Cre8tive Flow

If you haven’t been to a Blogger web site on Blogspot lately, you may not have noticed a new button on the Blogger NavBar.

It’s been out for at least a couple of weeks, a way of indicating to Google that there is something offensive on a blog hosted on Blogspot. Blogger has a page with more details: What is the “Flag” button?.

There have been a few people who have started to go through Blogspot, and click on the button for blogs that are filled with spam. I’ve even seen a suggestion making a cooperative effort to join together in an international flag day.

Hard to tell exactly. It’s pretty spare right now.

But the enthusiasm of its designers is pretty infectious. Chad Thornton and Joe Beda give some possible insights to the next steps in their blogs and comments.

The first page of this thread contained a number of ideas on how to reduce both page sizes and loading times. As you may have noticed, Send2Paul’s enthusiam for the material was contagious. And it continued on the second page:

Send2Paul
Sun Sep 19, 2004 9:57 am

Well, what can I say? - I think we’ve done ourselves proud here!

I think we may have the definitive bible on Page Size & Loading Time here. It’s such a superb thread to read from start to end (?) - it’s almost like reading a professionally produced magazine article.

One of my favorite Cre8asite Forums threads, which mysteriously disappeared, not once but twice, was rescued from Google’s cache, and is being reproduced here to celebrate Cre8asite Forums third birthday.

It began with a question from Send2Paul:

Send2Paul
Sat Sep 18, 2004 8:37 am

Morning all

Ongoing with my recent education in the Website Hospital , I find myself asking more & more questions the deeper I get into this “web design thing”… So, here’s a good one concerning page size & loading time….

I’m addicted to CiteSeer. It’s one of my favorite sites on the web.

So, I got pretty excited when I saw earlier tonight that Penn State and the University of Kansas have been awarded 1.2 Million dollars to bring us the Next Generation CiteSeer.

Originally launched in 1997, CiteSeer is an online document repository which has provided public access to over 700,000 documents involving information and computer science topics. It presently receives over 1 million searches a day. While there are some fun tools to use with CiteSeer like the CiteSeer browser, there are some even more interesting plans ahead for the service.

The standards body for HTML and the World Wide Web has released a document that can be used in Developing a Web Accessibility Business Case for Your Organization. It’s a nice approach because it uses plain English to describe some of the many benefits that can come to an organization that adopts accessibility for their site. These include views from a number of perspectives, and describe some of the many returns on investment that adding accessibiility will bring:

Social Factors
Technical Factors
Financial Factors
Legal and Policy Factors

Not easy to do?

Maybe easier than you think, if you are in the UK. Usually we stay away from talking ab out design contests here, but this one seemed interesting.

The Royal mint is looking for people to come up with New designs for a number of coins.

The winning designer will come up with six designs, for six different coins, and the potential prize is up to £30,000. More details at the Royal Mint.

Imagine the following.

You have a web site for your retail store, which sells bowling balls, and shoes, and shirts in Central New Jersey.

The site doesn’t sell any of your products online, yet. In the future it might, but right now, it acts to let people know what you offer, and how they can get to your store.

You include your address on a contact page and a directions page, which are linked to by all of the other pages, but your address is only on those two pages. It should be on all of them, but your designer wanted to fill the pages of the site with multi-colored balls, and shoes and shirts.