May 2nd 2007 Posted at Design
Comments Off on Developing Applications Over Multiple Web Service Layers 
One of the more interesting challenges in developing Earlymiser has turned out how to normalize performance across multiple web service layers. When querying multiple web service providers we have found varying degrees of performance and reliability.
April 9th 2007 Posted at Design, Software, Startups, Stories
Comments Off on Coffeeshop Usability Testing
I now have roughly 5 months of data dealing with the beta test of my comparison shopping engine. In the short time it’s been up, with ZERO advertising dollars, it has achieved a Page Rank of 6 and an Alexa ranking of 150,000. That said I think there is room for serious improvement.
April 1st 2007 Posted at Design, Software
Comments Off on Warning Mashup Builders, Microsoft thinks you are phishing
I was testing my comparison shopping engine in the latest version of IE when IE informed me that it suspected my site was phishing site and I should be very careful. The page in question was Godzilla Destroy All Monsters. Why would my comparison shopping page trigger a phishing warning from Microsoft?
February 26th 2007 Posted at Design
Comments Off on Form Design
Here’s a basic question for you. When you design a new site what country is your target audience in? Every site has a target audience in mind when you develop it (what you say you don’t have a target audience and everyone will use your service? Simply not true). When you design a site – you should have a target audience or at least specific use stories in mind when designing. Here are some use stories I did for Earlymiser – price comparison
February 23rd 2007 Posted at Design
14 Comments
I am preparing to upgrade and redo two Drupal installations this weekend. Already I am beginning to dread the preparation. While I have have spoken about how much I liked Drupal, it’s apparent that they are going through growing pains and should re-assess their coding practices.
February 12th 2007 Posted at Design, Software
1 Comment
One of the interesting thing about software design is how the intial assumptions tend to dominate the initial design. A lot of captchas had the initial design of reading letters or numbers that have been distorted or bent out of shape.
