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Drat the Rat is a children's story for all ages. A slightly cynical report on life as a rat with a mean streak. This will be a digital ebook created using the ePub3 standard and published to iBooks through iTunes.

Drat the rat wasn't very funny.

Drat the rat had very little money.

Drat was a dirty rat.

Web analytics packages, Google, Coremetrics, Omniture - they all come with a price, performance. Websites make money by being the easiest to find and the fastest to load. Let's look at the second half of that statement.

The news and media industry has had a very difficult time coming up with a business model that works on the internet. I have some thoughts that could be interesting if executed well.

I have compiled a list of 10 Usability and User Experience related tasks. You may be familiar with some of these tasks but likely are not familiar with the specific activity or deliverable for each.

I was recently asked about optimizing an existing Database and existing web application SQL queries. I had some answers but afterwards wanted to make sure I was up-to-date. Here is what I had to say and what I found out.

Heuristics in Usability are simple guidelines to go by when reviewing or better yet, when designing a User Interface. It would be nice to have a tool, even a simple checklist - but smarter and with more data collection capabilities. For right now, here is a list of the most common heurisitics from recognized experts in the field.

What is being done to make Rich Internet Applications more Accessible? The WAI-ARIA is working on it. I plan to explore the initiatives in summary and see how they apply to my own real world experience.

A great article over at A List Apart really does a great job of explaining how Aesthetics plays a part in overall User Experience and can contribute to Usability, Brand Awareness, Trust and overall User Satisfaction with a web site or any other functional design.

Why is User Experience Design important and how can it impact a web based project - positively or negatively. I will explore the topic and help you discover what you probably already know.

So I'm working on this Real Estate project and need to create boundary maps with cickable regions for an arbitrary list of cities... looked high and low for GeoData (shapefiles, KML, GIS, Arc, whatever) and finally struck gold, at least for California that is.

I just finished writing up a tutorial on the ModX Wiki for how to add reCAPTCHA to the ModX Jot snippet (it's a blog like commenting system).

A database at it's simplest is a structured record of information. It is a place to store and retrieve data from about very specific topics. Your email contact list is a database, your bank account is a database and your appointment calendar is a database. Any type of information can be stored in a properly designed database. Web applications use databases for such things as online product catalogs, registered user account systems and blog posts and comments.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization and SEM or Search Engine Marketing are related fields. Both initiatives attempt to improve a web site's visibility in the global network we call the internet by improving the frequency with which a typical user's keyword search on a popular search engine will return that web site at the top of the list. Getting your site to the top of the list is a complicated process but can be summed up in a few short words. Relevance, Authority and Popularity.

So you need a Flash based ticker of some sort? It needs to load items dynamically you say? Oh, well in that case let me give you a hand (well me and Tweener).

After looking everywhere for the answer to what mouse event was the right one to use in Flash on a TouchScreen, I had to discover it through trial and error.

One technique for providing keyboard input support in Flash is to emulate mouse events using the DispatchEvent method.