But the video has little to do with Matt’s wonderful life. It features Glenda Watson Hyatt, the “left thumb blogger” (she can only type with one thumb) telling a lesson on usability and accessibility.

I’ve met many experts on this fields but none of them with such compelling and down to earth arguments and experience as Glenda. Her condition makes her the perfect accessibility consultant.

In the video she praises one of the least visible WordPress features: the clean, accessible and valid underlying code it generates. Something that many web designers don’t care about.

She goes on to say how blogging changed her life as she is able to reach far more people now than before, when her only communication tool was email.

She enjoys now communication with people from all over the world and she has gained a reputation on the accessibility field. This time the catch phrase has more meaning than ever.

Glenda Watson Hyatt’s accessibility blog
Matt Mullenweg’s blog

Introducing the first Open Source app that lets you write posts, upload photos, and edit your WordPress blog from your iPhone or iPod Touch.

I guess that I’ll become a master of the virtual keyboard in no time.

By the way, it’s free!

Get Wordpress for iPhone here

Most of them will sound too familiar to you (content is king, flash abuse anyone?), but when Norman, Maeda and peers write something you’d better read it. Here are the 10 commandments with more examples and comments of my own.

1. Thou shalt not abuse Flash
   Actually thou shalt not use Flash at all as an information container or as an interface replacement. Your users have already learnt how to use HTML interaction conventions. Don’t make them learn again something they’ll use only in your site.
   Hall of shame: Camper shoes
2. Thou shalt not hide content
   Readers come to your web for your content or for your ads? Do not hide contents behind ads. Google got to the top with AdWords and not with banners.
   Hall of shame: La Vanguardia online
3. Thou shalt not clutter
   The web is enough complex as it is. The huge load of information is difficult to structure and you should help your users once they land on your site. Unnecessary graphical artifacts, excess of information, poor website structure, lack of visual hierarchy, ad abuse, and misuse of the HTML conventions won’t make your user happy.
   Hall of shame: Catalunya Ràdio, RENFE
4. Thou shalt not overuse glassy reflections
   Apple’s website looks cool with all reflections on their products and we all love it (There’s even a reflection in the header of this site!). But this is Apple. Don’t think that you’ll turn your company in a 2.0 project by just adding a reflection to your logo.
   Hall of shame: Apple’s Mobile Me logo
5. Thou shalt not name your Web 2.0 company with an unnecessary surplus or dearth of vowels
   Web 2.0 is full of unique funny names with half of the vowels missing. If your company has not embraced the 2.0 philosophy getting rid of some vowels won’t help, and neither will adding an i at the beginning.Here’s a Web 2.0 company name generator to get your own.
   Hall of shame: iStalkr.com (not active anymore after a year. Bad naming for an RSS aggregator?)
6. Thou shalt worship at the altar of typography
   95% of the information on the web is written language. It is only logical to say that a web designer should get good training in the main discipline of shaping written information, in other words: Typography.
   Read all about it in the seminal article Web Design is 95% Typography
   Hall of shame: YouTube.com
7. Thou shalt create immersive experiences
   What else can you say? You’t better give your audience some good experience, content and functionality wise. After all they’re giving you their most valuable asset: time.
   Hall of shame: Second Life (funny that one of the worst immersive experience is a 3D immersive website)
8. Thou shalt be social
   Online success stories share the “social” tag. In fact marketers are working hard to find some business model around them. MySpace, Facebook, Last.fm, Flickr, Bebo or YouTube are the names of the game.
   Hall of shame: Second Life
9. Thou shalt embrace proven technologies
   Simple good. Complex bad. Google, YouTube, Facebook, Craigslist or Wikipedia have all something in common: plain old XHTML and a simple CSS. Simplicity goes a long way.
   Hall of shame: Second Life
10. Thou shalt make content king
    People are not interested in your abilities as interface designer or information architect. People want to get to the contents they’re looking for. The interface is just the means to them and not the end. A good interface will go unnoticed and so will the work of its designer. The better the designer the less you’ll notice her work. A nice paradox.
    Hall of shame: Any web with a Skip Intro link. Here’s Google’s Skip Intro new feature.

Original article: 10 Commandments of Web Design
Businessweek’s poll The Best and Worst of web design

It supports self hosted blogs as well as the free blogs at WordPress.com

You can see all about it this screencast

Behold! You’re seeing the birth of the true mobile internet.

Stay tuned for the release. In the meantime you can install the iPhone Mobile Admin plugin to your blog and manage it from the iPhone’s browser.

20/07/2008 Update: The iPhone Mobile Admin plugin doesn’t work for WP 2.5 nor WP 2.6. Follow the discussion on Dan Cameron’s blog for more info.

Here’s mine (via wmacphail): an iWatch, a watch with a multitouch screen which hooks wirelessly to your iPhone or MacBook.

Here’s the beast:

Nothing new actually, as I had been using Ecto previously. But somehow, with the improvements to the Wordpress post editor and with the vision of “doing more with less” I ended up not using it at all. It got fed to AppZapper after a while.

But times change and posting in four different blogs currently, I thought I could use a little help from a desktop app.

With that philosophy in mind I tried to use TextMate, which I already use for programming, as a publishing client. TextMate’s versatility allow for that and much more and is the blogging tool of choice for many bloggers.

My experience with TextMate:

• Configuration is done and kept in a flat txt file
• Posts are not automatically synchronized with those of your database. You just write in a flat txt file that gets uploaded via rpc to your blog.
• No local copy of the posts is kept on your computer unless you save the file as a flat text file
• Categories are not passed down to TextMate from WP so you actually need to remember them and add them as meta information on your, again, flat text file
• I didn’t get any further

TextMate may be the best editor for the Mac OS (despite its funny tab management) but as a desktop publishing app is a nightmare.

At that point I left the “do more with less” philosophy to embrace the “do the right thing with the right tool”, which brought me back to Ecto, a nice app that worked extremely fine for me a couple of years ago. But when you use a Mac for a while you start to get very picky about the design of the user interface and functionality of the apps.

You want apps that are laid out nicely, have an internal and external user interface coherence, that are not too much bloated with features and excel at doing the essential. Ecto sure does a lot of stuff but the app somehow doesn’t look and feel right on Leopard.

So I decided to try MarsEdit, a blogging client extremely similar to Leopard’s Mail that also follows the one window approach.

My Experience with MarsEdit:

• Setting up the blogs was as easy as feeding MarsEdit the URLs and entering ID and password. No need to know where the xmlrpc file sits
• I automatically downloaded my 10 last posts and all my available categories
• No learning curve. Posting is as easy as sending a mail
• A live preview that shows you the final render of the post as you type. No need to reload constantly
• Ability to use TextMate (or any) as your favorite external editor
• Blog this! Bookmarklet on your browser
• Flickr integration. Enter you FlickrID and password, authorize the app, and all your pics are ready to be blogged
• Upload files with just drag and drop on your post
• Easily republish same content to another blog
• Spellcheck as you type
• Applescript support
• Works with WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, LiveJournal, Drupal, and Vox
• Growl! integration

I use MarsEdit to post to:
ganyet.com
iosephdurgell.org
RAC1.org/elmon
wearemortensen.com/blog

Funny to see that this episode comes out shortly after Soutpark decided to put all their episodes online with no geographic restrictions. You can’t check this episode online yet due to contractual issues but it will be available in June. If you can’t wait, you know the drill.

Incidentally all the browsers featured in the computers in Southpark are Mac OS Safari showing a distressing “You are not connected to the internet message” (The TV station though shows an IE not found page).

Check the full Southpark online episodes guide here.

Visit the 21 Steps website

Heres one of my Flickr sets seen with Piclens.

Do yourself a favor and download this beauty.

Once you have it up and running try it with the just created group to save Flickr from Microsoft.

PNG Icons & Icon Packs Download | IconsPedia