I love Firefox, and it’s mostly because of the plugins. Firefox is fast becoming my only tool for the web as it covers so many bases with Fire FTP, CSS and html editors, debugging tools, developer and designer plugins, administration tools, local program controls and social networking monitors to name but a few. A picture is better than words for this - and it only took about a minute to install at a svelt 400 od kilobites.
Recently through the magical pipes of RSS there have been quite a few rumblings about offline blogging apps and how they help the process of authoring. SO here’s a quick test run of the new Windows live writer. As you can see the interface has downloaded my theme from the URL I entered, and it hasn’t managed to get the font sizes quite right. I also had to uncheck a whole bunch of crap that Windows tried to bundle at me which kind of annoyed the crap out of me. I only selected to download Windows Live Write, but true to form Microsoft decided that this was probably their only opportunity to cram the latest releases of everything else they have down my throat. I seriously wonder about the monkeys on the typewriters in that company. Its a great idea being able to manage an entire post from the desktop. I’ll have to give Wordpress Gears a go also, as I suspect that it’s probably 10 times more user friendly and won’t try and make install 10 copies of Wordpress MU, Upload a gravatar, Try the 10 top plugins they feel that I must have and send me a complimentary pack of suppositories in the mail – only after I enter all my contact details of course including what flavour of ice cream I like ;).
Here’s a screenshot of the interface from my desktop. You can see that I’m typing in about 6pt font size.
Wordpress 2.7, the latest version of the popular Wordpress blogging platform is very close to being released as a stable version. One of the cool things they have decided to do with v2.7 is to add an icon set to the backend menu to marry up the heading links and visual interaction. So they held a competition between a number of designers who each designed a set of menu icons, and presented them in a jpeg format fresh of the Photoshop threshing floor. Then people voted as to what they thought was the best set – democracy in action – Beaut. The results are interesting from many perspectives, but what seems to be clear is that the imagery and what functionality was suggested by each icon seems to have been considered as most important by voters. This is because the winner and runner-up entries employ an identical visual language in what their icons are. Here’s a breakdown of how the different icons were represented:
Icons for the upcoming WP 2.7 release
You can see that the winner and runner-up have a very similar visual language, even though their styles are different.
Web 3.0 is probably going to be more like web 2.2.1, and could be a lot to do with making sense of the screeds of content that is available on the net. Bring on Calais who are a company modelled on the open style all about semantic findability – or in other words making use of people and natural workflows to classify and categorise content. It’s a good thing – It seems more and more often Google is becoming the broadsword of search compared to Delicious or Digg as a scalpel for finding quality up to date content. Google still use bots to crawl the web after all, and although many speculate we are close to the singularity, robots will never understand the web the same way as a human being.
One of the exciting tools in the Calais Semantic arsenal, is the wordpress plugin called tagaroo, which is being used for the first time on Infofoundry in this post. Calais explain it’s as following:
“Meet Tagaroo, the Calais plugin for WordPress blogs. As you are writing your post, Tagaroo automatically analyzes it and suggests both tags and images from Flickr to enhance your post. You can select tags you like, incorporate them into your post, and then automatically search Flickr for images to complement your writing. Tagaroo has its own home, where you can read about it in more detail, download the plugin, and visit the forums.”
So it automatically logs what you are writing – presumably against its own databases which requires an api key – and suggests search terms and images based on the content you have authored.
For example - the image and tags of this post have been added using tagaroo.
The Requirements document is important to create a specific list of functionality so that the client and company can specfically agree on exactly what is needed for the project. Recently I re-authored our requirements document based on several different past documents. I remember a while back when, I would search the web looking for headings so that I wouldn’t miss any possible requirements for a site. Heres the list of starting point headings that are in the current document, that I thought other Information Architects, and Interaction Designers may find useful.
1.0 BACKGROUND AND OVERVIEW
2.0 PURPOSE OF THIS DOCUMENT
3.0 ROLES AND OBJECTIVES OF THE SITE
4.0 PHASE ONE REQUIREMENTS
4.1 GENERAL
4.2 USER ACCOUNTS
4.3 BACKEND MANAGEMENT
4.4 PAYMENT SYSTEM
4.5 BILLING SYSTEM
5.0 PHASE TWO KNOWN REQUIREMENTS
6.0 REQUIREMENTS EXCLUDED FROM SCOPE
7.0 TARGET AUDIENCES
7.1 PRIMARY AUDIENCE
7.2 SECONDARY AUDIENCE
7.3 AUDIENCE USER REQUIREMENTS
8.0 SITE SUCCESS MEASURES
9.0 OTHER FUNCTIONALITY
9.1 UTILITY PAGES
9.2 COMPLIANCE STANDARDS
10.0 CONSIDERATIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
I'm an Information Architect working in Wellington New Zealand who deals a lot with web standards, conventions and best practice every day. This is the place where I place findings, musings and facts as a repository for myself and anyone else who might benefit. 
