This might be useful to some of you…

my typical browser session looks like this:

Now. that’s all fine and dandy until IE crashes on me, or when my computer does it’s automatic Windows Vista updates. (what do you mean I’m supposed to turn OFF the computer every now and then? huh-what?!) — and that twilight banner was a total coincidence.

So, thanks to Paul Boag’s post (wow this was work related browsing hitting my other internet life!!) I’ve discovered Instapaper. It’s a simple little bookmarklet that you can install in your firefox/safari and while you are browsing, you can click “Read Later” and it will give you a twitter-like page of all your URLs! 

it’s archives your links, you can read from your iphone (if you had one, which I don’t)  and even turn your list of unread articles/links into an RSS feed.

So, i’m sharing this out there for any other fellow blog-readers who live and breathe thanks to multiple tabs — there is an alternative. 

We’ll see how long I can do this!!

–sammy

updated site with portfolio

Isn’t it the old saying/theory that the shoemaker’s kids never had any shoes? Well, it’s true — the designer has hardly had any time what-so-ever for her website…

I’m pleased that I FINALLY updated most of my portfolio — some Graphic Design projects I’ve worked on over the years. Go take a look!!

Hopefully,  my next tackle will be too work on this wordpress theme…

Cheers!

–Wynn

my bing gripe

I was spoiled. usually when I type in an address, I am of the habit to drop the “www.” primarily because I always felt you don’t NEED to. Try it in firefox. Not a problem.
However, I believe that with the lastest upgrades in IE browsers and with the oncoming of bing, that now, if you were to drop the “www.” it now defaults to a bing search page — if you haven’t gone to that site before. “Did you mean to search for “www.whateveryoutyped.com?”

Progression of Design — over the years.

US Government Organization Manual covers — from 1940 to 2001. I found them inspiring to see how design, even governmental design, has grown over the years.

Why do we write metadata for our webpages?

First of all, just to clarify: Metadata is information about information.

How I work with metadata (in publications):

In the library, our metadata files are most like cataloging files – but it’s not the same thing. It’s information that describes the publication/document at hand. It should at least contain the author, date published, subjects and keywords.

We scan documents, run OCR (optical character recognition), and build a PDF file for the document. The metadata is then created in an XML file, and usually import it into the PDF document that it describes. Acrobat also has these nice user-friendly screens to write metadata with, for those not comfortable in writing code. If written in this manner, we can then export in XML if we ever need to.

As for websites, I haven’t written metatags in years.

Metatags had received a bad taste several years back, mostly because nefarious websites would input irrelevant data into their metatags just to gain more clicks/visits. So, your child could be researching for a report on aardvarks and quite innocently click into a site that has absolutely nothing to do with aardvarks, but tons of crap you don’t want your child to see. (At least until the age of 25. Uh – maybe.)

The primary search engine, no matter who wants to deny it, is Google. Google has probably gained this status because they rank pages based on the site’s quality and relevance. So, in that concept, your website about aardvarks probably should plenty of information about the history or the care of the aardvark. It would probably also help to have links to (and from) an aardvark farm, zoo, nature preserve, encyclopedia listings, etc. However, only Google knows how they really rank sites. So what it really boils down to then is the content on the page. If your content is good, well written, and not stuffed/hidden with keywords (like a paragraph of random keywords on the page in the same color as the background), then you will succeed better results with Google.

However, it should be known that writing metadata and metatags is good practice. Just as we title our pages, we should describe our pages as well.

Which is the whole reason metadata was created anyways.

Links of use:

Boagworld: Becoming number One on Google

Here are the W3C guidelines on meta elements

Also, Google does have advice on writing meta elements.

And when all else fails, here’s a generator. Simply submit your URL, and it will return Dublin Core metadata based on your content.