So today it was brought to my attention that the design of my blog needed work. Since good design is a very subjective term, much like good programming:

your program (n): a maze of non-sequiturs littered with clever-clever tricks and irrelevant comments. Compare MY PROGRAM.

my program (n): a gem of algorithmic precision, offering the most sublime balance between compact, efficient coding on the one hand, and fully commented legibility for posterity on the other. Compare YOUR PROGRAM.

Please tell me your impressions, of my blog, in the comments below. I would like to see constructive actionable comments, that I can work toward implementing, around the ease of reading, layout, and usability.  That is what I am really interested in hearing about.

You can tell me what you think of the colors but honestly much like personal tastes in cars, food, and everything else, it is usually very superficial and relies on personal preferences more than industry recognized usability problems.  My personal preferences, since it is my blog, is to use strong colors right next to each other to show strong lines, instead of gradients, because strong lines give the sense of strength and professionalism.

Honestly, if I was to break it down, I just like the look of a Orange, Blue, and Brown, I believe they provide nice contrast to each other and have an almost academic look.  If I was to sum up my style I would say the Power Point Theme Median, as seen below, is the closest I have ever seen to My Personal Style Tastes.

So please let me here your comments, about my blog, on:

1. Ease of Reading
2. Layout
3. Usability

I will take them all very seriously.

As many of you may know I love Google Talk. I love it because of its light foot print both on my hard drive and when running in memory. I love the integration with all my Google services. And I love the flexibility that it provides. If you would like a copy of it, you can download it as part of the Google Pack. Or by it self from http://www.google.com/talk.

However the Google Talk team just gave me another reason to love Google Talk. It now allows me to have direct conversations with my visitors with a simple click of the mouse on the chat bubble you see to your left.

This new feature is called chatback and allows you to integrate Google Talk in to any website you have access to add HTML. Chatback uses the web-based Google Talk Gadget so your visitors don’t need to download anything. It opens in a new window so they can keep chatting with you even if they browse to other pages.

Of course, chatback isn’t just for blogs. You can use it on any web page that you can add HTML content to. To get started, visit the chatback start page. (This is also linked from the Google Talk homepage.) Then just copy the provided HTML snippet to your web site. Visitors will then see a badge on your site indicating your availability, and can click to start a chat with you. If there’s a time when you don’t want to be distracted, just set your online status to “busy” and visitors won’t be able to chat with you until you change your status back to “available.”

So now if you want to chat with me about anything and you see a Green dot. You have the go ahead to say hi or ask me any question you want. I may not always respond, because I sometimes forget to turn of GTalk when I am in a meeting or giving a presentation.