help.net

I know it's not .Net related, but I was really moved by the Special Olympics Opening Ceremony yesterday in Dublin.

Fantastic is a very weak word for what I saw.
A lot of folks here in Ireland as usual criticised our lack of organisation but hey there it was absolutly awesome.



What a sight to see Bono from U2 singing about the man he has such love : Nelson Mandela himself here in Croke Park Dublin.
Surreal !

And I have to mention the athletes from all around the world, who just want to say to everybody, we are just like you we like to party ;-)

When you talk about usability, an obvious and long debate (still not closed) come on the old Click here link.

Do you consider this indication as an obsolete and space wasting on an already cluttered page ?

Or do you think we still need to think about first time users of Internet and hyperlinks are not so intuitive ?

For more information you can also read some thoughts on the subjects like:

It's surely not a big deal, but I found annoying the way VS open a project from the web if you ask this option.

I like it a lot, because it let me change something quickly if something goes wrong.

But I would like to see VS requesting my username and password BEFORE showing the list of files in the web project and not AFTER.

In terms of security, it's not really nice that you can browse the web folder, seeing every files.
Of course you can't open anything, but for an ecommerce I suppose it's not really a good practice.

Someone from Microsoft listening the song of my request ? ;-)

I am a big fan of blogs, as you must know now, but I was curious to know who could talk about my little world in their own blog world.

And I found it, the tool of the tool !

You just enter your url in the box, and the button Get Link cosmos open to you a brand new universe.

It's exactly the trick I used for my previous post to discover Jim Meeker, who is part of my little universe now ;-)

BTW I tried with Julia , Roy and Sam urls (sorry for the short time impersonation !) and the number of results is impressive.

The service is free but you can also create a watchlist for 10$, so you can receive an alert by email on everything new about you .

Paschal L had some comments on accessibility today. To those of us in government service this is a very important subject since Section 508 makes it mandatory to make all government web sites accessible to the disabled.

O2 in Ireland has launch a new blog service, phoneblogging, using a product Foneblog.

It's for me the first commercial phoneblogging product out there.

You can trial it for free for a month, then it's €2.50/monthly.

You can MMS or SMS your blog entries in.

Half of all e-mails are spam - "MessageLabs scanned about 134 million e-mails in May. It found that virtually one in every two e-mails was spam. This amounted to an increase of almost 40% compared to the figure in April."

If you are interested, Design Not Found has a great review on how the big names deal with Usability and design (good and bad).

It's a very good source for ideas !