Steve Jobs gave an interview today at D5 on some of the new developments at Apple Inc., including the forthcoming iPhone, the new Apple TV with YouTube, and the new version of iTunes that offers music without digital rights management, a.k.a. copy protection.

At one point, interviewer Walt Mossberg observes that the popularity of iTunes (for Windows) has made Apple one of the biggest developers of Windows software around – ironically. Steve’s reply:

“That’s right. … It’s like offering a glass of ice water to people in hell.”

Love it.

I just returned from a three day conference on our favorite web programming framework, Ruby on Rails. It’s nice to take some time to do a little learning – I felt like I was in a semester-long class, crammed into three days! But I have come back full of ideas and inspiration, and hope to share a bit with you, fair reader.

One of the phrases I kept hearing over the last three days was Google Juice. Wikipedia defines this as “the ability or power of a website to turn up in Google searches. A website that commonly turns up as the first or second entry in a variety of searches — especially for keywords that are not part of the site’s name — can be said to have a lot of Google juice.” This is something every site wants, so how do we get more of it?

One of the talks I particularly enjoyed was by Dan Benjamin, author of Cork’d, among other things. This was a talk on “Building Community-Focused Apps,” and was largely an account of what he learned from his experiences with Cork’d. And a big part of building a site like that is getting users, because without users, a community website is pretty worthless. Having build Gone Raw ourselves, we’re very interested in these kinds of websites.

One of his tips was that you need to care a lot about your Google ranking for every page of your site. It’s very common for someone to build a site and worry about how it shows up in Google when you search for the “gist” of the site. For example, if you search for “raw food recipes,” Gone Raw does come up on the first page, and that’s great. But not if you search for raw foods. Is this important? Yes, but not as important as you might think.

What’s more important, for sites like this, is how the many individual pages come up in searches. If you search for “raw bread,” we also come up on the first page. Search for “raw onion bread,” and we’re first on the list. This is critical, because more and more frequently, we get new users on the site because they were searching for a particular phrase or set of words that appears in our many recipes or forum topics. And this, more than any other factor, drives new traffic to Gone Raw these days.

So remember, every word of every page is valuable on your site. Not just the home page, or the name of your site, or a few keywords. The text of every single page has the potential to bring you new visitors.

Well, it’s that season, and another O’Reilly conference is approaching. I can tell by the sudden increase in spam of the “see us in booth 217” type. Which is unfortunate, I’m quite capable of walking the convention floor myself, thank you, and I’m not going to be encouraged to seek out booth 217 no matter how strange your company name sounds.

I’m going to skip my complaining about how O’Reilly never asks for permission to sell my email address, and skip directly to the poor design behind their conference schedule. It gets the job done, but not well enough, as evidenced by this year’s conference planning application online. Yes, “MyConfPlan” does everything your normal HTML table does, but actually lets you set up an account and indicate which talks you’re going to. What a great idea!

Why doesn’t O’Reilly do this? I’m not sure. They seem to pass right over all the great web-based ideas for enhancing their conferences, instead handing out a small phone book at sign-in. Does anyone actually use this book? It’s just that many dead trees and waste. We’re talking about quite possibly the world’s most nerdy group of programmers, getting together for three days! These are people who haven’t picked up a Yellow Pages since they lived with Mom.

Get with the times, O’Reilly!

Kevin and Kimberly at Left Turn Studio capture breath-catching photographs that are crisp, lively and real. Known best for their legendary wedding photography that has graced the covers and pages of countless magazines, Left Turn Studio brings energy, professionalism and tons experience to their shoots. Here at Needmore, we recently had the pleasure of Kevin and Kimberly documenting Ray and Kandace’s special day and we were delighted, in turn, to design around Left Turn’s lovely images.

Paul and Renee at Waxing Moon Candles create lovely and incredible-smelling hand poured, vegetable wax candles. We put on the finishing touches and launched their website this last week, in the midst of wedding flurry and mayhem. Their site, however, is an oasis of soft color and candles so vibrant you may find yourself sniffing your screen. Lemongrass, bergamot, rosemary, lavender…we’re warning you…the essential oils in their candles find their way over the ether.

I write a lot of code, be it HTML, JavaScript, CSS, PHP, Ruby, or whatever. I probably spend half the day in my text editor of choice. Consequently, I’ve become quite the aficionado of good fixed-width typefaces. And my favorite, these days, is Microsoft’s Consolas.

Here you can see it compared to my old standby, Monaco. Monaco is a good font – it comes with Mac OS for free, and it looks good at small sizes. But with my 30” display, I can stand to have a font that’s a little larger – 14 point seems to work well.

My favorite feature of this font is its italics. Just look at that! Monaco doesn’t even have italics – many fixed-width fonts don’t. But italics come in very handy, and I find Consolas’ very helpful, legible, and even kind of cute! It’s a bit of a departure for a programming font, but I like it.