Praise the Lord! Firefox 3’s Bookmark Drag-and-Drop Works!

One of my biggest Firefox pet peeves over the years has been how it handles dragging a boomark to the Bookmarks Toolbar on a Mac (apparently this doesn’t happen on Windows).  Here’s a screenshot of how it’s been up through FF2.0:

This tooltip that shows up when you drag the favicon down to the toolbar could be helpful I guess…the first time.  But the problem is that tooltip blocks all the space under it on the toolbar, so you can’t actually add the bookmark to any folders you have underneath it.  Unless you’re super quick and get to it before the tooltip comes up.  There are ways around it (put the bookmark somewhere else and move it afterwards), but it’s still really annoying.  I looked into how to fix it a while ago and found this work-around, but it removes ALL tooltips in your browser.

Anyways, it’s something I’ve begrudgingly learned to live with.  Until now!  The beta version of Firefox 3 (3.0b5) finally lets you add a bookmark to the middle of your Bookmarks Toolbar!  So instead of instructing people how to add a bookmark, it has a new tooltip about the current webpage’s identity information, but you can still add a bookmark under it:

After a second of hovering over the tooltip, the folder the favicon is over will expand so you can drop the favicon into the folder.  And after 6 or 7 seconds the tooltip disappears altogether.  AND sometimes when you drag it doesn’t even show the tooltip at all.  Thank goodness!

So what’s that identity information message?  A webpage’s favicon is more separate from the web address as a button (in FF2 it’s in the URL box)…and if you click on the favicon it will open a box telling more about the “identity information”:

If you’re on a secure website (starting with “https”), that’s where it will give the identity information:

The “More Information” takes you to the Security tab of the Page Info box.  I guess that’s a nice feature, but I doubt I’ll use it.

So color me excited about this in Firefox 3.  Yeah, it’s probably the least exciting new feature about FF3 but this has been too annoying for too long.  Any other FF3ers out there?  What’s your favorite part about it?

Posted in internet, software | 3 Comments »

Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Website

So I have this other website.  It’s basically a blog that I add to a couple of times a week.  It’s pretty niche and embarrassing to boot so I’m not going to disclose any more details…but in light of it reaching 5,000 page views today (after five or so months) I figured I should talk about things I’ve learned as I’ve tried to build a successful website.

Track your visitors (everyone else does it)

Get a traffic meter on your site from Day 1.  For me it was sitemeter because it was simple to use and gave me stats I liked without much fuss.  I’ve since added Google Analytics which I think will be great for tracking trends.  It also really blows sitemeter out of the water in terms of UI and the depth and flexibility of statistics it can offer.  But I still like sitemeter because I can see all the stats about a single visitor.  For example, this visitor spent a few minutes on my site so I wanted to find out more:

Okay, the person came from a Facebook link, looked at a lot of pages, and I can see what page he/she entered on and was viewing when exiting…and what that outgoing link was.  With Google Analytics you can figure out all the stats about a single visitor but it’s pretty convoluted.  Hopefully I can reach a point where I’m getting enough traffic to just monitor the trends (such as top landing page and link clicks via the spiffy site overlay).  But at this point — with an average of 30 visits and 62 page views a day — I’m most interested in tracking the patterns of my visitors who browse the longest as well as top referrers.

Optimize for the search engines

Fill out that meta section with as many keywords as possible.  Credit your sources, inspiration, etc with links and images; then your site will show up when people search for the source (I’ve found this to be particularly true with images).  Link your site on portals like Yahoo! Answers but don’t be annoying about it (here’s a good blog post on why it helps).  Maybe all this is just common sense, but luckily I realized one of the biggest tips (image linking) early.

Become part of the community

My site is far from the end-all-be-all in my niche and it relies a lot on content that’s elsewhere.  So I realized it’s a good idea to make friends with my content sources and contribute to their communities.  The more you get out there with your name and a link to your website the more it will be…out there.  But you have to be able to give something back to the communities other than just hawking your website.  Plus they’ll be less likely to get mad at you for any, um, content re-purposing you may be doing :)

Try things out…but don’t throw the kitchen sink at your visitors

This is something I’ve had a bit of trouble with.  Since by nature I like to tinker with new things and code/customize to my heart’s content, it’s hard not to add this widget or that functionality.  I gave Skribit a try because I think it’s a good idea (user-generated content suggestions) but my audience really isn’t that participatory or big enough yet.  So what I have now for visitors beyond the actual content is:

• ways to browse – archives, categories, tags/a tag cloud
• ways to respond – comments, ratings, contact info
• ways to share – I switched from a list of social network icons to a ShareThis widget

ShareThis is nice because it handles all the top social sites on its own (or you can choose what to put) and it gives you stats on how many people are sharing to each site.  Other than that, I have a countdown which may or may not be too much :)

I think that’s about it for now, but I still have a lot to learn.  While I’m still waiting for my “big break” I’m just plugging away at adding good content that will give people a reason to stick around once they find the site.

Posted in website | 7 Comments »

My New Bike…What is It?

In an effort to enjoy my environs a little more and become more active, I decided to get a bike. Nothing hardcore and nothing expensive…enter craigslist.  The website has treated me well in the past (I’ve bought and sold numerous pieces of furniture and even sold my car on it).  So a trip to Campbell and $85 later, I am now a proud owner of this beauty:

I’m pretty happy about it.  The biggest change is adjusting to pedal-based brakes.  Looks like I have a reason to use bike vs. car now! ;)

Curiosity got me wondering what kind of bike it is.  The owner listed it as “women’s cruiser” and got it second-hand a while ago.  It doesn’t have any branding on it (it’s definitely a custom paint job).

So where better to figure out the identity of my newest mode of transportation than the Internet?  My first stop was GIS (sorry, Yahoo!, but ever since you forced Flickr into your image results I’ve steered clear).  It helped me narrow things down…sort of.  Most of the results were for bikes currently on the market, AKA the latest version.  Same deal for brand websites (Huffy, Schwinn).  Here, though, was a nice set of vintage bikes listed out.  I also figured eBay might help.  Anyways, these are some of my final candidates:

West Port:

Beach Comber:

Cranbrook:

All of these have chain protectors and mine doesn’t.  Mine also doesn’t have wheel protectors (like the Cranbrook does).  So who knows.

Last year for our Design of Online Communities class, we did a group project suggesting a niche community for antiques lovers basically for them to show off their latest finds and get more information about them.  So yeah, if that community existed maybe I could figure out my mystery.  Then again, I quit investigating in favor of write a blog post about it, so there could very well be a group of bike enthusiasts out there ready to do just that.

Posted in leisure | 5 Comments »

Hello world!

Hi!  I’m Annie.  I figured it’s about time I put my thoughts about design and technology somewhere concrete. And what better place than annielausier.com? :)  I’m sure I’ll be writing a good bit soon.  

Tonight was about getting WordPress set up and finding a nice theme.  I liked the simplicity and design of Green Love over at BlogOhBlog. I wasn’t too keen on the dark so I lightened it up.   My portfolio site is located here until I integrate it into my new site.  Here is the blog I kept in grad school if you’d like to take a look.

Posted in design | 7 Comments »