from Daniel Koskinen

The arrival of Spring could be seen yesterday in downtown Tampere.

Original post: Downtown canoeing

from Daniel Koskinen

Eye tracking can be a terribly useful and important tool. Still, this tweet by Jared Spool struck a chord. It also reminds me of some research I was involved in once. I won’t say which one.

The true superpower of eye tracking usability studies is the researcher can tell any story they want w/the resulting data. #VoodooResearch

— Jared M. Spool (@jmspool) March 5, 2012

Original post: Everybody Loves Eye Tracking

from Daniel Koskinen

I seem to have read a lot of apocalyptic literature recently. After finishing The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood (highly recommended), I continued on the same theme with Stephen Baxter’s sci-fi novels Flood and Ark.

Being a big fan of Arthur C. Clarke, I became acquainted with Baxter’s writing though his collaboration with Clarke in Light of Other Days and the Time Odyssey trilogy. This was the first time I’ve read any of his own work though.

Flood describes mankind’s struggle to survive in an imaginary near future, where the oceans of the world start rising at an exponential pace. When available land starts to run out, things get interesting as people and nations develop different coping strategies. Or in some cases, don’t. A good read, although obviously at times just a bit depressing.

As you probably guessed, Ark is the sequel to Flood. A story about a desperate effort to send the remnants of humankind into space, it’s not as coherent as Flood. If you can look past the US manage to scrape together a mission to Jupiter and invent a warp drive in the middle of a civil war in a world with vastly depleted resources, it’s a fun and mostly believable read. Then again, necessity is the mother of all inventions, so why not.

Original post: Flood and Ark by Stephen Baxter

from Daniel Koskinen

On Monday I became the third employee of H1, a small, family owned web agency based in Helsinki, Finland. Aki and his wife Jaana are both very experienced web professionals, and I’m proud to be working with them. Looking forward to an interesting time!

Original post: New Job!

from Daniel Koskinen

Responsive design shouldn’t be just about checking screen width and removing stuff on mobile devices, even though this is what it often amounts to. I also admit to doing this myself. Designing with a mobile first approach is sensible, but we run into problems with the typical wireframes/photoshop/html pixel-perfect workflow.

Stephanie Rieger made this excellent presentation on pragmatic responsive design with lots of good points.

You should check out her other presentations too.

Original post: On Pragmatic Responsive Design

from Daniel Koskinen

Sorry about the feed spam yesterday, all the duplicate entries were caused by an unattended redirect loop which is now hopefully fixed. Let me know if you still have problems.

Original post: Sorry about the feed spam

from Daniel Koskinen

The latest WordPress 3.3 includes a fix that removes the performance problems related to using just /%postname%/ as your permalink structure without any prefixing dates/numbers. According to Joost de Valk, using dates in URL’s can result in poor click-through-rate, so I thought I’d go ahead and make the switch.

Check out the instructions on Joost’s blog. He also has a nifty tool for generating the necessary .htaccess redirects.

Original post: Simplify permalinks for better SEO

from Daniel Koskinen

Original post: A Finnish-American wedding

from Daniel Koskinen

Being used to the fairly sensible ways of Finnish trains and buses, the policies stated on the American Greyhound website seem quite odd:

While the ticket is schedule specific, it may be used for any schedule on the correct date for the origin and destination purchased.

Err, what? So they’re basically saying that the ticket is only for a specific schedule, and then saying it isn’t. Well, at least it’s cheap.

Original post: Buying a bus ticket in the USA

from Daniel Koskinen

Solid, semantic and accessible HTML markup matters. When most people look at a web page, it doesn’t make much difference to them whether headings are coded with proper <h1> and <h1> tags or <span style="font-size: 20px">. Still, for someone using a screen reader, not to mention search engines and feed readers, it can make all the difference in making sense of a document. Luckily this specific issue is now rare, but in a world of plugins and cool themes that generate semi-adequate markup, we’re often not using HTML and CSS to their full potential in building solid, accessible and search engine friendly sites.

By we I mean me of course. WordPress is awesome, and it’s one of the few CMS’s around that has committed to accessibility on the admin end (I’m not saying it couldn’t be improved). Unfortunately tight schedules and the very fact that its so easy to whip up a site using a few plugins and occasionally ready-made themes means its very tempting to be lazy.

So here goes: I hereby promise to continue to build usable sites, with a renewed commitment to good semantic and accessible markup. Because the web should be for everyone (and there’s nothing like some sweet, elegant HTML is there?).

Original post: Committing to Good Markup