Busy, busy, busy

So, obviously it’s been a while since my last post. RIT runs on a quarter system (as opposed to a semester system), so we just had exams and a break. I was too busy during exams to post, and nothing really worth mentioning on here happened during break.

So, that brings us to today—I just updated the design section with a new design (EdgeIRC version 4) and redid all of the thumbnails so you can see the design better. Jakob Nielsen calls this “Relevance-Enhanced Image Reduction;” Jakob Nielsen also uses big words for no apparent reason. I’d just call it “cropping and resizing,” but maybe that’s why I’m not a so-called “usability expert,” making a bajillion dollars, with a website that looks like it was made by a third-grader.

As long as we’re on the subject of Generally Not-Good Things, Lockergnome has just done the dumbest thing ever: after turning an ugly, old, table-based hack design into a clean, decent-looking standards- and CSS-based design, they (for some unfathomable reason) switched back. This is a slap in the face to countless people who have worked so hard to bring the web out of the tangled mess of nonstandard markup, and it ensures that I will never visit Lockergnome’s site and never believe anything they say again. Simon Willison sums it up perfectly: Welcome back to 1996.