No Mod Required

Remember when I redesigned my home page? No? I made some changes based on the guidelines provided by usability.gov. Basically I cut down the amount of prose text and clarified the site choices available.

Well, not quite a month has passed, but I wanted to share the preliminary results with everyone anyway. By the metrics that I was targeting on that page (bounce rate and % of exit) the redesign was a resounding success. Here are the numbers:

So people are spending less time trying to figure out what to do, are less likely to immediately leave (bounce) and are less likely overall to make my home page the last page they visit on the site. I'll take improvements like that any time. Big ups to the Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines

Once I get my laptop back from HP, I'll be looking to see if I can experiment with a few more nuggets from that excellent resource. I'm definitely eying adjustments to some of the navigation pages around here. I'll be sure to publish the results as I get them.

Indie Rock Pete's shining moment.

I'm so indie rock, I only listen to voicemail on the original vinyl

Marie Antoinette I liked this film more than I probably should have. It was painfully light- the entire "story" part of the film would have fit into the running time of a sitcom. It's also full of new rock and roll and I'm not normally a fun of that sort of anachronistic blend. With that sort of handicap, I'm honestly surprised that I liked this film as much as I did. I did enjoy it though. It's absolutely beautiful, the characters are fascinating (like a carnival sideshow) and the period is, of course, monumental. It should have been better, and could have been with a more substantive approach, but for what it is, I thought it was pretty good.

NEW YORK - It was the stuff of urban legend: Rumors that a historic SoHo building had important graffiti hidden in its walls.

Except, in this case, it was true.

A large mural that was created by some of graffiti's earliest pioneers was discovered recently in a 10-story limestone building just as developers were converting it into luxury condominiums.
…
Fab 5 Freddy and Futura 2000 _ who helped pioneer graffiti as an artform by spray-painting entire subway trains in psychedelic colors _ figure prominently on the wall.

Check out the full article from from newsday:
Urban legend graffiti mural actually found in NYC

I eat this stuff up. I really do. People rediscovering Caravaggios, Vermeers, Rembrandts… a man can dream can't he? It's just plain cool.

This one is especially crazy since it was auctioned in just about the most public manner possible and only went for 50,400 GBP (somewhere in the neighborhood of $100,000.) Lots and lots of people had a shot at this one. If the attribution really sticks that's an incredible bargain.

ROME - A casual glance at an auction catalog set a British art historian on the path to discovering the brushstrokes of Caravaggio on a painting previously attributed to an anonymous follower of the Baroque master.

Experts in Italy believe a copy of Caravaggio’s “The Cardsharps” which surfaced at a London auction last year is an earlier version of the 1594 painting now displayed at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.

Here's the newly attributed painting

and the version at the Kimbell

Anonymous painting attributed to Caravaggio

some favorites from my flickr:

Miss 17

Laser 314

Revs Amaze

OCLOCK 156

REVSPECIAL

Kem5

How did that news never filter down to me until now?

The 30-year-old Scot, who joined the Slipstream team as a part owner for 2008, has been a strong anti-doping advocate since serving a two-year suspension for confessing to using EPO.

Saturday's EuroFile: Millar joins WADA panel; magazine links Ullrich, Fuentes

And here it is:

THEBLACKADERFOKUSED

He added me as a contact on flickr.

The internet is an interesting place.

Today's show was fun. I wish I could have stayed longer, but duty calls sometimes…

My set-up:

A sketch I did

I'll be posting some links to some of the other artists from the show later on this week. It was a good mix of people.

Support: This technique is supported by IE 5.+, Firefox (and the rest of the Mozilla family) and Safari 3.0*. It is not supported by Opera** (any version), Netscape 6.2 and earlier or Camino.

Warning: I haven't thought this all the way through, so if you see any problems with this technique other than the above support caveats, then please let me know I'm really just writing this up because I just thought of doing it, I tried it and it worked…

The issue and solution: Occasionally I need to use an image, with text, for the background of an input button. It's rare, but occasionally it needs to happen. Thing about that is, I still want to have a regular value in there so that screen readers and people surfing without CSS at all can still figure out what the input says. I've usually encountered this issue on on fast-paced, get-em-out-the-door projects, so I've never had time to actually sit down and think about a solution. I've never actually come up with a solution that I liked for this. Negative text indent doesn't work, so I've always done random hacks to get it to work correctly. Recently I achieved it by shrinking it way down and coloring it the same size as the background.

Painful.

Today, for whatever reason, I took it one step further and set font-size:0;, hit F12 and saw, *GASP*, it worked. Browsercam verifies that it works for the above named browsers.

Here's a sample:

And here's the code for the above #go button.

#go {
	background: url(images/go.jpg);
	height: 25px;
	width: 41px;
	font-size: 0px;
        border:0;
}

This is one of those things that seems so obvious in hindsight. I just never thought to do it before today. hrm.

*Safari 1.2 and 2.0 ignore both the font-size AND the background image.
**Opera displays something like 6pt type.