Was looking for my notes on a Flash project and rediscovered a 2002 report from nngroup.

I really think the guidelines for designing with Flash are for any project.

Things that popped out at me (and made me nod my head):

• Do good design
• Familiar is good
• Dancing bears is bad (“Don’t show gratuitous motion.”)
• Don’t be annoying with sound/motion
• If your purpose is information, don’t be silly (was re: should I use 5pt font size)
• Be. Meaningful. (Though I think that’s up there with good design is good.)
• Pass the remote (was re: letting users have control)
• KISS and I don’t mean the band (Keep It Simple Stupid)

Also with the report came some excellent examples and a report on usability for those with disabilities. October 2002 was a long time ago, but the information still looks good. I wish I could buy all of their reports. But I (and you) can read his Alertbox for free!

Upgraded, finally, to WordPress 1.5. It comes with Kubrick as a default which is a very nice layout, I think. Not too different from what I had.

The managing more than just the blog is great. I’ll have to see if it’ll basically do a CMS. I don’t see why not. pMachine did that well, though it wasn’t as — what’s the word — smooth as WordPress. I added the “About” page thorugh the WordPress “write page” option.

I had just put in a lovely spam blocker plugin but maybe they have made the default plugins better. We’ll see. The spammers had moved from comment spam to trackback spam. But neither was showing on the web pages. Haha. Suckers.

And, how the heck is it smaller than the old WordPress? With more features! Gotta love smooth coding.

Illustration Friday (tip)

Started to look around and found a few more plugins than I already had for spammers. One of them Spam Karma looks very promising. We’ll see.

A great depository of WP plugins is WP-Plugins and I still visit WordPress Codex. Though it used to be the WordPress Wiki but is a wiki but just not called such.

At least that’s what I keep telling myself. I turned comments into approval only. Then added the spammers’ urls/keywords whatever to WordPress’s Anti-Spammer tool. Works fine. But I wish there were a way to just automatically flip off the spammer.

Cause there’s a lot of it.

I wonder if it’d stop if I turned off comments for all posts. Like if these bots would see a “broken url” and then take me off their list. If so, I wonder how long I’d have to have the comments off to be taken off a list and will they ever revisit?