Recent happenings
Real Life
Well, Olga and I just got back from a hiking/camping trip in Red River Gorge, with our friends Jeff, Josef and Lynette. The image above is a snapshot of my Flickr account saying that I've maxed out my uploads for the month. Not bad if you ask me, for having only started on it a few weeks ago.
There are now 50 total photos online, and plenty more where those came from, as soon as June rolls around (unless any of you Pro account users have one of your freebies to share). That reminds me, I again have 50 GMail invitations to give away if anyone wants one, just contact me and say so.
The director of UMCOM.org contacted me this week and wants me to work on a few CSS designs for the University of Kansas Wesley Foundation, so that should be pretty cool. It's affiliated with Church of the Resurrection, the largest UMC in the nation. So, this summer looks to be pretty busy, with classes, design work, and being a teacher's assistant for the IT605 class.
Web Annoyances
In preparation for that, I want to get a few more ideas down on "paper." Namely, my pet peeves of web design.
So here goes…
Sites whose navigation relies on Flash, see Asbury.edu - This site is funny because it even has a "low bandwidth" version of the site, which is still largely depended on Flash. Who cares about a low-bandwidth version if you still can't navigate the thing? They should do what most civilized people do, and that's have Flash and non-Flash versions of the page.
"Contact Us" links which are not in fact links to a contact page, but are
mailto:references that auto-launch your default email program. This is especially annoying when they look the same as the rest of the menu.Links that launch a PDF, but don't give the end-user proper warning. I know that Macs have a nice built-in PDF reader, but for PC users, Adobe Reader nearly crashes the browser. This is why I use Macromedia Flashpaper on my site instead. As a rule of thumb, if you have a link that takes the user to something other than an HTML page, let them know.
I think that about sums it up for me. Does anyone else have things about the web that they just can stand?