Two Cents and a Thousand Words

My good friend Jess just sent me my first birthday present of the year. On September 16, 2004, I sent her a few pictures of lighthouses from around Maine for a project. One of the ones I sent was the photo of Portland Head Light to the right. Little did I know that two and a half years later, she’d return the picture to me – as a painting.

That… that just made me feel… special. I’m staring at a rendering of a photo I took created by one of my best friends. I can’t help but smile.

The title of this post (and the painting) is in reference to the wonderful song on Nickel Creek’s self-titled CD.

My former domain registrar of choice has been through a bit of a thing lately. By “bit of a thing”, I roughly mean “screw customers and become the company with the worst reputation on the Web.” I started using RegisterFly (no link intentionally, because they don’t deserve the Google Juice) a few years back after a suggestion from Kevin Rose (yes, the digg.com guy) on The Screen Savers. They were great for quite a while, but over the past few months I’ve had numerous problems and unresponsive support requests. Apparently, I’m not alone.

Luckily I managed to get the bulk of my domains away from them before the real fire started. The only one that’s left isn’t a huge deal, but it would be nice to keep it. If the Internet Overseers at ICANN step up to the plate, I have a pretty good chance of getting it – I still have quite a bit of time before it expires.

It underscores the importance of good customer service in order to make your company not appear incompetent. It also heightens awareness on how crucial domain registrars can be to companies and individuals. Picking the wrong one can have long-lasting effects.

For the record, I have 22 domains, but many of them are inactive. I managed to transfer the big three (justinrussell.com, semsym.com, and mainesites.net – the precursor to semsym.com) earlier this year. (Speaking of semsym.com, wouldn’t it be nice to see a resurgence of the Network? Hmm. My birthday’s coming soon. That seems like a milestone of some sort. Hmm. Naw, nothing could be happening. Couldn’t be.)

What the heck is del.icio.us and why should you use it?

Sounds like a great topic for an Edge tekk article to me.

By the way – if you enjoy reading what I write, I may have a new venue or two coming up soon. More details later, if they work out.

Ze starts out his last week of the show with some wonderful thoughts on creativity:

I’m amazed we have one word that can apply to all these different things. A word that evokes wonder when I think about what other people have done, but evokes fear and self-doubt when I think about myself.

That was exactly what I needed.

Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve been trying to enhance the development process at work. Matt’s been leading the charge on doing more quality assurance and things of that sort. I’ve been a little less vocal about it; I think it’s been because I’m still trying to figure out the best way to go about it. As I’ve been pondering it, though, I’ve noticed that this conversation seems to be occurring more often between developers around the Web.

My friend Ian has written a couple of excellent posts about two topics that are near and dear to anyone in a product-based industry: quantity versus quality and the bulleted features list. I’ve always found it interesting that even in such a diverse field, many of the same factors of product development ring true.

One of the sites on my reading list is the blog of usability and interaction designer Daniel J. Wilson. He recently posted an article about some interaction testing of a new product called Skitch. We’ve had the opportunity to do this sort of auditing on our own projects lately, and it’s an invaluable exercise. Besides the sheer fun of trying to deconstruct and self-criticize the project you just finished coding, this sort of testing really allows you to step back and visualize the experience of your product from the user’s point of view. Although it sounds simple, it’s really not; I’ve recently found that it takes much more than “point out anything that doesn’t make sense” to instruct someone on this sort of testing.

These sorts of enhancements, though, are those that will cause users to enjoy using (and continue using) a product. They’re the ones that patch mental disconnects. They’re the ones that might prevent maintenance work later in the product’s lifetime. In development, the little things are the big things.