This week was important and exciting for the USA: Barry finally clinched the nomination. I couldn’t be more pleased with the choices for POTUS this year, especially when you consider who else was running 6 months (or even a week) ago.
I will continue to support Barry for a variety of reasons which I may touch upon here and there during the general election season. The first reason is a distinct difference between the candidates that several of my colleagues will appreciate: barackobama.com utilizes standards-based markup with near-valid xhtml and CSS positioning. Naturally, johnmccain.com uses the – ahem – old practice of table-based layouts with little thought to accessibility and web standards.
There will be a test on all of this after you finish the video:
Also looking at for the first time this week…
I was just listening to The Strokes - You Only Live Once
We launched it tonight to a relative few number of quirks and bugs. This had been in progress well before I joined the team but I was fortunate enough to contribute to the last few weeks of development. The website has grown rich with web-specific content and a new homepage was needed to prevent from burying that content beneath the homepage. The comments coming back have complaints that the homepage is busy, which yes, is busier than the previous iteration.
The real test will be if it becomes less-busy to the familiar eye or stays consistent. I can attest that the design team is listening to feedback and paying close attention to metrics. If unforeseen problems arise, they will be dealt with. Only so much best-practice can be practiced before you start experimenting to solve design problems and it’s important to find out if those choices are successful, or not.
One of those experiments involved the navigation which was re-designed and re-engineered from the ground, up. The menu items are magnified based on NYMag’s bread-and-butter content visitors coming to the site are looking for. At the same time, the navigation offers access to more content than ever before. The content-rich drop-down menus add no weight to the page as they are loaded behind the scenes (AJAX) after a menu item has been mouse-over’ed. This also ensures better SEO as search engines will be able to index more of the page content without getting caught up in redundant links in the navigation. More subtle refinements, like the slight delay on the drop-down menus, prevent accidental drop-down behavior which can be frustrating to clear if your mouse cursor travels across the masthead for any reason.
Most of my efforts were focused on the masthead/navigation performance across the two platforms and web browsers. Aside from the normal issues, it’s no secret that DHTML doesn’t play well with Internet Explorer 6 or some types of Flash rich-media banner ads. We’ve come up with a solution to deal with both and we’re hoping to get documentation published somewhere appropriate as soon as possible.
There are still some performance issues related to the homepage and masthead navigation that are being worked on and resolved. But I am very pleased with this starting point. It has been a great introduction to the now predictable excellence on the behalf of the entire NYMag.com team.
I was just listening to Gorillaz - Kids With Guns (Hot Chip Remix)
Google brings their maps to the skies (also the Moon and Mars). Like Kottke, I got all teary-eyed.
I was just listening to Del tha Funky Homosapien - Bubble Pop
B&H Photo acquired and is selling a Canon Super Telephoto 1200mm lens. Weighing at 36 lbs and available only by special order, there are less than twenty of them known to be in existence (not counting the ones mounted on spy planes, etc.).
Only $99,000.00. Question: How much of a geek would I be if I went to the B&H store to take a picture of this lens? Could I convince them I wanted to test it out on my Rebel XT?
Tempting.