Linux, Radioactive Cell Phones, Pink Horses, and More
Despite the lack of pizza and our fearless leader at this week’s Resource Friday, the topics continued to be intriguing, thought-provoking, and engaging. Read on for more!
Ubuntu and Us
Mike Newswanger, Programmer
For resource Friday today, I went into basic network file server security. Using a Linux-based server, users and groups can easily be added or removed to give people access to what they need and keep them out of where they shouldn’t be. The Linux platform offers free licensing solutions, easy scalability, and very little hardware resource requirements. Combined with phenomenal reliability and overall security of the system, Linux makes sense to be the basis of a server.
Many services that are not built in to standard Linux builds can be downloaded and configured in a matter of minutes, including:
- Apache, PHP, MySQL to use to host intranet services for within the company.
- Samba to manage file shares across multiple operating system platforms
- SVN to keep files versioned so that changes can be tracked
Everything You Think Is Wrong
Jeff Burkholder, Engineer/Analyst
I ran across Cory Doctorow’s review of Dan Ariely’s new book, The Upside of Irrationality, and shared some of the thoughts with the team. I primarily talked about the human predilection toward adaptation to extreme emotional stimuli, and how we tend to approach things we really like and really hate in precisely the opposite way from how we should.
I also dug more into Ariely’s blog, and found an interesting study about how items on eBay that have a story attached to them — not information about the item, but an emotional (and fictional) story that evokes the item — can increase the selling price of that item. A pink toy horse that was picked up at a garage sale for $1 was coupled with a story of a woman whose daughters (who played with a pink horse) had died long ago resold for $104. This study showed that people are more apt to “buy into” something if there’s an emotional response coupled with it, regardless of the (ir-)rationality behind just such an action.
Getting Burned
Jonathan Arndt, Programmer
There were some articles of interest on Slashdot this past week. One reported that mobile devices in California are now required to carry a warning label indicating how much radiation they emit. Another article explained how a certain retailer in Australia has been engaging in some dubious practices surrounding selling iPads.
WordPress 3.0, Evernote, and more
Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist
WordPress has released its 3.0 version, and I gave the team a tour of the new features. I also shared how instead of immediately beginning work on 3.1, the WordPress team is taking the next three months to focus on everything around WordPress itself, including documentation, support forums, integration with other platforms, and the way it plans future releases. The combination of that outreach with a shiny new 3.0 version should give WordPress a further boost on its path toward becoming one of the most dominant content management systems in use today.
I introduced the team to usertesting.com, which provides Web developers with inexpensive user testing services. For $39, developers can specificy the demographic background they are targeting with the site and have a sample user who fits that mold use the site to perform set tasks. Testers provide the developers with a video of their experience using the website as well as written notes of what they liked and what problems they ran into. This service makes usability testing easier and more affordable than ever.
This week I was searching for a clean and elegant tool to use as a digital notebook (a sort of “junk drawer” for ideas and bits of information). I started out with a version of TiddlyWiki that had been customized to be compatible with the iPhone, but I wound up settling on Evernote, which I now heartily commend to those who need to keep track of (and organize) lots of random ideas and bits of information.
It was a relatively slow news week on the social media front, which is probably the only reason Tweegle garnered as much attention as it did. If Twitter and Google got married and had a ridiculously ugly child, Tweegle would be it. Avoid it.
Inspiring Design and Trends for 2010
Astrid Salim, Creative Director
Today, I showed more websites that I find inspiring. Last week, I was talking about how a grid system can make a website simple, clean, and contemporary. So today, I showed more inspiring websites that also have a similar style. Parallax Design Group‘s website breaks up the layout in simple colorful boxes. The logo is overlapping the boxes, making the grid feel softer. Gravitate Design Studio uses boxes in a slightly different way. The boxes are stacked and overlapping each other, giving it a casual look, but the corporate colors keep it professional.
I also shared some of website design trends for 2010. One of trends is the use of little icons to replace text. One of the recent projects that YDOP has is to redesign one of our client’s website. I created some icons to use in some sections of the website. Everyone at YDOP agreed that they make the website look better. Those icons help a lot because the reader identifies images faster than text. They also give a visual interest to a long page of text. These icons can make a website friendlier and easier to navigate.