Links of Interest

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Designer / Not a Designer


I stumbled upon this hilarious animated GIF movie of a non-designer talking to a designer.

 

CushyCMS

Everybody and their brother is talking about CushyCMS lately. Probably because it’s brilliant. It is a service which makes it very easy to give the ability to edit web pages to anyone. You sign up for an account (and make accounts for your “editors”), give it FTP information for a site you wish to make editable, and then add which pages you intend to be editable. This isn’t a WSIWYG editor, it’s just a text editor (or image uploader as the case may be). You declare which regions of the page are editable by adding the class “cushycms” to those elements. I may do a videocast on this since it’s really cool and could benefit from a demo. (You can actually watch one on the homepage that they created too).

 

Disqus / Seesmic

Disqus is a system for extending the traditional commenting system. It does cool stuff like makes comments threaded, allows you to respond via email, and gives you and your commentors a cross-site identity. It’s none of these things (although pretty cool) that interest me though. My favorite is the fact that you can add a comment system to any page, even if it doesn’t have a native commenting system. So in theory you could chuck comments on any old static web page, which I could definitely see coming in handy some day. The other is integration with Seesmic, which is a service for video comments. I first learned about Disqus/Seesmic from it’s use on theblanchard. I also see Seesmic has a WordPress plugin too. I think it’s very cool, but I don’t think I’ll be adding video comments here. I just get the feeling ya’ll aren’t the “video comments” types =)

 

Padded Link Targets

Signal vs. Noise (The 37s Blog), has a an insightful post on padding your link targets. If you are using text based navigation on your site, I think this is an important consideration. Padded targets just feel nicer and will surely result in less mis-clicks and lower frustration.

 

Typogridphy

Harry Roberts has a pretty nice template/framework out he is called Typogridphy that is worth taking a look at. Other than the nice and detailed typography, the whole layout is em-based, so it can grow and shrink along with the text with a “zoom” effect.