A side project I’ve been working on the last couple of weeks is finally finished: superscreenshot.com. As the name implies, the site will produce a screenshot of any URL you send it — a full-page screenshot — not just the top screen. It’s a free, ad-supported service.

If you send a URL it already has on file, it returns the saved screenshot and gives you the option of refreshing it. Since any screenshot program has to download the actual web page in its entirety before it can make the screen capture, this will take anywhere from a few seconds up to a minute or more depending on how many images and ads the page contains (since we generally start reading a page as soon as the content is loaded, we normally don’t realize how long many pages take to completely load the last Google Analytics script or third-party ad).

If too many screenshot requests come in at once there’s a queue since the hardware can only process so many screenshots at a time. But the AJAX-style updater gives you the current progress.

Without further ado, head on over to superscreenshot.com and give it a try.

I read recently that Google’s Gmail service will be doubling the capcity of its users mailboxes to 2 gigabytes. I’m not sure what the point is, other than pure marketing. As someone who has saved every email received since 1995*, my personal sum comes to 345 megabytes. I’m sure that few users have reached the 1 GB capacity, so doubling it must be a pretty cheap move..

*Not including spam or mailing list email, or email with large attachments

Reading articles like these always remind me of the Winer quote, “If you want to be in Google, you gotta be on the Web.”

Google is beginning to have a subtle, but noticeable effect on research. More and more scholarly publications are putting up their issues in PDF format, which Google indexes as though they were traditional Web pages. But almost no one is publishing entire books online in PDF form. So, when you’re doing research online, Google is implicitly pushing you toward information stored in articles and away from information stored in books. Assuming this practice continues, and assuming that Google continues to grow in influence, we may find ourselves in a world where, if you want to get an idea into circulation, you’re better off publishing a PDF file on the Web than landing a book deal.

Of course any researcher who employs Google as his main tool is not conducting serious research. For real research, a trip to a good library is still required. But the quote subtly suggests the distinction between merely getting an idea into circulation (via the web, without a large marketing budget) versus trying to keep your media or publishing company profitable. It’s hard to do both. Amazon is attempting a similar strategy by planning to make the full texts of books available to user searches, but limiting the amount of text accessible to the user.

Now take search topics where users who are feeling lucky on Google are directed to Contact Sheet, however irrelevant (in Kottke fashion):

#1 - contact sheet - even though I’ve never discussed the concept of contact sheets or talked about photography in length on these pages. Someday I will; Google seems to be pre-empting me.
#1 - scott steffens - duh
#1 - ransom note
#1 - omaha sugar daddy
#1 - milton bradley simon shockwave
#1 - nyt news tracker

A selection of close seconds and other notables:
#2 - make friends
#2 - frank gehry talks about seattle
#3 - times iraq altered photograph
#3 - tour de france elevation map
#3 - rem koolhaas design process
#5 - how long does freshly squeezed orange juice last?
#7 - smut magazines
#7 - quit vegetarianism
#7 - creative direction vs. art direction
#17 - underlying issues of the control freak
#17 - sexy 50-year-old woman
#21 - etiquette wearing white shoes before memorial day

All the smuttiness that Google tracks and directs over here (there’s a lot more, from looking through the dregs of referral logs) makes me feel like a politician who’s been quoted grossly out of context.

For years I’ve kept manilla folders full of examples of great web design on my desk. Anytime I see a site that illustrates a new way of designing something I might be working on I’ll print it out so I can easily refer to it and flip through the stack of pages. It’s so much easier than pulling up screenshots or organizing bookmarks. It’s like creating my own custom issue of Communication Arts.

To print these web pages in the most accurate manner, I usually take a screenshot of the site, import it into Photoshop, upsample to 300 dpi, reduce to 8”x10”, and print it on HP Everyday Photo Paper, Matte (around $.14 a sheet in 100 sheet packages). Flipping through this folder is the best way for me to quickly brainstorm about ideas, navigation, organization, etc. Sometimes I’ll stick post-it notes on the print-outs as a reminder of what struck me about a particular site.

Lately I’ve been printing out sites of large organizations that incorporate a top universal nav bar (bbc.com & microsoft sites) that let users quickly navigate to the main areas within a large organization but have restrained color and styling so the nav bar can be applied to any microsite within the organization. Currently, these examples can be found near the beginning of the manilla folder.

If I’m soley interested in the content of the page, I’ll usually skip the details above and send it to the laserjet printer by hitting Cntrl-P from the browser. Not infrequently I’m disappointed to see that some pertinent bit of the content ran off the right side of the page by inadequate printing capabilities of the browser. In 2003, ten years since the first browser was introduced, you’d think the major browsers would have the simple task of printing down pat, but unfortunately I have to resort to the above method when I want an exact representation of what’s on my screen.

A recent Boxes and Arrows article illuminates some shortcomings of Nielsen/Norman Group methodologies found in their report Usability Return on Investment. It’s about time someone shed a critical light on their activities. While they preach user-centeredness, they have a very NN/g-centered view of usability. Both principles in the firm, Jakob Nielsen and Donald Norman, excel in overstating the obvious, especially in book form where they have plenty of room to repeat their assertions until the reader is numbed into submission. I read Nielsen’s column with the same skepticism I apply to any other columnist—he’s far too opinionated and commanding to be taken too seriously. (I also noticed a wee shift in Nielsen’s once-scathing opinion of Flash after Macromedia paid him large sums of money for his consulting work, an embarassment for both parties, in my opinion). Beyond that, their methods for drawing broad conclusions are dubious and often lazy, as seen in this intelligent review.

I always enjoy the research before the design phase starts. It’s a time when ideals are formed, before the technical and budgetary restrictions of the project have been assigned. Just like college is the idealistic time before your career makes you cynical about the compromises that ensue in the real world, the research is the Ralph Nader while the implementation is the Al Gore.

While performing some community research for a project at work I recently dug into Meetup.com, a site that enjoyed a publicity boost from Howard Dean’s grassroot supporters and the media coverage that followed. There’s also recent blogger linkage due to new Movable Type meetups.

Before Dean’s boon, I’d gone there to look for a Portuguese community in Seattle. There are interested people from Brazil and Portugal and those eager to meet with native speakers, but there’s little to do on the site other than sign up for the next potential meeting. There’s no way to see if they’ve met in the past or to exchange messages with others signed up on the list. How amazingly frustrating — Meetup offers no way to correspond with users, individually or en masse, to establish a rapport before walking blindly into a room of strangers. You can see them there, but can’t contact them. This is particularly problematic when no one person wants to step up to be the host. Instead, some users post links in their profiles to other Yahoo forums and external sites—a very haphazard way of maintaining user interest.

There could also be better user profiles—why not show what other meetups users belong to, if they choose to share; show agendas and reports of last meetings including number of participants, and if the meeting has a serious agenda, what was accomplished. I can see that Meetup is about real-life meetings, but to have restricted contact with other members until the meeting seems to be a leap that many people aren’t willing to take.

Instead of freely accepting e-mails like every other address, you now must state whether you agree or disagree with President Bush, in addition to completing steps on nine pages of a complex form before sending an electronic mail (now called a courriel in France, perhaps getting back for our “freedom fries” debacle) to the White House, reports the NY Times. The URL is down this A.M.

But even Jakob Neilsen has jumped in for some easy press, “It’s probably designed deliberately to cut down on their e-mail.”

Since the beginning of GW’s reign, and especially throughout the war, I’ve been hesitant to promote my nationality in any form. But for three weeks in July I can’t help but cheer for the Americans in the Tour de France. I’m not much of a sports fan, but cycling is different. It mixes sheer endurance of the individual with complex team strategies (and occassional in-team rivalries that Greg LeMond encoutered in 1985-86), and all the drama, gusto and gossip of a major European sporting event.

And cycling generally avoids the monetary hoopla and commercialism that has infected other mainstream sports. Cycling teams don’t coerce cities into spending billions on fancy stadiums — it welcomes everyone that wants to watch with a free ticket to the sidelines, especially the fans who dress up in bunny costumes and run alongside their favorite riders on the slow, grueling climbs. Nothing is off limits, and fan participation has remained a significant (if not dangerous) part of the event.

As someone who doesn’t subscribe to cable television I feed my fancy by rolling out of bed and reading the days’ race reports, with the stage freshly finished when I wake up in Pacific Time each morning. Here are some of the sites I visit to get my fix.

• Canal Le Tour — The official site of the Tour de France is the best site for comphrehensive Tour standings. And there are a lot of them — General Classification (overall standings) and stage standings for individual, team and five categories. But the 14 daily results are organized so it’s easy to find who won the stage and how Lance is doing in the overall (very well, thanks to a magnificent performance by the Posties in the team time trial on Wednesday) and a plethora of other data. The race map with detailed elevation profiles is available in static and Flash versions (the latter only in French). If I woke up early enough I could also read the play-by-play with live updates every few minutes.
• New York Times — the Times, my primary general purpose news source, has a Tour page that unnecessarily pops up the Interactive Tour page everytime you navigate there. I promptly close it because it’s the typical Flash nightmare — slow to realize mouse clicks, poor proprietary navigation, etc. But the coverage by Samuel Abt and other Times’ reporters contains excellent writing and covers human interest aspects of the tour such as what it’s like to be waiting on the sidelines and how the TV coverage works.
• VeloNews — The gold standard of pro cycling rags, VeloNews has the most comprehensive Tour coverage without needing to explain the basics for a mainstream audience, and no fancy interactive fluff needed to drum up interest — if you’re there, you already love cycling. Articles are arranged by stage so it’s easy to keep track of where you left off (something I have a hard time doing with the NYT). VeloNews also has writing contracts with USPS trainer Chris Carmichael and several riders. Nothing technologically fancy, just writing about bike racing.
• ESPN — A leading site in ball-centered sports, ESPN built out its Tour de France site to appeal to the general sports enthusiast. For some reason, the title of the page reads “ESPN - Olympic Sports - Tour de France” — cycling evidently always falls under olympic sports on the site (aren’t basketball, baseball, tennis and hockey also olympic sports?). The coverage is thin — in fact I hadn’t even thought to visit the ESPN site until I started writing this entry. The layout is good, but the updates are slow to arrive — nothing more than the statistical results for most stages. However, the map interactivity is among the best and has a nice elevation profile overlay, but only on mountain stages where it matters most. It’s the quickest to respond to clicks since it’s not bloated with features. I applaud it for its simplicity. And ESPN.com is also XHTML compliant.
• Bicycling Magazine — the be-all of bicycling magazines, Bicycling is known as a practical knowledge bicycling magazine for those who ride. It fits real Tour coverage between articles like 13 Rides Tough Enough to Change Your Life and The Best Champagne to Drink During the Tour de France. Has all the expected race results, interesting facts and contributing writers. Like VeloNews, their tour map is plain HTML on a regular page which makes it the easiest to read. But there’s something so 1997 about this site that doesn’t appeal to me.

I’ve noticed over the years that all cycling becomes more pleasureable when the tour is underway. When you can link each hill on your commute to work with a particular Tour climb, you just go faster and feel better. While the Postal Service is climbing up Alp d’ Huez on Sunday, I’ll be doing my final training ride for RAMROD, a 155 mile ride around Mt. Rainier on July 31st, where I’m sure I’ll have the tour in mind plenty.

Safari 1.0 was released for the Mac today, which marks the first General Announcement of an Apple-made web browser. Some visitors (thanks and thanks) had reported a major bug in the way Contact Sheet’s homepage was rendered in the previous Safari Beta — completely lacking a vertical scrollbar.

With the 1.0 announcement I thought I’d take the time to investigate the problem, seeing how my bug reports to Safari went unanswered (the bug still appears in 1.0). I looked at my stylesheets, then HTML, and found the problem with a bit of JavaScript, specifically a document.write method to detect the user’s screen size that caused the scrollbar to disappear — clearly a Safari bug. I altered the placement of the code slightly and the scrollbar now appears.

I didn’t hop on this problem when it was first brought to my attention because (a) Safari is a beta browser (b) since I now sport XHTML and CSS validity, it was likely to be a browser bug (see a) and (c) only 1% - 2% of the daily users use Safari — although this is likely to increase with the 1.0 release, and with my bug workaround in place.

Which begs the question, at what point should web designers care about site/browser compatibility? Is it purely about the percentage of users? Compliance with web standards? At most places I’ve worked it seems that folks use the sheer volumes when creating policy. But if “only” 1% of your users are viewing with Netscape, 1% of a million are a lot of people viewing a potentially imperfect site. With the browser market pie chart becoming more fragmented — a good thing, mind you — designers will have to consciously draw the line somewhere. And we already do with old versions.

So, what are your browser compliance criteria?

I wrote a quick little script and let it go for ~36 hours to find out that these are the only alpha-numeric two-letter domains available in the .com .net .org suffixes according to the Internic Whois Directory:

75.org ac.org fs.org h9.org mw.org

nq.org o7.org qd.org yo.org z9.org

However, most registrars won’t let you register two-letter .org domains anymore to comply with a new ICANN/PIR restriction.

There are no alpha-only three letter domains available. Zqx.net? Taken. Ywj.org? Gone. But there are 3777 .com, 22,176 .org and 16,562 .net alpha-numeric combinations still waiting to be snatched up.