A new face to this site

November 9, 2009

If you’re following me over RSS, come check out the site. I just published my new design.

The old design was just about two years old now. I needed a refreshment, and some parts were just plain ugly. There was also too much clutter in the sidebar. Many thanks to Priidu who helped me with some ideas and nudging along the way.

Content changes

Along with the new layout, I also published information about two projects that haven’t been out there yet.

First, Skype group chat. I take credit for largely designing its behavior in 2004, just about five years ago. I didn’t know at the time that I was doing interaction design, but that’s exactly what it was. It was interesting to revisit this experience, in light of Google Wave and all these new things. As an example, we did an interface where elements appear and disappear based on mouse hover. I see the same behavior in iTunes 9 for song preview playing. I’m not saying there is a connection between the two, but it’s interesting to see how such interface concepts mature and evolve across products.

Second, the restroom status indicator. I did this about a year ago, to explore how to bridge my two interests of electronics and UI technology. The outcome was pretty neat, I hope to do more of such hardware prototyping projects.

Comments

One thing that also changed is the comment system on this site. I am now using Disqus instead of Movable Type built in features. THey have better features, and my own comments were a pain to maintain well. The old comments may or may not be migrated.

Comment system switching illustrate the evolution of identity and content on the Internet for me. On one hand, you could argue that anything that’s been put up should remain there forever. On the other hand, things have a lifecycle. They are born, they live, and they die. I don’t have an expectation that my comments will be up there forever, and neither do I guarantee anything to you if you are posting on my site. It may remain, or it may not.

Disappearing content? Or even disappearing identities? It used to sound terrible to me until I saw danah boyd’s writeup on teen IM identities. Can’t locate the exact post, but her point was that whereas adult identities in the form of IM, email addresses etc tend to be fairly stable, some teenagers tend to often switch to new identities on IM systems and just completely abandon the old ones, and that’s perfectly normal for them.

Commenting should now be much more convenient here than it used to be. You can do it anonymously or reuse any of your existing identities. Leave me a note if you find something broken.