I spent some time over the past weekend watching old music videos that I hadn’t seen for a dozen years, if ever. YouTube is really a treasure trove of those wonderful old things. I discovered bootleg videos of bands that I wouldn’t have imagined existed – certainly not freely available on the Internet. Sure, there’s some crap in there… but what fun!

Question, though. If the music and film industries are relatively mellow about the YouTube thing (for now), who are the real bad guys? What organization would be ready to crack down and serve a DMCA complaint against a video made by yours truly???

Dear Member:

This is to notify you that we have removed or disabled access to the following material as a result of a third-party notification by L. Ron Hubbard Library claiming that this material is infringing:

Personality Test

Please Note: Repeat incidents of copyright infringement will result in the deletion of your account and all videos uploaded to that account. In order to avoid future strikes against your account, please delete any videos to which you do not own the rights, and refrain from uploading additional videos that infringe on the copyrights of others. For more information about YouTube’s copyright policy, please read the Copyright Tips guide.

No worries, though. You can still watch it on Noboto, and see what all the fuss is about. For now.

The Lynda Movie Library has been a very useful service to us over the past couple of years. For $25 a month, you can watch as many movies as you want, most of which are training videos pertaining to the types of media software that designers use.

But it’s not all wine and roses on Lynda. For instance, the video “Building an Online Shopping Cart” just appeared, and since that’s an area of interest to us, Kandace decided to watch it. Unfortunately, an hour or two into the video, you realize that friendly instructor Lawrence Cramer is also CEO & Founder of Cartweaver Lawrence Cramer. And he’s got some software to sell.

Now this all wouldn’t be so bad if we had any indication that this video might not be helpful. Ideally, before vesting several hours of our time into watching it. Sadly, this video is not alone – many of the videos on Lynda turn out to be rather unhelpful, but you don’t realize it until you’ve wasted quite some time with them.

The solution? Let users rate and comment on the videos! Let me share my thoughts, so that others might benefit. It’s not going to make Lynda seem like a waste of time, if there’s some folks saying that this video was somewhat self-serving. Quite the contrary. I’m likely to spend my scarce time on Lynda much more usefully if I can read a couple reviews before diving in.

Having just recently bought our first home, we have discovered Seven Dees just a few blocks from us. It’s a huge home and garden center, and we’re probably rather lucky to live so close!

Yesterday, we learned about something they call the Planscaper. The idea is that you can have a chunk of your yard landscaped for a one-time fee of $500. But get this: they never come to your house. They don’t do any work for you at all! It’s definitely for the do-it-yourselfer crowd. So you’re probably wondering, if all you get is a sit-down session with a professional landscaper, who advises you based on a drawing of your yard… what makes it worth $500?

There’s the angle. In exchange for your $500, you get a $500 discount card at their store, plus 10% off after that. In other words, it’s basically free, as long as you’re likely to spend at least $500. Which you are!

It’s a neat idea, and a great way to get business going. They can basically offer a valuable service for free, knowing that it will pay for itself in increased business.

We’ve had a lot of potential clients contacting us lately about working on the design of their web applications. It makes sense, because we’ve done a lot of projects like this, both for past clients and for ourselves (Gone Raw, for example), so we know what it takes. We know how much work it is to write the code, and we know how much work it is to design the site.

And guess what? They’re both a lot of work. Which makes it surprising that many folks who contact us, looking for a design for their web application, are surprised at the estimate we give them. The design of the site often seems like an afterthought. Their first reaction is usually along the lines of “But realize, we aren’t asking you to write the code! We already have someone to write the code!” They then ask if we don’t maybe want to reconsider the cost.

Not really. Good design is a lot of work. You might not realize it, though. You may start your project by planning what the site has to do – perhaps by making a list of required functionality. In the case of a recipe sharing website, for example, you might list out things like “lets users enter a recipe,” or “lets users rate a recipe,” or “lets users sign up for an account.” It’s easy to see how these pieces of information might be stored in a database. It’s also easy to imagine the code needed to accomplish these things. And you can measure your results. Can I see the recipe I just added? Good. Then it’s working.

Design is, perhaps, a bit harder to quantify. You might not have things like “make sure users can find their way around easily,” or “make users feel warm and fuzzy with good color choices,” or “be sure visitors with poor vision can use the website” on your list. But you should! These things are very important, because there’s probably already a half dozen sites out there that already do exactly what you’re trying to do, maybe better. What’s going to make your experience more compelling? It just might be the design.

Jamis Buck and Michael Koziarski have started writing regular installments in their Rails Way blog. This is great, because what they’ve decided to write about is the nitty gritty of real-world Rails applications. This week, they’ve been taking apart the Tracks application, and showing ways that the code could be improved. If you’re a Rails programmer, you should be subscribed!

It was inevitable, really. When we made the decision to work on a website for sharing raw food recipes, we naturally started by looking at what was out there. And one of the first places we looked was Yahoo!. Surely, a section of their vast web empire was dedicated to sharing recipes!

Turns out, there wasn’t, which kind of surprised me. But just one month later, just as we released Gone Raw, Yahoo! Food was also launched, which included their take on recipe sharing. And even though there’s a lot of recipe sites out there, we were sure that Yahoo’s deserved a good close look.

And they did a good job. The presentation is wonderful, they got some nice interactivity without resorting to Flash, and it’s easy to navigate and use. Now, there’s no way this is going to hurt Gone Raw, of course. You’d be hard-pressed to find a raw food recipe on Yahoo!. But there’s a lot of recipes on there. What’s the catch?

The catch is that they aren’t Yahoo’s recipes! Every recipe has a “provider,” a list that includes Allrecipes.com, Cook’s Illustrated, Martha Stewart, Epicurious.com, Reader’s Digest, and even Kraft Foods! That’s the catch!! You can’t add your own recipe. You can’t share a recipe with a friend. What Yahoo has given us is essentially a “portal,” a way of presenting recipes from a dozen other sites with their own ads.

Suffice it to say that we won’t be losing any sleep over this one. While we’re happy to see this site, and we’ve gotten a lot of good ideas from it, we think Yahoo kind of missed an opportunity. And anyway, we’re happy to focus on pleasing a small community of healthy individuals, not everyone looking for any recipe about anything.

Gone Raw is here to stay!

Sorry, you just had to see this piece of an actual email I received the other day. What can I say but… awesome! Made my day!

designverb has an excellent how-to today on making your own business card holders out of paint chip samples. What a cool idea, and what a cool writeup!