Interact B.in

Cool Book “Matrix” Page on SitePoint.com

I recently wrote about the navigation over at SitePoint.com.  That led me to head over to their book section.  

I’ve read a good deal of SitePoint books and have always appreciated that they took creative approaches to displaying a “matrix” of their books to easily display their books by topic and level (beginner, intermediate, advanced).

Check out their most recent version, it’s pretty slick.

Well done SitePoint!  Keep up the good work :)

The New, Fixed, Transparent Navigation at SitePoint.com

SitePoint has always been a company, in my mind, that has a hard time defining exactly what it does.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing, because they do a lot of great stuff - from publishing resources and books to managing forums and marketplace.  

Over the years they have made a lot of changes to their main navigation and homepage layout to reflect what was most important for them to share and convey about their company and offerings.  

Their current design is very very plain and almost too simple in my opinion because at first glance it looks like it could be any given tech blog.

That said, when you start to scroll down, a fixed position, transparent menu appears at the top of page that’s pretty nice. There must be something about transparency that still looks sexy to me.

When I noticed the menu it drew my attention to the Information Architecture and I appreciated again the effort that goes into organizing large sites with tons of different types of content.  What’s a little strange though about this main menu is that a number of the sites link to other domains with completely different navigation that offers no way back to the main site.

I would suggest they look into something like the approach Fuel Brand Network (and others have taken) with a single site navigation and then a global navigation across all their sites.

Just a thought.  Otherwise, keep on rocking the great content SitePoint!

Cool Delete Confirmation for Comments in Google Drive

I’ve mentioned this before, but since coming on board to Treehouse I log a lot of time in Google Docs.  I think this has been a recent addition, or I just noticed it recently.

When you have a comment selected in Google Drive, it looks like this:

When you click “Delete” you get this notification:

A few things I like about this:

1. You can’t miss it
2. I like how it covers the whole comment
3. Something about the transparent black just looks good to me

Thanks Google for continuing to make Google Docs (I mean Drive) a lovely app to work with.

What Happens When Images Don’t Respond but Site Does

When downloading Chrome the other day I noticed that their download page has some nice little responsiveness with the menu, positioning and fonts.  

It did not however have the images respond.  

Remember folks, apply responsive effects to your images when they break the flow of the page otherwise!

If you want to learn more about responsive images, I would suggest this ALA article from Mat Marquis.

Some Useful Google Docs Features

Since starting my new WordPress teaching job at the fabulous Treehouse Island I have been using Google Docs on a daily basis.  I’d like to share a few features I find particularly helpful.

1. Shortcuts for headings: If you want to make a line a header of some sort just hit Command + 1 (or 2,3,4, etc.).  
2. Apply paragraph styling: This is helpful when you need to clear some styling.  Shortcut is Command + 0
3. Add bookmark: If you have a long document it’s nice to add bookmarks, which are basically anchor tags.  No shortcut
4. Add table of contents: A table of contents does exactly what you think.  It displays the hierarchy of the document according to order on the page and headers applied
5. Right click: I love the care Google put into the right click menu.  It changes based on what elements you’re interacting with.  It’s especially helpful with tables.

The one thing that I find strange is the shortcut for adding a comment is the same as for minimizing a window.  I have not explored yet if it’s possible to change that?

Google+ Displays Good New Feature Overlays

I like how Google+ shows users about new features.

Grooveshark Needs to Improve their Ad Design on Interior Pages

I recently posted about how awesome Grooveshark’s ads are on their homepage.

Because of this I was really disappointed once I started searching for and playing music.  The ads go from awesome and creative to annoying and standard banner ads.

I know that the desktop Grooveshark is free so they needs ads, but going from really cool ads to banner ads is a disappointing and rough transition. 

Grooveshark Has Creative and Noninvasive Way of Advertising on their Homepage

I haven’t used Grooveshark in a while, but I do like them and was pleasantly surprised when I visited their site recently and saw a really cool landing page.  It took me a second to figure out that it was actually an ad I was looking at.

There are a two things I really like about this:

1. It looks great!  It’s colorful and well designed.
2. It doesn’t take away from any of the functionality or features of the site

Way to go Grooveshark for coming up with a way to have cool backgrounds while getting paid for it.  Well played.

PS - I will say that Pandora was the first in the online music industry to do creative ads in this way, but I think Grooveshark does it better.

I Knew That Google Would Use This Charting API Since I First Saw it On TED

One of the first TED talks that blew my mind was Hans Rosling’s statistic graphing application he and some of his students built to make statistics visually exciting.  

His software, GapMinder, lets you select various pieces of data (pulled from 3rd party database) and compare their interaction over time.

He mentioned that he wanted to work with people like Google to open up the charting API to other types of data.  Ever since then I’ve been expecting it to show up in Google similar to the way the weather or calculator features work.  But, no.

Where does it first show up?  Google Analytics!  That’s right, check it out.

I would suggest going back and checking out his TED talk, because I have a feeling we are going to see this in more and more places.