Book Worm: The Zen of CSS Design
The Zen of CSS Design by Dave Shea and Molly E. Holzschag is a delight. It is lovely to look at and it explains CSS clearly and directly.



- posted by Sandra Smith @ 4:37 PM 0 comments   

 
Powell's or Amazon
I recently decided to start writing mini-reviews or notices about the books I'm reading. It seemed logical to provide my readers with a link to more information about said book. And why not, just for fun, make that link one to a place that actually sells the book. I'm starting to get the hang of this affiliate marketing stuff.

Okay, my buddies over at Rain City Studios have a few links on The Standard, and I wanted something similar: an image of the book cover and a link to the page about that book at the bookstore. Seems simple enough. Off I went to Amazon.ca to sign up.

I was thwarted at the second screen about "payee information." I had filled in all of the required fields correctly, but each time I tried to advance to the next round of play, I was told firmly that I had missed the snap on the fields in red.

ALL of the fields were in red. Except for the ones for Address 2 and Address 3, which were blank (does anyone ever fill those out?).

After a fruitless 30 minutes trying to be one with Amazon's methods of input, I spent another 30 minutes exploring their byzantine "contact" information, going round and round til I finally found a generic form to fill out. (Fortunately, it let me post without waving red flags at me this time.)

Then I went promptly over to Powell's to sign up for their affiliate program.

I like Powell's Book Store a lot. They have a great selection and lots of choice of used/discount books. They were the first (that I know of) to offer free shipping on international orders. I was living in Japan when I first started ordering from them, and this was very important news to me. They also have an interesting newsletter.

What they don't have is the option for their affiliates to post one of those pretty book cover images with a link. I can get a text link with no problem and I can get a banner ad easily enough (see sidebar). To produce the lovely image in my recent Book Worm, I had to

• get the affiliate text link for the book
• grab the image from the book's page
• upload the image to my Flickr album
• direct Blogger to find the image
• change the linking from Flickr to Powell's so that my affiliate number will register

Flickr won't like this. I'll try to get around it for now by providing a separate link to Flickr whenever I blog about a book.

I'll let you know if I get any response from Powell's about the book image problem.

I did get a response from Amazon about that text field nonsense. For other Canadians who might want to try this dance, make sure that your postal code has a space between the two sets of three characters (mine did) and make sure that you type out your province name in full (but it's so l o n g!).

Wouldn't it have been simpler for Amazon to tell me that on the form itself? Drop-down menus have been used with some success by other companies.

Someone should buy Amazon this book.
- posted by Sandra Smith @ 9:38 AM 0 comments   

 
Flash: Exposed!
I love peaking under the skirts of all of your websites. When I can't "view source" I get grumbly and wonder if all the cool kids have a secret they won't let me in on. I'm looking at you, Flash!

Now it seems like my particular fetish is being pandered to by the nice people at Macromedia. Matt Haughey posted this on the Creative Commons site yesterday afternoon: There is an Actionscript file that will add a "view source" option to any Flash movie.

So all of you Flash-perts have no excuse anymore for being so coy.
- posted by Sandra Smith @ 1:15 AM 0 comments   

 
Book Worm: Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
One unseasonably warm February day back in my university years, I was driving happily home from the mall with the windows down, the radio on, and the anticipation of playing my newly purchased album on my mind. (I won't admit to the vintage; if I say that it was vinyl that's all you need to know.) I was also crunching on some mixed nuts from an open bag on the passenger seat.

And then I got a feeling.

I closed the bag of nuts, put both hands on the wheel, and slammed backwards forty feet (yes, feet; put that together with the vinyl and do the math) from the impact of a head-on collision with a middle-of-the-day drunk driver. If I hadn't paid attention to that gut feeling a moment before, I would have been driving faster and been less alert, both of which conditions would have led to a lot more damage than I sustained.

I've been a fan of the feeling ever since.

In Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell examines the adaptive unconscious, which is that gut instinct that tells us that something is amiss and that gives us a gentle nudge to pay a wee bit more attention to our environment.

"Blink is a book about those first two seconds."

It's not just about avoiding accidents or mitigating damage, of course. Gladwell opens with an anecdote about the Getty Museum's intended purchase of a rare type of ancient Greek statue, illustrating how experts' initial and immediate reactions against its authenticity, scientific evidence to the contrary, were eventually proven correct. But he gives other examples in which experts want so much to believe that something is true that even if their gut response walked around behind them to kick them repeatedly in the butt, they would pay no heed.

"fast and frugal"

Not only do we have a natural ability to make accurate decisions quickly, but also we are incredibly economical in our decision-making. We can make accurate assessments of a situation with very limited sensory input, using only a few seconds of visual cues to determine a person's proficiency at their job, for example.

Gladwell contends that this natural ability can be refined and honed so that we are, in fact, being conscious of our adaptive unconscious. He encourages us to take our instincts seriously.

I am just a short ways into the book. With chapter subtitles like: "The Secret Life of Snap Decisions," "Why We Fall for Tall, Dark, Handsome Men," (Hi Honey!), and "Creating Structure for Spontaneity" my gut instinct is that I'll be unable to put it down.
- posted by Sandra Smith @ 11:01 PM 1 comments   

 
BCIT New Media Crew in the News
Just in case you thought that Hamster Salad and The Standard were making it all up, check out this article in 24 Hours: Vancouver about our results in the New Media Slam 2005.
- posted by Sandra Smith @ 12:05 PM 0 comments