Yes, I am alive.

Regular content will resume shortly. Make sure you’re subscribed to the monkeyPi feed.

In the meantime, enjoy a few minutes watching this pinnacle of interweb awesomeness:

The Content Wrangler – a one-stop shop for all your 21st century news & info needs that cover the technologies behind technical and visual communication. Scott Abel runs a tidy site here. Bonus: lots of interviews with industry gurus.

Palimpsest – One to definitely add to your Bloglines accounts. Sarah and Alan run this site for Scriptorium Publishing. Great coverage of conferences and presentations here.

Helpstuff – Char James-Tanny’s site. She’s an industry guru, who always manages to get the scoop on new Documentation product releases before the rest of us. Hmmm… (Link goes to her blog).

Centripital Notion – Art, science, nature, and technology merge in this way-underappreciated blog. A great place to spend some free time.

KrazyDad – Jim’s site shows how fun and malleable information can be. Go nuts with his Sudokus, or spend a few hours with his Whitney Music Box.

WWdN – Okay, so I wrestled with throwing this in the sidebar, because I didn’t want people to think I was a star-struck loser who linked to someone on the basis of his fame alone. But the fact is that Wil runs the type of site that I’d like monkeyPi to be when it grows up. He’s equal parts geek, father, writer, and humorist, and his posts go back and forth accordingly. A “blogger’s blogger,” if you will. Do yourself a favor and check him out. Here’s a post to start you off.

I’ve spent most of my free-writing time over the past few months doing some sportsblogging over at MotSaG. You can usually catch me over there, writing under the sportsMonkey moniker. But now that the great 2006 OSU football season is over, things have slowed down a bit and allowed me more time to ‘come back home,’ as it were, to monkeyPi.

I haven’t written a What’s UP? article since October, so expect to see that recurring feature begin again, as well as more geek talk, technology news and reviews, tutorials, and other random bits. Hopefully we’ll be seeing more of theIcons, too. Lastly, there’s always the Yay Parenthood posts that occasionally shoehorn their way in here.

I made some additions to the sidebar, as well. I’ll be covering those in a later post.

I still have plenty to do, but most of the remaining changes will occur “behind the scenes,” in the underlying code & such.

Some changes that will affect my loyal readers…

• You now have an ability to be notified when someone responds to your comment(s). Just select the check box before clicking Submit and you’ll get an email any time someone posts a comment after you.
• Notice the new nav tabs across the top of the screen. Yay! I no longer have to embed a “home” icon in every post.
• Don’t be surprised if you see the sidebar change/evolve/barf on you. K2 has tons of built-in support for fancy sidebar modules, and I might try to play with some of them.
• Speaking of built-in support, the new theme also has much more powerful support for tags, so you’ll start to see me use them religiously. Check out the “tag cloud” on the archives page for an example of this. (It’s a bit thin right now, but I’ll be making an editing pass over my previous posts to apply tags to them, so it should get better and more complex as time goes on.)
• There is one negative with the recent updates… the K2 structure seems to load the main page much more slowly. I’m guessing it has something to do with all the pre-processing that goes on before the page is displayed. Once you’re in to the site, everything zooms along. I’m going to strip and thin out all of the code I don’t need, and see if it speeds things up a little. Until then, if the site is too slow for you, you might as well subscribe to my feed – I publish 100% of each post’s content there.
• To kick off the new theme, I’ve posted the inaugural strip of theIcons, a webcomic that features the twisted, hidden world of visual communication symbols. Hopefully, I’ll be able to bring you their adventures semi-regularly.

Yes, theMonkey is still alive. Sorry for my recent absence.

Most of my blogging the past couple of weeks has been over at MotSaG. Football is only 24 days away, so most of my spare time has been on psyching myself up for a great Buckeye season.

If you’re interested in good sports articles, feel free to stop by & check us out. Otherwise, stay tuned here at monkeyPi, and we’ll get the content back up and flowing as soon as the creative juices allow.

< - Home

I apologize retroactively for wasting your time with that paragraph.

Waldorf: Reading a post like this makes me nostalgic.

Statler: Oh, yeah? Nostalgic for what?

Waldorf: D.D.T.

< - Home

Sorry I haven’t posted in a few days. I just returned from taking the first of four courses that prepare usability professionals for the CUA exam.

This particular course focused on the most current research regarding issues of human-computer interaction (HCI). We spent a little time covering some cognitive psychology and human-factors basics, then dove right into the research. Quite a bit of what we covered surprised me… as computers and interfaces evolve, a lot of long-standing conventions and “must do’s” are being challenged. The User Experience field has to scramble to keep up with these changes.

Of course, some things never change. Certain guidelines and rules for interface design (especially those that account for how eyes, brains, and perception works) will always be safe to rely on. But a lot of other notable guidelines are being challenged by current research.

I’ll try and post some interesting summaries and articles in the upcoming day(s). Stay tuned…

< - Home

All thanks and respect to the largess of my blogfather, the Buttonmasher, who has graciously helped me establish this site. What can I say? He made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. The man’s virtually “adopted” enough bloggers to make Angelina Jolie jealous.

So, thanks much to the b-masher. With E3 going on, now’s a great time to pay his site a visit.

As far as monkeyPi goes, feel free to bookmark my page (or grab my RSS feed). My goal is to have a creative outlet, but I hope most of what I post here will amuse you.

Home