Blog Posts

I’m on vacation. I’m not on a big boat on a warm Caribbean ocean or careening headlong up and down the world’s largest wooden roller coaster or drinking wine in the Napa Valley. (What is wrong with me!??) I’m on a nearly mandatory “stay-cation” all by myself (not even my dog is home today) which while on… Read more: Resistance

I haven’t been writing. I also haven’t been teaching. I’m no longer in the same job. My garden is a shambles and I lost two of my seven bee hives. But I knew it was going to be summer of loss, I gave up on it before it even started. There was a garden, but… Read more: Long, Quiet Hiatus

That’s what I googled this morning. Over the years I’ve started and abandoned so many blogs I can’t keep track – except the one with my name on it! And very often I wonder what in the world am I going to write about under my own name! What was I thinking buying this domain… Read more: Why Keep a Blog?

Before diving headlong into the second principle of Permaculture, I  realized that I need to back up and keep exploring this notion of applying a biological design system to something that is non-biological – namely the World Wide Web. While it is indeed true that the web is not carbon-based, it is (IMHO) inherently human… Read more: Natural Design

There are 12 principles in permaculture design and they are easily googled. Full books, long books have been written on these principles! But I’m going to list them here anyway, just by way of introduction to the concept with the caveat that I will dive into all 12 of them separately. Dun da da daaaaah:… Read more: Permaculture Principles

Practitioners trace the origins of permaculture design to an Australian forest service worker in the 1970s. His name is Bill Mollison and together with his graduate student David Holmgren, they offered us all a radical shift in thinking about agriculture by observing and re-creating what happens in a forest. You probably have never heard of permaculture,… Read more: Ethical Web Design

Do you keep a vegetable garden? I do. I guess people would call me a gardener, but that would be a stretch! As each sign of Spring begins to appear in the dank-cold of winter, the garden in my dreams – the garden I know I can create – begins beckoning me to action. And… Read more: UX Garden

  I worry a great deal about revealing too much of who I really am in my online writings and probably a lot of that worry is warranted. Still, there is something to be said for celebrating the humanity we all share with the hope that all will come out clean in the wash. I… Read more: Recipe of me

Locusts chirp this morning like slow motion waves of sound broadcasting the local weather forecast: hot as hell. The rest of the house is sleeping except for me and the cat who is cleaning her front paw, but missing and inadvertently cleaning the foot stool we’re sharing. She is annoyed. She is usually annoyed. So… Read more: To-do lists

It isn’t really surprising to me that people sometimes think I handle usability for web sites. You know, I make sure they work right and do what they are suppose to do. To a large extent, that is true. Making sure the links work, the navigation makes sense, SEO plans are in place, testing the… Read more: The “X” in UX design

If you want to learn how to write for the web, let me Google that for you. Seriously, there is so much information on this subject it is mind-blowing and most of it is, in my opinion, very, very good. That’s because most of it relies on the seminal research done by the great Jakob… Read more: Writing for the web

UX Design is not, not, not usability testing. Here is a great interview with my hero Jesse James Garrett about this concept of creating experiences for end users. It is very well done. Mashable video interview of Jesse James Garrett And if Mashable had played well and put the video in YouTube, I would have… Read more: Paying attention to User Experience Design

Last night I got to take the new Canon 5D Mark III out on it’s maiden voyage. I doubt I’m going to be the main photographer using this incredible camera for still images, by my goodness, it’s like driving a Mercedes! I chose this camera because of Canon’s dedication to video DSLR, which is off… Read more: Maiden Voyage of the 5D Mark III