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I almost posted a TweetDeck support ticket when I realized the interface was just hiding what I needed. My Direct Messages (DM) column had disappeared. Last night I tried using the ‘Add Column’ feature to get it back, but I did not see an option to do so. Today a new version was released: I installed it, but still no DM column. I tried the ‘Add Column’ again, with no luck, so off I went to search for a solution. Nada. Here’s what I was seeing:
Read the entire post: Looking for Affordances in TweetDeck

The buzz is building for the February 2010 Interaction10 Conference in Savannah, with good reason. There’s an outstanding line-up of speakers and an impressive community of attendees. (Including many people I haven’t met in real life, but talk to quite a bit on the twitters.) I was amazed at the inclusiveness of the 2009 IASummit, and was a little concerned IxD10 wouldn’t live up to welcomeness I found in Memphis. Those fears have disappeared. I’ll report back, but it’s looking like there will be no lack of making new friends. Read the entire post: Looking forward to Interaction 10

I absorbed Scott Berkun’s Confessions of a Public Speaker (O’Reilly) during the four days after Christmas (amidst the bizarre humidity and noise of an indoor Boston water park with my family). Berkun grabbed & held my attention with amusing stories and solid advice that resonated with my presenting experiences, good and bad.

Read this book if you present at conferences, pitch your ideas, your products, or your firm. It’s a manual for being prepared and engaging. (It is not an in-depth discussion of rhetorical styles nor presentation slides; for these Berkun refers the reader elsewhere). The book offers many useful suggestions for conference hosts as well.

The central tenet of the book is that successful public speaking requires serious thinking. The more you’ve thought through your ideas, the more confident you will be in your ability to discuss them, even through technical glitches and difficult audience questions. Read the entire post: Book Review: Confessions of a Public Speaker

I heartily recommend Luke Wroblewski’s Web Form Design (May, 2008) for people who create web forms and for those who hire others to create them. The book is structured in three parts: form structure, form elements, and form interaction, and includes a plethora of real-world examples. Whether you’re a novice or expert, walking through Wroblewski’s overview of forms-related issues will provoke your thinking about design choices and their impact. Luke is Chief Design Architect at Yahoo! and blogs at Functioning Form.

Below are some of my thoughts and recommendations in response to the book.

Deepen your understanding of other people’s experiences

Who are we to not bother to ensure the resources we create are universally usable? As you are thinking about making better web forms, deepen your understanding of how design choices affect people with disabilities. Read the entire post: Book Review: Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks

I should have been relaxing and working on an inspirational side project, but instead spent much of Thanksgiving weekend trying to eliminate a senseless spam injection on a WordPress (wp) site.

I was frustrated, to say the least, by how difficult it was to find a solution. There were many months-old unanswered pleas on the wp forums.

I cannot figure out the hackers’ revenue model. Repeatedly over the course of two weeks, my husband’s site became unreliable to access. The symptoms were varied, including:

1. The site never loads
2. Loading stalls and then redirects to a virus scanner software
3. The site is redirected to a Harry Potter related website
4. The site takes a long time to load and the source code shows approximately 30 links to enhancement-related drugs or movies. Each time the links are to a new single site, where the drug or movie is a variable at the end of the URL. The inserted code has a style of display:none; so it’s not visible to the naked eye. Nevertheless, it is available to search bots.

For the first few days, the injection would take place in the form of #4 (invisible links) at the same time of day. Replacing the theme’s header.php erased the problematic code, returning the site to normal for the day. (I read of other situations where the injection is in the footer.) The ftp logs showed that /wp-content/themes/mytheme/header.php file was changed. Read the entire post: Recovering from a WordPress Spam Injection