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My Presentation on UX for WordPress Sites

David Drucker — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 21:46:14 +0000

I recently gave a talk on applying some User Experience considerations to the design decisions one makes in a WordPress blog. Since there are a number of plugins and other technologies that can enhance the user experience of a blog, I thought it would be good to promote some of these. Here’s the presentation deck (without my commentary, so not every slide will make 100% sense, but you’ll get a feel for the subject):

Will Japan Take Off Because of Broadband Price and Speed?

David Drucker — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 17:53:31 +0000

I noticed a fascinating couple of graphs in an article on the blog World Politics Review, Top 30 Countries for Broadband Internet Access. One of them showed Japan’s astounding average Internet speed:

Japan shows an impressive 60 megabits per second speed (I’m assuming this is for download as well as upload?) with Korea not far behind at around 45 megabits per second. I checked my broadband speed here in Canada via SpeedTest.net and my results were a little less than 1/3 of that. I am surprised to see my number as high as that, but then again, it’s before noon on a Saturday.

What’s also interesting is the cost of getting that speed. Here’s another graph:

According to this, all that speed is incredibly cheap, under a dollar per month per megabit in US Dollars, according to the article. By this calculation, I’d expect that for a person in Tokyo to get roughly the same speed I do, they’d pay around $20 per month. Here in Vancouver, my Internet cost is coming in at about $47 for that 19 Megabits, so that works out to roughly $2.5 (Canadian) per megabit, which would convert to almost exactly $2 US per month per megabit. That’s better than the graph says (although it’s hard to tell, I’d read it at closer to $5 per month).

Although I’ve been making some comparisons here, I’m wondering how life would change for me if Internet was half the cost it was, and 3 times faster, but I’m also wondering if this high level of service at relatively low cost will cause a flurry of Internet activity and development in Japan. I note that their limitations have more to do with screen size (many Japanese access the Internet exclusively through via cell phone screen, if I’m not mistaken).

So, what’s it like? How has cheap, fast Broadband Internet made things different, and do you think it will change things in the coming decade? My friends in Japan, your input here is welcome!

Long Time, No See?

David Drucker — Fri, 09 May 2008 23:43:29 +0000

I admit it, I’ve neglected this blog. I could provide the usual excuses, but I think I’ll spare you, dear reader (if you’re still out there somewhere), the explanations.

I’ve been a little better about my personal blog, Loud Murmurs, but now that my contract at IBM is over, I have a little spare time. That means not only redesigning this web site (yes, look for exciting new changes in the coming days and weeks) but also starting to write in this blog once again. I will make another effort at getting my presentation of roughly a year ago up online (and fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, it’s still just as valid today as it was then).

What you can’t see is that I have a new admin interface which I really, really like. It’s the Fluency Admin by Dean J, Robinson.Tell you what, I’ll put in a screenshot of the screen I’m writing this on:

What’s Taking so Long?

David Drucker — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 18:24:20 +0000

I learned the rather inconvenient truth about exporting slides for the web, including the most typical formats (export to one big QuickTime movie, export to PDF, export to Flash, export to a series of linked images): None of these handle presentations with embedded movies (they typically show up as still images, if anything at all), and my presentation was about 75% embedded Quicktime movies. Ouch. What’s more, some of these movies are either very large for the Web, or require some codecs that I had a hard time getting to work consistently on two different Macs, much less every Mac and Windows machine playing them via the Internet.

So, I find myself in the unfortunate situation of essentially having to recreate the slides from scratch in Dreamweaver, and re-compress all of the movies (along with trying to figure out how to do so without them becoming unreadable thanks to multiple transformations from one codec to another). All of this is not a problem if one has the time. So, I’m going to give it a couple of more hours today and hopefully will get closer to a solution that I can post here. In the meantime, sorry for the delay.

A Very Unique Clock

David Drucker — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 05:49:13 +0000

An Actionscript (Flash) programmer who has a blog called ‘PixelBreaker’ has built a very clever clock that uses a polar plot to show the passing of time. Here’s a capture, with a link to the real thing:

A great example of good information design, if there ever was one. I’m thinking that it might be easy to read, once you get used to it. And pretty, too. Will make a nice screen saver.