Here are the highlights from the numerous changes that went into this release:

1. “Trash” status: No longer worry about accidentally deleting your posts, pages, and comments. The “delete” links have been changed to “trash”, and new screens let you restore trashed content or delete it permanently. Think of it as your computer’s Recycling Bin, but for your blog.

2. Image editor: A built-in image editor let’s you crop, rotate, and resize your pictures right from inside WordPress.

3. Post thumbnails: WordPress now lets you attach a small picture to your posts. Just upload your image, and WordPress takes care of resizing and cropping it to a standard size, then displaying it with your content. A few changes are needed to enable this feature in your blog theme. Clients should contact their Xeno Media project managers to arrange this modification.

4. Canonical tags: The new version of WordPress generates these new HTML tags automatically, pointing search engines to the “official” URLs of your posts and pages, avoiding “duplicate content” penalties that might harm your search engine rankings.

In addition, the WordPress developers have started building the framework that will let WordPress 3 (expected 2nd quarter 2010) go beyond pages and posts, and support a variety of custom content types.

Version 2.9.1 came out last week to fix a few bugs in the initial release, and we’re confident it’s safe to upgrade your blogs and take advantage of these exciting new features.

Beyond icons of mugs, squirrels, cartoon characters, etc. (keep in mind most fathomable subject matter hadn’t been covered at this point), some designers branched into releasing sets intended to replace the stock system-level Mac OS icons (hard drive, folders, CD, trash, etc.). Designing a system icon suite forces you to think completely conceptually. I found getting into this branch of iconography particularly interesting as being more a graphic design exercise, than in creating object or character-based icons. Some examples of my stuff circa 1998:

During those days of experimentation in system-level icon design, there were three steps that served every set:

1. Define the theme
2. Establish the overall aesthetic
3. Maintain the style across the entire suite of icons

Point three gets extra emphasis; the vitalness of consistency can’t be underestimated. In web site design, after the overall look-and-feel is nailed down, I’ll work out specific UI elements (icons, controls, widgets). Maintaining clarity of purpose and consistency with the overarching interface are paramount concerns. I’ve found while working through the project, sometimes an idea comes up for a control or icon that I’ll work out and implement; on second look later, however, it doesn’t fit in with the larger established suite of design elements. Most times the overall look-and-feel will (and should) organically mold the “hey let’s add…” -type controls — but it’s always worth a double and triple check on overall consistency at regular intervals.

Back to system icons; with massive canvases, zillions of colors, and advance rendering mechanisms available for today’s designer, present OS/system icons are a far cry from their humble beginnings. The graphic style of system icons for Mac OS X, throughout its various iterations and upgrades, has permeated icon design across innumerable platforms and media. The iconfactory’s work in this design type over the years has always set the standard for style and consistency spanning hundreds of system icons (like the entire Vista OS, for example). Their approach is defined by the brand, and their authorship is perpetually transparent.

We are looking for a full-time web developer to add to our team. Think you’re a good fit? Please follow these instructions carefully:

1) Email your resume with salary history or requirements to resumes@xenomedia.com
2) On a separate page, include your answers to the questionnaire located at the bottom of this page

Note: this is a permanent, on-site position; we are not considering contractors or firms; no staffing agencies; local candidates only; NO CALLS PLEASE.

WEB DEVELOPER

Required Skills:
- PHP (object oriented)
- MySQL (PostGreSQL a plus)
- Apache Server
- Content Management System implementation
- Ambitious, flexible and understands the varied demands of a small shop

Desired:
- Drupal CMS
- Estimating, Project Planning and Project Management
- E-commerce experience
- Javascript/jQuery
- CSS

We offer:
- Competitive salary
- Retirement plan with company match
- 100% employee paid health insurance
- Great co-workers and interesting clients

Questionnaire
- Please describe what responsibilities you seek in a new position.
- Explain how you believe your skills and personality fit this position.
- What is your current career status and what is your reason for making a change?
- How long have you been searching for a career opportunity and what is your time frame to begin a new position?
- Describe how you are transparent with your work. (i.e. how do you make it public, accessible, easy for others to see what you’ve done).

Search start-ups such as Collecta, Scoopler, OneRiot and Yauba (to name a few) aggregate content being shared on the internet as it happens by continually indexing updates on sites such as Twitter, Digg, Facebook and more. In fact, Microsoft just announced that they’ve integrated Twitter and Facebook posts into Bing search results as they take their first step into real-time search.

As interesting as real-time search promises to be, I’m curious how it will handle how to accurately rank (does it appear in spot 1 or 100) a piece of content that has just been added to the internet. How do we know that the results real-time search serves up are relevant to what we are searching for, other than having a related keyword in the search query? Traditional methods of ranking search results such as link authority (whether or not trusted links are pointing to this content) won’t really work with real-time search, as content just added to the web is not going to have inbound links from trusted sources.

One of Bing’s approaches to ranking real-time search results (at least for Twitter) is to assign higher value to longer tweets, those that contain added information and links, and tweets from users with many followers. While that approach sounds good in theory, it seems like something that could be manipulated fairly easily.

It’s pretty exciting to see how real-time search continues to unfold. What effects do you think it will have on how we search for things online?

You can do a few things on the site: 1) upload an image to test or 2) participate in tests.

I participated in a handful of tests and they are pretty addictive. You’re shown an image for 5 seconds and then must write down 5 things you remember seeing. Or, on some images, you are told to click on the things that stand out and then identify what those things are. I didn’t try uploading an image for feedback, but will plan to in the future.

It’s amazing how an effective page design will help a user remember key elements in a short span of time. I looked at some images and 5 seconds later couldn’t remember a thing. On others, I could clearly recall things like a call to action to sign up for a newsletter or search or even what the Unique Value Proposition on that page was.

This is a great tool for a designer looking for objective UI feedback on a new comp or for someone that wants quick, raw feedback on a page that might not be converting very well.

Give it a try!

That got me thinking – how far off are we from seeing an influx of 3rd party mobile app checkouts that organizations can utilize on their own websites?

While iTunes, Verizon and a few others have a proven infrastructure for accepting app payments, there’s an incredible amount of value to keeping a current customer on your website and allowing them to checkout with their mobile app purchase right there.

How long until we see a Google or PayPal mobile checkout to pop-up?

“Who put 2 gigs of files on the dev server?!”, Mike would yell from his office. Our VXAtape system used 20GB tapes that cost $30 each. Realistically, that works out to around 30GB of storage with compression. We could have upgraded to the next level of this tape technology, with tapes costing twice as much but doubling the storage. But, that also would have required a pricy new tape drive. That investment would only buy us maybe a year of growth anyway, before we started yearning for even more space.

After listening to Scott Bourne rave about Data Robotics’ Drobo, I looked into getting a couple for backup—but that’s not going to happen until Kevin & Alex buy that winning lottery ticket. That got Mike and I thinking about hard drives as backup, though, and it got Mike to break out the sacred Xeno Media credit card. The next day, we had a pair of 500GB hard drives ($120 each) and a USB hard drive dock. One drive was for even days, and the other for odd. A script on our main Linux server copied 65GB of data to the disk every night, and all we had to do was swap between even & odd while waiting for our morning coffee.

We ran like this for six months, and found it a fast, reliable way to back up all of our important records. Still, having only two drives meant we’d be without monthly and weekly backups. It also made offsite backups a pain, because who wants to carry a 3.5” hard drive back and forth to work?

The other day, a courier dropped off phase 2 of our cunning plan: sixteen portable USB hard drives—eight terabytes of storage in a small pile on Mike’s desk. Each drive enclosure is barely bigger than the 2.5” wide, 9.5mm high drive inside, and we treat these pocket-sized disks like tapes.

These drives cost three times as much as our old tapes, but hold twelve times as much. Their MTBF is measured in tens of thousands of hours, and they’re only getting an hour of use a day. They should be long obsolete before we start seeing problems.

I’ve been wanting to get one for awhile and decided now was the time since my T-Mobile contract finally expired. I’ve done a lot of useless stuff with it for the first few weeks and now I need to get serious with some apps that can help me with real work.

Came across an article with the top 10 must-have iPhone Business Apps. I’m gonna try some out and see if I can do some useful work-related things with my new toy.

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/169587/top_10_musthave_iphone_business_apps.html

Quite often I find that most websites lack a strong UVP and if they do have one, it’s not articulated very well. Without a UVP, you risk getting lost amidst your web competitors. It’s my experience that creating a compelling UVP, or improving on an existing one, can dramatically help an online business improve conversions without touching anything else on the website. In other words, before you decide on the necessity of a massive site redesign first consider if you are doing a good job telling your web visitors why you are their only alternative.

Creating an effective UVP is not easy. It’s not a catchy slogan or tagline, but rather a statement that tells your target audience why they’ve found the business they’ve been looking for and why they need to stay. It must be clear, concise, memorable and conveyed in a few sentences.

Setting out to write a UVP can be a painful – start by creating a list using the following as a guide:

– What is your audience’s problem or issue and how are you helping?

– Quantify how your service or product helps your audience. (e.g. “Our widget helps customers save an average of 40%…”)

Great! You’ve got your list and maybe even some numbers to back up your claims. Take time to identify and notate common themes that emerge. Give your list to a good copywriter and ask them to create 1-2 sentence variations using the common themes you’ve identified.

You now have a handful of UVP’s to choose from… in an ideal world, you’d test each UVP on your website and identify which variation has the most positive effect on conversion. For most that is not an option, so ask customers, staff, friends and family for feedback.

Pick a UVP, get it front and center on your website’s homepage, and reinforce it through the rest of the site.

You’ve only got a limited amount of time to engage your web visitors. A powerful unique value proposition differentiates you from others and helps convert casual visitors into loyal customers.

The fact of the matter is that no one — from seasoned designer to production staff to project manager — is above the sketch phase. For me personally, the “sketch phase” implies literally thumbnailing iteration after iteration on paper; a quick glance over my desk at any point yields dozens of Kimberly lead-based ideas. The exact same method/approach doesn’t need to apply across the board for everyone. In the same spirit for web designing, modern applications have wisely placed themselves preceding the Photoshop phase for rapid prototyping.

There are innumerable amounts of rapid prototyping UI-geared apps available, like OmniGraffle for wireframing, or even Skitch for “back-of-the-envelope simplicity”. For my money (or hopefully someone else’s; expensive Adobe apps are expensive), Illustrator is the way to go for fast digital-based UI thumbnailing. Then there are web-based applications, like Protoshare for example, that even take the wireframe concept to the next level. With providing immediate clickability on “site sketch” prototypes and enabling commenting on various bits of functionality between team members in real time, there’s simply no excuse to make Photoshop step 1.