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“The $6 Billion Black Hole Implodes” and other links…

Buy this Book at Amazon.com!

gawker.com: “Yahoo Video has struggled to compete with YouTube's reputation as an all-in-one destination and Hulu’s clearly curated collection of primetime entertainment. Its prehistoric video technology and Dallas operations center, a legacy of the Broadcast.com deal, has meant that it costs Yahoo more to serve up a video than Google. It hasn’t helped that the video group has had a revolving door of leadership. Onetime Yahoo Music chief Ian Rogers ran it briefly before leaving for a startup last year, handing it over to Yahoo Media chief Scott Moore, who promptly split for Microsoft.”

“Why Oracle Won't Kill MySQL”

Forbes.com: “They can kill the business. But I don't think they will. Larry Ellison is smart. MySQL was getting around 70,000 downloads a day when I left. It's an amazing grip on young developers. Having MySQL makes business sense for Oracle. …So were Larry's anti-open source rants all bravado? …Yes, of course. I think he loves open source. I am just speculating, but he is an outside-of-the-box thinker. And it will allow him to compete creatively with Microsoft, his favorite enemy.”

“How to programmatically detect Silverlight version”

apijunkie.com: “The answer to A is relatively simple since Silverlight.js (the standard Silverlight javaScript include file) contains a function that we can use. The function is called isInstalled and it returns true/false. You can use it the following way to detect if there is any Silverlight version installed… Every time we call isInstalled the function code goes through the same process of trying to create an ActiveX/Plugin object etc. In some parts of the programming world this kind of inefficiency would be labeled as border line heresy.” I suggested earlier just how much borderline heresy is out there for the Silverlight install experience… and I was just looking at it from the point of view of an “end user”… This article reveals some the mucky technical details of this inelegance.

“9 Common Usability Mistakes In Web Design”

smashingmagazine.com: “Usability is all about making things easier to use. Less thinking, less frustration. A website should do all the work and present visitors only with the things they’re looking for. Usability is also about the experience people have using your website, so attention to detail matters, as do the presentation and feel of the page.” Two of their nine resonate with me: “Tiny clickable areas” and “Content that is difficult to scan”… Most of the other “mistakes” are more like deliberate design goals by business decision makers…

“30 Free and Useful Web-Based Tools For Designers”

web-kreation.com: “Browsershots makes screenshots of your web design in different browsers and in different OS platforms. But be patient! It can take a few hours to complete. …ClickTale reveals what visitors are doing inside your webpage (mouse gestures and clicks). Also scrolling heatmaps show where visitors look and how far down they scroll. …Test your webpage [with Pingdom] to see the total time it takes to load the page including all objects (images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes). It mimics the way a page is loaded in a web browser. …Quarkbase is a free tool to find complete information about a website. It gives information such as Google and Alexa ranks, top countries, popular pages, traffic rank, social popularity… Website Plagiarism search [with CopyScape]. Search for copies of your page on the Web. …websnapr lets you capture screenshots of (almost) any web page.”

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