So what is Building43?

To quote their About us page again…

The goal is simple – make it easier for businesses to use the new Internet to improve their business results.

It’s a Rackspace owned website with a celebrity blogger at the helm of it — Robert Scoble. The ultimate purpose is to sell hosting, which is perfectly fine.

Scoble calls it a community too on his About page:

I work at Rackspace and am building a community for people fanatical about the Internet called Building43.

Don’t call it a community, please

Call me old fashioned by to me an online community still means a forum or chatroom where one can sign up and initiate discussion or participate in existing discourse, where your role is defined by what, how and how often you say things.

At Building43, instead, your role has been determined from the start:

But building43’s foundation and future is its community — people like you who contribute valuable content, through video, blog posts, podcasts, Friendfeed comments, Tweets or by simply dropping us an email to tell us about the latest or next great thing. Participate now. We can’t do it without you.

In other words, to participate you have to contribute content via the latest web 2.0 cleverness (eg. Twitter, FriendFeed). Which is more about social marketing that than giving users space to express themselves.

Building43 is a blog

It looks like one, reads like one and behaves like one.

And it would be great if they added a forum of some sort.

Now that I’ve made that clear I’ll go ahead and bookmark it because it promises to be a pretty useful resource.

A few years ago I signed up with IndexTools, a web analytics service similar to Google Analytics, and paid for a plan for up to 1,000,000 page views each month.

I wasn’t sure which plan to go with, though, as I didn’t know how much traffic was generating.

In the end traffic level averaged around 300,000 page views per month with the occasional spike. I never went over my quota.

I remember asking one of their sales reps why their pricing couldn’t be based on usage. The answer was that it was technically harder to do so. Hard to believe given measuring traffic is their business.

I’ve got the same issue now with a web agency I work with. We have an agreement for 6 hours of maintenance and support each month. The price is discounted and it guarantees specific turnaround times. Extra hours are more expensive and there is no agreement on turnaround times. Of course this could have been negotiated before signing on the dotted line, but certain agencies are not particularly flexible.

Selling ‘blocks’ of things is convenient if you are a supplier as you may well end up not providing 100% of what is offered. But not such a good deal for the client.

Pricing that scales based on the amount of service provided is much more fair. Think about this next time you’re negotiating with a service provider.

I try to keep my logo designs simple, professional -looking and representative of the businesses values.

I don’t have a background in print but I try to ensure that logos will work on printed material too.

SEO was a decisive factor in determining the name of the website – Rome Rentals Co.. The design needed to be formal, trustworthy but also somewhat light-hearted to represent the website’s core offerings: quality vacation rentals, a service to match and experiencing Rome as a local.

Ease-of-use of its booking system is one of the selling points of cityapartments.it. I designed the logo back in 2002 and it has since evolved in a more SEO friendly version that splits the ‘cityapartments’ word in two.

CITYGUESTHOUSE is a low budget hotel in Rome located off the beaten track. For this reason it needs to stand our as a place that is friendly, colourful and has a ‘personality’ that sets it apart from typical hotels.

travgo is the company that built and manages cityapartments.it and Rome Rentals Co.. Their products are websites and management systems behind them, but they also offer the experience of Italian cities such as Rome.

Tablet PC Italia is Italy’s first and only website dedicated to Tablet PCs. The logo, quite expectedly, refers to handwriting.

The idea behind your.domain.is.it (now offline) was to offer short URLs to sites hosted on free webspace providers. But only to websites of a certain quality… website domains that ‘are it’.

Need a logo?

If you like what you see and think that my approach and style would be suitable for your website then send me an email and I’ll get back to you with some ideas.

Online there are no bibliographies. We use links instead. However, I think there is a case for using them as an expanded function that goes beyond providing reference facts and acknowledgements.

Articles online aren’t so much different from the printed versions. This is also due to publisher’s clever use of resources to re-propose content in different formats. But apart from complementing content with links, commenting and the occasional widget there is little difference between what is published online and on paper.

Telling the story behind the story

This does not need to be the case as online, given the very nature of the medium, gives us the opportunity to tell the stories behind the story. For every polished article there are all sorts of scraps of information that originally provided the author with inspiration and material. This, along with the author’s own thinking and emotion contributes to the messy process of articulating an article.

So why not provide a bibliography of all the bits of information, thoughts and emotions that helped shape it? These could be inter-linked web pages, images, social network connections, twitters, statistical facts, video clips, emoticons, ecc… presented over some kind of timeline narrating giving the article a lot more context. Sharing and linking of these elements would provide an alternative route to navigate articles across a website.

Capturing inspiration

For this to work there would have to be some kind of software and / or gadget to allow authors to capture their inspiration. But the extra effort would mean creating additional content that could be, dare I say, monetised on. Could such bibliographies be what publishers charge for after offering the article for free?

This way I only have to remember a single formula rather than a whole bunch of different passwords.

Never use short, simple passwords

If you’re still using passwords such as ‘iloveyou’ or ‘hello’ then expect to be hacked. Never choose a password that is that simple. There are kids out there using simple hacking scripts that rely on long lists of combinations of commonly used words to guess passwords.

Even if you choose a complex password don’t use the same one every time you register. A hacker may get your login details from an obscure forum you may have registered at and then accessed your Hotmail account using those details.

Think of a formula to determine and remember all your passwords

First thing is to figure out what values will make up your formula. These should include anything you can easily remember and also values you can determine from the site you are registering at.

1. Your username
2. Your email address
3. Personal info such as your birthday, place of birth or any important dates or names of people you know
4. The URL of the site you are registering at
5. The name of the site you are registering at

I’ll explain what to do next by example.

Lets say I want to register a Yahoo! email account at http://mail.yahoo.com, using lawrence71aus as my username. I will use the information from 1, 3 and 4 above.

A formula to determine the password could be made up of the following values:

• The number of characters of the URL (mail.yahoo.com): 13
• The first 2 letters of the domain name (yahoo.com): ya
• The first letter of the place where I was born (Rome): R
• The last 2 characters of my username (lawrence71aus): us
• The last 2 numbers of the year I got married: 07
• My wife’s first name: Zoe

And put together like this… ya + Zoe + 07 + us + R + 13 … to produce the following password: yaZoe07usR13

I can then apply the same formula if I register for a Live mail account using my new Yahoo! email address lawrence71aus@yahoo.com as the username.

• The number of characters of the URL (mail.live.com): 11
• The first 2 letters of the domain name (live.com): li
• The first letter of the place where I was born: R
• The last 2 characters of my username, not counting what comes after the ‘@’ symbol (lawrence71aus@yahoo.com): us
• The last 2 numbers of the year I got married: 07
• My wife’s first name: Zoe

Applying the same formula results in: liZoe07usR11

The formula can be as complex was you want, but some websites impose limits on the number of characters you can use. More often than not they require a minimum number of characters.

I hope this is helpful. And I glad that the stuff I learnt in my high school maths classes have finally put to practice.

I thought about this name back in 2007 when arguing about information architecture on the Econsultancy forum and taking the side of those who think that web designers, analysts and developers are able to define website information architectures as part of their jobs (as opposed to necessarily having to hire a specialist).

I hold a B.Sc. in Architecture from the Welsh School of Architecture too, but that’s not particularly relevant.

architxt.net and keeping things simple

The idea behind the site’s design is to showcase what I describe as “simple, text-centric websites” on my homepage. I’m a big fan of type and the written word. I love design too but let those with the right skills make the web look prettier.

Simplicity and clarity is what I aim for. The strategic thinking, planning, design and build are the services I offer to achieve that.

My background

I started out in 1998 as an HTML coder for NRI Resources Ltd. and now contract at the Department of Justice, Victoria. I’ve worked in London, Rome, Taichung (Taiwan) and now are in Melbourne.

I have never worked for a web design agency but have worked with a few including Nomensa, Line and Reactive. I know the web design process very well and whether experts are providing value for money.

As a freelancer I have worked on small projects of my own and for friends and family. Currently I am working on Rome Rentals Co. (and will blog about this site soon).

To recap, I am a freelance web designer with significant experience on the client side offering a service to build simple and elegant websites.