It really is a welcome change to have the new MySpace home screen. It's not going to win any awards, but it provides a fairly overdue update to the leading social network site. Apparently Facebook is making enough traction to scare them into actually doing something with their design, which was poor for its time and sad in this one.

Oddly enough, it vaguely resembles this half-baked idea I threw together as a design exercise for myself a few months ago (click for full size).

This is more of an idea than an actual implementation – in fact I haven't had time for a proof of concept but I'm pretty sure it'd work. Whether or not it's actually a good idea is a different story.

The problem: Designers, and other people too, tend to redesign their blogs periodically. In the case of designers, it might even happen on a whim. When I go into Photoshop or more commonly Snipshot (neat tool) to resize an image for my blog posts, I have to constantly re-reference what size my blog currently is. Now, I have the overflow hidden with CSS, so my layout will never break, and I haven't redesigned in ages, but still it's an issue for me. What if I could upload any (reasonably close) image and my blog would crop it to size? That might be better than the pixely resize. It worked on Engadget while they were briefly doing it, but that was a scaling resize. What if my picture gets stuck at a horrible 1/3 type ratio? so the crop it is.

The script would (will?):

1. load up on page load
2. take all the images of a certain class (or within posts, whatever) and box them in a div
3. strip them out of said div
4. re-add them as background images.

Voila – you're cropped. I'm still jiggling the idea around in my head of what to do with the height, a notorious bugger of a problem anyway and a vague question of ratio in this case. I suppose I'd try to keep to a certain ratio and then crop if the height surpassed that. Has anyone done this before? Am I crazy? Is it even worth it?

I'm familiar with the name Boy Genius Report because Engadget gets some (apparently very good) phone scoops from them/him/whatever. Turns out they returned the favor by ripping my Engadget layout. Just because I'm in a crotchety mood, I'll call out their "designers," who are called Solo Stream. Now, I know that Boy Genius and Engadget have a great relationship, and I wouldn't want to jeopardize that. But really. I didn't make this happen, I'm just pointing it out. Everybody reads these sites in RSS, so maybe it doesn't even matter. But regardless of what I think of the Boy Genius Report, I can't say as I'll ever recommend Solo Stream to anyone looking for a blog design.

UPDATE: they did a writeup of their "design." Oh wow, what a challenge it must have been to convert the fixed width to a fluid one with a max-width. If anyone wants to know how difficult it was for them, I'll be fielding questions in the lobby.

UPDATE 2: Solostream response and my response to that. At least, after the comments clear cache here.

I find Thomas Baekdal at baekdal.com to be an interesting read whenever I manage to get through some feeds. His recent article "Stop making it look like a system" struck a particular chord. Anyone interested in doing interfaces for any kind of software – web or otherwise – would do well to take a look at that. It's basically what my entire job was during the design of Blogsmith.

He does a great job clarifying and quantifying a process that we ourselves didn't describe with a whole ton of sophistication: Gavin is fond of saying "this looks like a programmer did it." It's easy to spit out tables stocked with data, the barely formatted result of a database query. It's not as easy to turn those into human-friendly formats. We were fortunate enough to have the "real" data Baekdal talks about in his article, so we knew what we were working with. But more importantly, I have been fortunate enough to have a team that won't accept these "system" style screens.

How now?

It's not easy. Not in the least. It requires a lot of thought before you even get to the whiteboard, but there are two big things I like to try:

1. Imagine turning it sideways. It seems dumb, and actually turning a table sideways gives you the same crappy table on its side. But it gets you thinking in a different direction.
2. Take out the table headings and try to convey that information without those keys. This seems overly fundamental to what I'm saying here, but I guess that's the catch: you can't get out of this paradigm unless you can explain your data without explaining it. Grouping, weighting, and maybe a contextual word or two – like a well placed "at" or "and" – will go a long way toward making something easier to understand.

I was going to put some before-and-after screenshots in here, and maybe I still will, but I'm debating, considering the proprietary nature of Blogsmith.

Sadly, the more things there are to blog about, the less time there is to do it. I couldn't thing of a theme to tie it together, so Dada it is. What's happening?

• Gavin got a new blog design.
• Dozens of 14-year-olds put some hexadecimal numbers on the internet.
• I went to see Jello Biafra speak, then snuck my way upstairs to see the end of the always-psychedelic Acid Mothers Temple and Melting Paraiso UFO show. The guitarist was hanging his guitar from the ceiling as they wound up what sounded like a multi-hour heavy metal freakout jam. Unsurprisingly, the Magic Stick smelled like a bong. However, I stood in line to buy pizza behind Kawabata, and he didn't smell like a hippie or a guy who'd been in a van all year.
  
• I watched a friend buy a Skynyrd record with no irony.
• Some people came over for Cinco de Mayo to enjoy my grilled/marinated chicken taco stylings and scratch-made margarita recipe. 2 parts tequila, 1 part triple sec, 1 part Rose's lime juice and some more fresh lime juice squeezed in for good measure. Now you know my secret, don't let it fall into the wrong hands.

You read that right, it's Naked Day. Don't tell Gavin, he gets out of hand with these kinds of things. Actually, it's CSS Naked Day, and I'm CSS-free, naked as Dennis Franz's butt. I'm not sure why this came about, maybe to celebrate semantic markup, maybe to show that all designers' blogs look alike without design, maybe some fuzzy message that on the inside we're all the same. Rainbows!

Regardless, a designer cat Dustin Diaz came up with this crazy idea and just for today, if you put a bunch of designers' blogs next to each other it'd look something like Showgirls (and just as sexy).

At Adaptive Path's blog (link via Webreakstuff), Jeffrey Veen interviews the director of user experience at Google, who says (with a lot of leading from Veen) that Google is semi-unique in that they have a designer present at every stage of the application design process. That's really awesome of Google I suppose, but I realized it's not that impressive to me because we've been doing things that way for a while now. And I can't imagine how you could come up with a decent product if you didn't do things that way. Trying to dress up an "un-designed" interface is like tossing an aftermarket spoiler onto the back of a compact car.

Both Blogsmith and Emurse had a designer present during the early stages, and whether that designer was me (in this case, yes) or someone else, the end results benefit greatly. It also helps, of course, that we have experience-minded programmers rather than what you might think of as traditional software engineers. When Gavin sees something that needs work but doesn't have a specific problem in mind, he's fond of saying "this looks like a programmer did it." That probably sums up why a designer is needed in application work.

Between bottles of cough medicine, I've managed to get some work done. One of those projects has been expanding my knowledge of Blogsmith's galleries features. They were created almost especially for TMZ, but have since been rolled out to popular Weblogs, Inc. sites like Engadget, Autoblog, and WoW Insider. Current galleries are fairly simple, so I'm trying to see where we can go with them. Have a look at my portfolio and witness me pimping while simultaneously witnessing Blogsmith galleries.

About a week ago, the blogosphere exploded when "news" came out of Blogsmith going out to the public. It might be the first time I could search for "Blogsmith" on Technorati and not get a bunch of results from people I already know.

By now, most people have (hopefully) read Brian's response, which is basically "news to me." He also cited this post wherein Duncan Riley called it a "Jason Calacanis designed blogging platform." The comments there are a good read. Knowing peoples' usual reaction to Brian's quips, everyone's scrambling to find evidence of his secret plans for a Craigslist killer.

Anyway, all speculation of a consumer-oriented Blogsmith aside, the original article somehow got the logo off the corner of our current CMS. That means two things:

1. Someone tipped them from the inside, regardless of accuracy.
2. We need a better version out there since I'm fairly pleased with how it came out.

You might be wondering where the hell this came from. It actually took a fairly odd path from futurism (for some reason, something made me think Soviet propaganda posters) into art deco. But the primary goal was to stand out from Web 2.0. There are no reflections, no glossy Apple surface, and no rounded letters. Futura, baby. It's retro time.

For those of you who spend a large part of your primary life in Second Life, Weblogs, Inc. has launched Second Life Insider. I can't tell you how glad I am to get something going in the Launch sidebar again.