Hello, April (Plus, Monday Update)

Geez, you do somthing for three months in a row (Jan. | Feb. | Mar.) and all of a sudden people start expecting it as a regular thing. Well, then, fine: Here's the new page of the 2006 Hello Kitty calendar that hangs in my pod:

As in previous months, you can see the minefield warning sign to the right. I find it necessary to restate this.

In other news, I hope your April Fools Day was relatively uneventful. As blogger John noted in his entry, Wikipedia has an authoritative list of pranks, both online and offline, from Saturday. Of particular note is the section for Events mistaken as April Fools Day hoaxes.

One thing that wasn't a hoax was a redesign of the Web site of the Gray Lady, the Paper of Record, the newspaper with a lot of nicknames: The New York Times.

One of my initial reactions was that it was harder to read (at least on the Mac side -- the fonts are smaller and lighter [dark-grey on white] than on my PC).

They've added in tabbed widgets for popular e-mailed and blogged stories, as well as a broken out a whole section of Most Popular articles (as in mailed, blogged and searched).

There's been some remarking on the Times's redesign and how it looks like the recent redesign of satirical (and sometimes profane) fake news site The Onion. One of the principals of the Onion redesign was, Khoi Vinh; he's now the design director of NYTimes.com, though he says in his blog that the Times strategy had been set before he came on board.

There is a kind of similarity between the fake news and the real news site, but when you get down to it, there's only so much you can do to content on a Web page, even with your AJAX and Flash and Javascript and all the rest: It ultimately ends up as text, pictures and links in little boxes (rounded corners or not) in your browser window, and it's going to stay that way until someone comes up with a new paradigm (3-D, virtual reality interfaces along with our neural implants, maybe?)

Just like anywhere else, fashions rise and fall on the Web. One era might be all about drop shadows and beveled edges on buttons. For a tongue-in-cheek look at the current fashions and conventions of the Web 2.0 craze, check out the Official Web 2.0 Certifyr_beta.

It's kind of an in-joke for people who take this kind of stuff way too seriously, but I think it's kind of amusing.

Thanks -- Joe

Tag: hello kitty