Alistapart, the venerable (hey, Mike Davidson used venerable, too) web design magazine started by Jeffrey Zeldman, has been updated to version 4.0.

A few thoughts as I peruse their design and new articles:

• It’s beautiful. Just Pretty. This is a design that I would be really proud of. Jason Santa Maria takes a color pallete I love and adds little details like the black seal for a wonderful affect (update: JSM points out the old articles are grey. So now I *really* love the color pallete, as it gives a sense of home)
• I wonder if changing the domain name will hurt traffic like it did for Keith Robinson (update: that was just temporary until the DNS propagated - great, if not intentional, advertising!)
• Ruby on Rails, the platform underlying it all, is the cat’s meow
• Comment feeds are now standard in Wordpress installations. I’m in the process of adding them (along with other things) to my own hacked templates
• We need more voices like those at Alistapart and Digital Web. Nothing is quite like sitting down to a new edition of those two publications
• I really hope they start publishing on a regular schedule again
• It looks like nobody’s figured out categories/tags yet. Here’s another shot at it
• Jeffrey should write more. Just the tone he writes in is wonderful to read
• Why is the layout left-aligned, and the comments paged?
• Joe Clark is curmudgeon-like, and I mean that in a good way
• Interesting use of “user science” as a top-level category
• In Safari, when you roll over an article title that wraps, there is an interesting affect
• What is the meaning of Semantician?
• The bar is now higher

Update:Added attention/tryability graph.
To follow up on yesterday’s post: application innovation is happening on the Web at a much faster pace than it is on the desktop, allowing people to switch away from Windows to their OS of choice. Driven mainly by Google and Yahoo using open APIs, this innovation is showing that web-based apps [...]

Continue Reading: Instant Tryability: the Big Advantage for Web-based Apps

There are many options for creating an interface element that points to your syndication feed. Below are some of the most popular ones:
Plain old XML icon

The original, orange XML button popularized by Dave Winer
Part of Jeremy Hedley’s reworked buttons (my personal favorites)
XML A CSS-only XML icon

Feed Technology Specific

RSS Orange RSS icon
Atom Orange Atom [...]

Continue Reading: Interface Elements for Providing Feeds and Having People Subscribe to Them

Part two of the series “Deciding What Features to Implement”. In this edition I observe a powerful new class of features that emerge from the aggregated behavior of a web site’s users: emergent features.

Continue Reading: Deciding What Features to Implement: Let Features Emerge From User Behavior

Controlled vocabularies are, by their very definition, exclusive. The Long Tail paradigm, however, relies on inclusion. So, doesn’t that leave us with an easy choice?

Continue Reading: Controlled Vocabularies Cut Off the Long Tail

Deciding what features to implement on a site is not easy. It’s not that designers lack ideas, we often have many of them: too many to implement. Somehow we have to sift through these ideas and figure out which ones are the best ones to implement in the scope of the project and which ones aren’t worth the time and effort. Here’s one way how.

Continue Reading: Deciding what Features to Implement: Go for the Win-Win.

What’s your biggest design challenge?

Continue Reading: Design Challenges

Tons of conversations about folksonomies. Little talk about how to apply them to your site. What gives?

Continue Reading: I’ve Heard of Folksonomies. Now How do I Apply them to My Site?

In my last two posts, I’ve been hinting at why I think folksonomies like del.icio.us work: they are harnessing user behavior, rather than predicting or dictating it. The key to this is the ability of the folksonomy to change over time, an ability that controlled vocabularies often lack. In this post I’m going to explain further what I mean by that.

Continue Reading: Controlled Vocabularies and Folksonomies: Why Change is Good.

Lots more about folksonomies: the downsides, the behavior, the human adaptation! (updated)

Continue Reading: Folksonomy Notes: Considering the Downsides, Behavioral Trends, and Adaptation