Websites

Ones I made or Like

  • August 4, 2007

    Twitter & Productivity

    Twitter

    Twitter, a website that allows you to post short (140 characters or less) updates, has been becoming more and more of a productivity tool. I have been a Twitter user since April, but haven’t really started using it until just recently. With integration for Google Calendar, Remember the Milk and GTalk among other things, using Twitter isn’t just a fun little app anymore. It’s a tour de force of productivity for those who use it right.

    First thing first: Anything I can do from IM is a great thing. While it’s AIM support has been on and off and is currently off indefinitely, the recently added GTalk support is awesome. I can send updates from GMail or my desktop quite easily now, as well as eliminate those direct message emails I get by just allowing Twitter messages to go to IM. Plus, I have GTalk for my Blackberry, which is an added bonus.

    With a number of different bots, I have all the information I want at my fingertips. Weather, sports, headlines, etc. Not to mention an alarm with Twitter Timer, integration with GCal and especially Remember the Milk. My favorite Tasks web app got better because now I can easily, from anywhere, send a task to my phone.

    Finally, with TwitterBerry, I can easily send updates from my blackberry, without the extra resources required for GTalk. This program was the final nail in the “Use Twitter to GTD” coffin. In the coming days I will be scouring the internet for more Twitter Resources, and frequently checking Retweet for news on new Twitter Bots. So…How do you use Twitter?

  • July 20, 2007

    CNN’s Redesign

    CNN Redesign

    A few weeks ago CNN launched the redesign of their site, and in my opinion they really nailed it. With a cleaner design and new up-to-date features, the new CNN is really a leader in the major news industry websites.

    Design: Looking at the old design, You can tell the new CNN is much much cleaner and more organized. With a full width header and fixed width content, everything looks more spread out and less crammed. The user is not overwhelmed by the massive amount of content CNN has to offer. They also decided to tone up their color scheme a little, going with more consistent reds, whites and lighter blues, like teal. This makes the site conform better than their previous design. Finally, a quick look at their source will reveal significantly less tables in the new design. This puts them way ahead of other major media sites.

    CNN Local

    New Features: I feel the best part of CNN’s redesign is the fact that their new features are more user oriented. They offer a great number of videos, blogs, podcasts, polls, RSS Feeds, hot topics and even comments to allow the user to make the CNN experience their own, which is a huge plus. My favorite new feature, however, is the “Local” box on the homepage.

    The CNN Local box gives you weather reports and headlines from whatever zip code you decide to put it, and I find that awesome. Instead of having to navigate away from CNN, I can get all the news in one place. It also pulls from a number of local news sources for your area, which almost serves as an RSS feed for your zip code.

    Over all, CNN’s new design is pretty nice. While they could have gone totally tableless, I think the new features and mostly tableless design puts them way ahead of their competitors. The new website keeps me coming back even if their brand of news isn’t mine.

  • June 26, 2007

    Google Calendar Updates

    Google Calendar

    As a big fan of all things Google, including Google Calendar, I am pretty happy with some new features GCal has recently rolled out.

    Im not sure how new this is, but I discovered it today- you can actually have the weather, in the form of a little icon on each day, displayed on your Google Calendar. I find this pretty awesome as it’s one less stop I have to make on this information highway.

    But the real reason I am writing this post is due to the fact that recently, Google released a mobile version of their calendar. simply go to calendar.google.com with your mobile web enabled phone and log in, it will display the next few upcoming events you have for whichever calendar you choose to view. With this and mobile GMail, I may not need to use any built in functions of my Treo. But I think this is a good move by Google. They see the obvious shift in the use of cell phones, and the increasing amount of people using smart phones and accessing the internet on them. If Google keeps this up with all of their products, they will no doubt own the mobile web realm.

  • June 22, 2007

    Facebook as a Business Model

    Facebook

    It’s no secret that I am a big fan of Facebook. They have a niche user base, their application is clean, easy to use, and has numerous built-in features. Now with the new Facebook Apps, people can add basically any feature they want to Facebook, assuming the can develop or know a developer. This has led me to think about the Facebook approach to things- the way they develop and the way the actually listen to feedback. Both of these things are very important in the development of a web application.

    Looking at Facebook’s progression, it seems they did things the right way. They started off small. To use it, your school had to be added. It gave the basics of a Social Networking App. As they grew, so did their features. They added photo albums and notes. And not just like MySpace had them. The Photos are completely organizable and easy to use. And the notes- you can tag friends and import RSS feeds. When they added the mini feed (which I think people have come to like), there was some uproar, but the people at Facebook spent the next 2 days listening to people and making adjustments. Before they rolled out the new design, they got feedback. They really care about their users.

    So how is this a good business model? Facebook knows that without users, they are nothing. So they want their users to have a good experience. And the best part is they are able to make money off of it in a non-intrusive way. Go to MySpace on any given day, and you will be met with an outrageous skin for an upcoming movie, full page redirect ads, or animated ones that are almost as annoying as the animated background your friend is using on her page. Facebook neatly integrates ads into the mini feed, and under the sidebar- and the sidebar ads are from facebook users. It’s a very neat an clean way to do things.

    All in all, I feel Facebook is the benchmark of a good web application- it has the right features, a good user base and makes money.

  • April 16, 2007

    How Design Effects Users

    As a web developer, I feel I know a little bit about design and functionality on a website. Lately I have been noticing my use of a website depends heavily on design and functionality, as I’m sure it does for most people whether they realize it or not. Take, for instance, how I get my news online.

    CNN

    Fox News

    Here are screen shots of both CNN and Fox News. Click the images to go to the sites. While Fox News is more my brand of news (surprise surprise), I find myself going to CNN more often. This is because I feel CNN has a nicer, cleaner looking site. CNN’s logo blends nicely with the rest of the banner, unlike Fox’s, which just looks like it’s thrown there. There isn’t too much going on ‘above the fold’ for CNN. With Fox, it’s a different story. For example, Fox offers 27 links in it’s main navigation. CNN offers 20 (which was actually more than I thought). CNN’s navigation is also contained to one, solitary line. Fox has theirs on two lines, each a different shade of blue. Below the fold on Fox is even worse.

    Where CNN offers more stories organized in a pretty nice fashion, Fox offers links to all of their shows and a litany of thumbnail images. I feel that I get much more information from CNN’s homepage, which is what the user wants. Plus, CNN’s links are much friendlier. If you’ll notice, a link to a story on CNN appears like this, after ‘cnn.com’: /2007/US/04/16/vtech.shooting/index.html. Year, region, month, day, name of story. Here is a link following ‘foxnews.com’: /story/0,2933,266463,00.html. This is not informative, nor very nice looking. But news isn’t the only problem area. Because of GMail, I never use my school’s email system.

    What got me thinking about this was Google asking students to take their survey about campus email. I am a staunch user of GMail and tell everyone I know to use it. It’s a good interface, easy to use, lots of space and has great IM and Calendar integration. I was also able to make it a one stop shop for sending and receiving email from the multitude of email addresses I have. “Royal Mail,” as the University of Scranton calls it, is not a good experience. It’s poorly designed and not very intuitive. Unless you change the settings, you get oldest mail first, and deleting a lot of email at one time is not easy. But the biggest annoyance I feel, is no search. GMail has excellent functionality here, allowing me not only to quickly find mail, but the search also allows me to use GMail as a file server. And with near 3GB of space, I have the capacity to do so too.

    Design and functionality is everything on the web. If your site doesn’t make the user experience easy, you’re app is dead in the water. GMail has turned me away from my school’s lousy email system, and CNN’s design helps me tolerate their particular branding of news (though CNN isn’t nearly as bad as MSNBC).

  • March 25, 2007

    Scranton Wilke Barre Direct

    Scr. WB Direct

    Scranton Wilkes Barre Direct is an online directory for businesses in the area. Developed with my friend Dan, who did the design work, we needed to create something scalable and easy to use. They wanted featured ads, regular ads, 160+ categories and many ways to organize them. We created a most popular categories section on the homepage (defined by the owners of the site), wrote a search, and I defined the database so that all ads were added into a main and sub location.

    The site is also (for the most part) completely driven by a custom made Content Management System. This system allows the owners to ad, edit and delete ads, business, categories, events and locations. They also control if sites are displayed on the site and if they are featured ads, which show up in special places on the site. Finally, they can make categories appear on the home page. All in all this was a good project that allowed me to do some cool new things programming wise. With 700+ lines of functions alone, there is a lot going on in the background that I feel is pretty transparent to the user.

    Project Page

  • February 15, 2007

    New Design Launch!

    New Design

    Announcing (finally), the new design of TheJoey.Net. You may have noticed over the last 2 days, this design was up more and more. I was putting the finishing touches on the design and wanted to see how it looked live, in the flesh. Over the next couple of weeks I will talk about all of the new stuff, including the design, AJAX features, my first crack and a WordPress plugin, and more.

    As for right now, I am just happy I finally launched it. I started working on it in late December, and if you’ll recall, I started doing a live update a month ago. Let me know what you think in the comments!

  • December 27, 2006

    Facebook vs. MySpace II

    The Showdown

    This is part 2 of a 3 part series that started here.

    Add-Ons

    Since joining Facebook and Myspace, both sites have added a number of features. Facebook has made major advancements in features and technologies, using the latest programming languages and web standards. I have also written multiple posts on the new features. Some of the more notable ones are the photo albums, the notes and the API. The photos I love because I like taking photos, but don’t want to post friend pics on my Flickr site. With the Facebook Albums, I can organize and add photos, and tag friends. And I can add way more than on MySpace. AND with Facebook’s built in Java unloader, I don’t have to do it 1 at a time. The Facebook Notes allow me to add thoughts and (more importantly) import my posts from this blog to my facebook profile. While I haven’t used the API yet, it’s nice to know that if I want to build an application using Facebook, I can.

    There are a number of other features that Facebook added that I can go on and on about, but won’t. Just to mention them: The mini feed, Share This! and the Facebook Badge (mine is on the About page). As for Myspace, the add-ons are not as plentiful. I can add more than 8 friends on my profile page now! Up to 24. But I am sticking with 8. I can also add more pictures. I do not know what the limit is, but with no way to organize the photos, I wouldn’t want to add too many anyway. One cool feature is the ability to add videos to your profile, which I actually took advantage of. Other than that, not to much that I have seen is going on at MySpace.

    Sorry MySpace, but Facebook wins this round too. The people over at Facebook have been busy making things better for it’s users. In the last installment of this series, I will be talking about the user friendliness of both sites. Later!

  • December 20, 2006

    Facebook vs. MySpace I

    The Showdown

    After using both Facebook and MySpace for some time now, I have been able to see how they both have grown and what kind of things the have going on for the user. Since I’m a big ‘groups of three’ person, I will break this up into 3 parts- The Overview, Add Ons, and User Friendliness. The last topic will be the most in depth, since it is the most important. Right now, it’s time for The Overview.

    First of all, Facebook and MySpace are both social networking sites where you can set up a profile, friend people and search for people with similar interests. Facebook up until recently was open only to students at schools that agreed to have it. I started on Facebook last January and followed with MySpace in April. I did not like MySpace for a number of reasons, but joined to link up with people who could not get Facebook. Facebook was a nice looking interface that allowed me to link up with not only Scranton students(#), but any of my friends from home who went to college. I was able to link up with people I haven’t spoken to in a couple of years. MySpace was similar when I joined, though most of my MySpace friends are also Facebook friends.

    Facebook has a much cleaner look to it, with virtually no advertisements. I cannot say the same for MySpace. One think I really don’t like about MySpace is that it is packed to the max with ads where ever you go and it gets pretty annoying. The Facebook ads are nicely integrated into the design, and not in-your-face, but still noticeable. And Facebook offers cheap and easy advertising for us students.

    The final point on this ‘overview’ is that MySpace has so much spam on it, where Facebook has none. Everytime I log into MySpace I see I have a new message from a profile that was either deleted, or a message that looks like this:

    Hey Cuti, I saw ur MySpAcE ProFiLe and luvved it! Hit me up sum tym to chat! XOXO DevilGurlPrincess69

    As much as I love it, it’s horribly annoying. And the same thing goes for bulletin spam about porn and Viagra. If I cannot do anything on my end to fix it, MySpace should do something on theirs. Sorry MySpace, but Facebook takes this round easy.

    Next tym Time, I will talk about what new features both have gotten since I have joined. Later!

  • December 5, 2006

    New Facebook Features

    Facebook Prefs

    It’s been a short while, and I apologize for that. Right now it is crunch time in school with the end of the semester, and my primary laptop’s hard drive bombed on me (the third to do so on me, on as many computers). Right now I am on the back-up, which is not as good, which is making me less productive. But that is for another post. Now, I want to talk about a couple of new Facebook features.

    The first is pictured above. I just discovered this a couple of days ago, but it launched in mid-November. The sliding bars allow you to indicate what type of stories you prefer to read and who you want to see less or more stories about. From a user stand point, the sliding bars are pretty cool. I frankly don’t care who is in a relationship, or who friended whom today. The “Read More Stories” about a particular person is kind of creepy. The “Read Less Stories” is nice. From a programmer’s point of view, the sliding bars are really cool. They look nice and are really easy to use. It’s a smooth interface and it auto saves. Well done Facebook Engineers.

    The second feature is the Facebook Firefox Toolbar. This is a tool bar that allows you to quickly search Facebook, share websites you are visiting, and alerts you on New friend requests, wall posts, messages and pokes. It will also tell you when friends write a note, update their profiles, or when someone writes on their walls. You also have the ability to enable/disable features and add links to it. Over all it’s a nice little tool for the Facebook power user. I think this will make it so I am less often checking Facebook and more often doing real work. Later!