Chris Hanrath

I was just checking the Google Analytics reports for my portfolio and found interesting referring keywords that send people to my page. Take a look at this one search term that was typed in by someone who visited my portfolio page:

“(intitle:~cv or inurl:~cv) and (”ui developer” or “developer ui” or “user interface developer” or “developer graphic user interface” or “gui developer” or “developed gui”) and (pa or pennsylvania or “new jersey” or ny or delaware or de) -jobs -careers -sample”

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I’m excited to announce that my friends and former mentors Trek and Jesse from Backtik have released the first version of Red. In their screencast they show us how to build an AJAX photobucket similar to the one from Facebook just using Ruby without writing any Javascript at all.

Update: Now featured on Ajaxian.com.

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LinkedIn has added a new feature that allows users to add applications to their profiles and networks.

LinkedIn Applications enable you to enrich your profile, share and collaborate with your network, and get the key insights that help you be more effective. Applications are added to your homepage and profile enabling you to control who gets access to what information.

I experimented this morning with the Wordpress Blog feature, that is supposed to show your recent blog posts on your Profile page. From the Application gallery I was taken to the WordPress App Page, where i can choose to display it on my profile and LinkedIn Homepage.

This is where it stopped working for me… I went back to the WordPress App page and found a button to “update settings”, but the following page does not open. I will have to come back when it’s fixed …

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The New York Times online, uses a bar at the top of the page that allows people log-in to their social platform to follow friends, co-workers and other readers as well as share content and comment on it.

The bar is very subtle, but offers more details in form of a pop-up once the user clicks on the “What’s this” link.

After signing up for the service, another wizard opens and offers to search for other people, import contacts or check suggested users.

The bar stays visible at the top throughout the user’s visit on nytimes.com and offers access to the timespeople page where the user can access newsfeeds, activity history, recommended content and his social network.

[Found via nytimes.com and timespeople.nytimes.com ]

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The more i talk to Jesse and Trek about their project “Red” that lets you write Ruby code that is converted to Javascript – the more i like it. When done, developers can write their applications completely in Ruby and don’t have to worry about the generated Javascript for the browser. Whatever Ruby specific code people come up with (class creation, inheritance…) Red translates it into Javascript. Looking into the future, this will enable developers to write great applications that can leverage all advantages of an object oriented language.

[ github.com ]

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Yesterday i attended a presentation of Expedia on the University of Michigan Campus. They came to recruit Software designers and Project Managers. I was positively surprised to see how much they focus on usability and user-centered design to improve the user experience of their website. The presenter showed the audience a very interesting and promising take on booking your next vacation using expedia. Instead of using the traditional “day, time, destination” input, she showed us a very interesting wizard that selects vacation packages using other inputs such as an interactive map and vacation activities.

Unfortunately this is only visible to random users visiting Expedia.com who fall into the right category of the bucket test. But you can get an idea of Expedia’s attempts to improve the user experience at labs.expedia.com

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