Over the last few years the use of wikis has become really popular. For every wiki evangelist I have met, I have also come across as many who hate wikis. I’ve used them extensively and I too have gone through a love-hate relationship with the wiki.

Having recently done some work on the evolt.org wiki, I decided to write down some of my thoughts about why sometimes wikis are phenomenally successful, and others just never seem to work. Like a lot of similar issues, none of this is rocket science.

Any front-end web developer knows how much the World Wide Web Consortium validators have done not just for our markup skills, but for the web itself. Due to the cost of operations these heavily-used and much-appreciated tools are now in jeopardy.

Oorspronkelijke titel/original title: Top 10 Lies told by Clients

Als je commercieel aan de slag gaat, dan is zorgen dat je je werk goed doet maar een klein deel van je taak. Regelmatig zie ik treurige voorbeelden van mensen die met goede bedoelingen aan een opdracht beginnen, en vervolgens verschrikkelijk voor de gek worden gehouden, omdat wat zij zien als een uitdaging en als iets dat ze met liefde doen, door de tegenpartij wordt gezien als iets heel anders, helemaal niet romantisch of geïdealiseerd, maar rauw en simpel.

December 14, 2008 evolt.org turns ten years old. 10! We've been busy upgrading our hardware, software, content, and vision, and we could use your help. What could evolt.org offer you that similar communities do not? What do we do well, and what can we do better?

Improving your use of color may open the door toward improving of the effectiveness of your site or portal. Our research shows that simple color-changes can improve click-through rates, registration numbers, and community activity.

This conclusion derives from research at LeerWiki.nl, a Dutch community for learning and earning. We have tested how different color schemes affect visitor behavior with regards to site goals, in order to optimize the use of color. This article outlines our research process and results.

I have been working with large organizations to create or move web and intranet sites from static HTML pages to the company's chosen CMS. My role is that of liaison between the IT department (or whoever manages the project) and end user. By default, my clients tend to be in clerical roles: the folks in the trenches. My job is to evangelize the product, explain the process, present, instruct, coach, and guide clients in web architecture basics and design best-practices, and in use of the chosen software.

One Saturday afternoon, I agreed to take my daughter to the AT&T store, just to LOOK at an iPhone... touch one... explore a little. MISTAKE. I should have duct-taped myself to the mast — and my wallet to my ass — because next thing I knew (after daughter demoed it as expertly as if she'd been using it all her life) we were walking out of the store with a brand new iPhone 3G. You'll love our coverage, the AT&T salesman assured as he packed the phone into a bag, only for us to discover upon arriving home that we had no reception within a quarter mile of our house.

Dang! I thought, now we have to move.

I have a very simple anti-bot spam technique that works extremely well. It requires no javascript, cookies or complicated server weirdness, is fully accessible, has no hidden fields, has negligible overhead and takes just a moment or two to implement. It requires that the user fill out one field with a number, so it's good for anti-bot but will not prevent human spammers. In three years, I have yet to receive any spam on any of the many sites that I have installed this on. Sites that were being bombarded with hundreds of spams daily suddenly became quiet and good emails get though.