’s small horizontal UI area. It’s out of the way enough to not add to clutter, but sitting right there for when you need it. Since Twitter’s content is made up of text no more than 140 characters in length, there’s really no need for an expansive UI.

To provide some interactivity, if the user clicks in the text area it turns into an input box, that is used to write a new Twitter update. For example, in this case I might click it and write a response to Todd: “@Todd Iron Man is great. Have fun!” hitting enter to post.

I came about this little idea since I really have no need for the relatively bulky Twitter GUIs that exist today. My Twitter needs are limited to seeing the latest update and being able to reply or add my own in a snap. The current available solutions have user interfaces that are far too involved for these simple operations, and take up too much screen real estate.

If anyone is, or knows anyone with the knowledge to bring this to life, and is interested in developing this small freeware app. Let me know.

Well, after around 4-5 days of online-offline back and forth, DNS issues, email issues and the task of transferring all my sites to a new hosting account, WebRevolutionary is now back! I’d like to extend my gratitude to the Site5 support staff, who seemed to reply almost instantly to my support emails, doing everything they could to help me out. Honestly, I couldn’t be happier with these guys. I always assumed that I’d never need to worry about requiring support when researching different hosting companies, but, I did, and I’m glad I’m with Site5.

Also, I’ve got two new wordpress themes in the works, (in the stages of tidying everything up, should be ready to release in the next few days to a week). One brand new layout for WebRevolutionary, and a new free, public theme called Greyscale (name not final). Look out for those, and heaps of brand new posts, coming very soon to WR.

It’s quite a sobering thing to notice that I have neglected to post in this blog for a month and a half. I am from this day making it my focus to kick-start this blog back into life, with many more articles, opinions, a re-design and just more attention. This blog deserves the attention, as I only recently discovered that it’s cracked the Technorati “Top 10K” which serves as great motivation to keep it alive. I apologize to those who have been looking for more frequent columns.

So what’s been going on in my textual absence? Not a whole lot. Continuing my freelance Web Design work, making design proposals to various people, just the norm. I hope to soon release a dedicated page for the ColdBlue Theme, and a proper, cohesive online portfolio design. This all should appear before your very eyes within the next couple of months, so keep a keen eye

Peace.

The Word Wide Web Consortium (the folks defining and promoting Web Standards) have recently given the ever-useful Markup Validator a discreet and well-executed styling. When such a redesign is being developed it’s important to focus on usability, readability and ease of use, graphical “design” should not detract from these basic elements of layout, but rather enhance them.

If you’re curious, take a look at the new design in action. I’m a huge fan of the “soft” look, usable layout and great choice of colour. It’s simple, and that’s all it needs to be.

When designing for the Web, one must be constantly mindful of the wide variety of Operating System/Browser combinations that are possible, and the varying results in rendering when it comes to these. If you’re a Mac user, you may find it difficult to debug your pages in Internet Explorer without having access to a Windows PC. Luckily, due to the recent move to Intel processors, Mac’s now have a whole bunch of different software solutions for Windows Virtualization, and recent improvements in this field offer even more seamless integration with OS X than ever before. One of the most popular applications for Windows Virtualization on the Mac is Crossover, which is based on WINE. While the premise of this app is great, it simply isn’t stable or reliable enough for repeated use.

VMware Fusion has my support as the best Virtualization solution. You choose to either boot up a fully-fledged Windows XP or Vista installation, or just open single applications from the OS. The Windows applications are “unified” with OS X, and are displayed as standard independent windows within the Mac OS. For example, I’ve added icons for Internet Explorer 6 and 7 (both Vista and XP versions) in my Dock, clicking these opens the apps in their own windows, seemingly absent from Windows XP/Vista.

Sure, it’s probably not worth throwing out your XP/Vista test box just yet, but if OS X is your only available system, then this certainly will allow for some comprehensive testing across multiple platforms.

Today I paid a visit to the Flock Website, in hopes of checking up on how the little jack-of-all-networks browser’s development was coming along. The page that met my eyes left me in a state of puzzlement, shock and disbelief. I was half hoping that it was all some sort of elaborate joke, but alas, it’s all real.

It seems as though the powers that be decided that the “boring” old Flock page needed a facelift. What we see here folks is plastic surgery gone horribly, horribly wrong. These surgeons are clearly not qualified to be hacking and slashing at a once-beautiful Web entity.

Thar she blows. The brand new Flock page. What a colossal disaster. And no, the extent of this apparent trainwreck isn’t just skin deep, oh no. The underlying markup looks like it was printed on A4 paper, shredded and pasted back together again.

To refresh our memories, here’s a screencap of the “old” Flock design. Skillfully hand-crafted by Bryan Veloso, it embodies the very essence of simplistic beauty. All that Flock stands… or stood for.

I, for one, have completely lost faith in the project. I was initially interested in seeing what kind of progress had been made with the browser, but now I just can’t bear to look at the thing.

Flock that!

An Update

After a lengthy conversation with Evan Hamilton, Flock’s Community Ambassador, I’ve made a discovery or two. It turns out that the new Flock design was actually contracted out to an external agency. Flock have since hired an in-house designer, who, according to Evan will be able to properly communicate their visual ambitions. Evan mentioned the difficulties that arise when contracting a design over a large geographical distance, and I fully understand.

I must say, I was very impressed with Evan’s response during our back-and-forth, he was wonderful to chat with, seemed to take notice of my criticism and suggestions, was not offended by this harsh article and just came across as genuine. Consider my faith in the Flock project restored.

There’s a great little OS X Application called Get Tube that has proved itself amazingly useful and simple in performing it’s task. Just copy and paste the URL of a YouTube video (it also supports a couple of other video sites) and Get Tube will automatically download and convert it to either an MP4 (MPEG 4 video) or MP3.

Even though it’s a great program, I’m not too fond of its icon. So, I’ve come up with a simple little replacement icon, to fully justify this great app’s place on my dock.

If you’re getting a little tired of the Get Tube icon, Download My Replacement. If you don’t have Get Tube, I highly recommend trying it out. (Note: It uses VLC for transcoding, so you need that too)

All too often during my hours of performing daily web tasks do I uncover great examples of anti-usability, but they’re usually not to the extent of what I’m about to show you.

One would imagine that such a large company as Vodafone, claiming to hold 200 million proportionate customers in 27 markets across 5 continents would at least provide a human-usable experience for a common user path. But alas, they seem to have failed… and not too gracefully.

When I am sent a Picture Message (MMS) on my mobile phone, instead of receiving the image itself, I get a SMS message with a link to download my MMS from the Vodafone website. Now, as irritating as this is, this isn’t actually what my post is about. You see, apon visiting this URL in my web browser I am presented with the following.

When viewing the aforementioned page at full resolution, my focus is drawn to the absurd flash movie (which actually serves as a menu, unbeknownst to the user) rather than the navigation at the top of the page. After a couple of double-takes and head scratching, I (the average user) finally can avert my gaze from the pretty colours in the middle of screen and make use of the actual navigation bar to get that one step closer to my goal of collecting my “PXT”.

Upon further investigation, it turns out that the flash “thing” in the center is actually a navigation menu itself. But, the user can only find out this by hovering over each picture to see what link it holds. On top of that, not every picture is a link, and it feels like a “lucky draw” to get the one you want.

Due to the top menu utilizing some sort of whacky Javascript navigation technique, with scripts disabled it simply doesn’t work! Even though Javascript is quite commonly enabled for most users, there still are a number who either don’t use a browser that supports it, choose to disable it or have it disabled by their antivirus application. The only other navigational alternative to this is the little Flash movie, which also could be hidden to those users without the Flash Plugin.

So, a certain percentage of this page’s visitors won’t even be able to get to their destination, and even the ones that have all the plugins enabled will still spend more time than they should trying to figure out how to use the thing!

When I visit this page, I’m confused as to its purpose. I should be given exactly what I’m looking for, ready to be used. Instead I’m given this convoluted, confusing and unusable page.

In summary, if I were to be tasked to redesign/realign this page, I would probably do the following:

• Focus on the typical user path. Provide a clear focused link to “Collect your PXT”. As well as the other actions.
• Completely trash the pointless flash animation.
• Use a hover state on the navigation, to let the user know that it’s actually clickable.
• Use real links, rather than Javascript tomfoolery, to allow for direct linking to the proper page and accessibility for those with JS disabled.
• Ditch the annoying “TXT Speak” (“Collect yr PXT” – what a joke!). It’s insulting to the user’s intelligence.
• Instead of sending the user to a “splash page”, get them straight to the form they are looking for. The user shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to get their image

Copywriting is a part of creating a web page that seems even to be neglected by many of the the oh-so-2.0 type sites and services of the new millennium. How hard can it be to come up with a short string of original prose? Too hard, it would seem. I’ve done a quick Google search, uncovering the sheer extent and overuse of a certain cliché.

There really seems to be a surprisingly large number of websites that offer the “easiest way” of doing something… How odd.

WipBox: The easiest way to sell on eBay or Craigslist
Justgiving: The easiest way to fundraise and donate to charity online
Picture2Life: Easiest way to edit your pictures online
Sidewalk: The easiest way to gather and analyze customer information
BillQ: The easiest way to keep track of your bills.

Spend some time to think up an original tagline, it’s not rocket science. Please.

Along with a brand new design for WebRevolutionary, I’m going to be releasing a new (free) publicly-available WordPress theme, which has yet to be named. Progress is coming along quite nicely, and I hope to have it released within the next week or so.

Features

• Sidebar Widget Compatibility
• Better readability (scalable fonts)
• Syndication focus
• Support for Ultimate Tag Warrior and other Plugins

I’m open for any suggestions, so if you’ve got an opinion or idea, let me know.

The folks over at Reinvigorate have just pushed out an email announcing their latest endeavor.
Snoop is a downloadable application for Mac and Windows which keeps you updated on the latest user activity on your site (provided that you have an active Reinvigorate account). It features an live-updating list of recent visitors, and a really interesting method of tracking comments and even product purchases, which can be easily implemented with a little scripting knowledge.
Similar to the Mint Doorbell Pepper, Snoop features a variety of sound effects which alert you of either a new unique, returning or referred visitor, a product sale or a comment.

This little application really has boosted my confidence in Reinvigorate, and I’m sure to be as addicted to it as I was to the Mint Doorbell Pepper, at least for a week or so… *ding* Oh vanity!