Have you ever wondered if there was an easier way to find content on your favorite websites? If your favorite websites support OpenSearch, then you may be in luck. OpenSearch is a set of technologies that allow you to search websites directly from browser with a simple click. In this post I am going to review how opensearch works, how to add it to your browser and the progress this technology has had in terms of adoption.
There is an ever increasing awareness of how much of our lives are captured and stored. Web sites track usage for a variety of reasons, for example on Summize we track usage, so we can fix bugs and improve the site. Web site usage tracking is not likely to change as sites depend on these logs to keep their systems running, fix problems, fight fraud and deal with many other issues.
Most of us never think about what is being collected or how how it will be used. At Summize we think it is important that you understand what is being collected and how it is used. For that reason we have added P3P support to our site. In this post I am going to address three questions about P3P:
Today we released a new color blind mode on Summize: read all about it.
Color blindness (or color deficiency) affects about 10% of males (and <1% of women). Take a look at how this Summize snip may appear to users with the most common variety of color deficiency, deuteranomaly ("green weakness"):
Yikes! As you can see, it is difficult to distinguish wretchedness from greatness from badness from swellness — only the yellow hue of so-so-ness differentiates itself. The effect is particularly distressing when looking at buzz:
The noteworthy transition from green to red user sentiment is completely lost.
In color blind mode, snips are rendered from black-to-white rather than red-to-green. Grayscale snips address all varieties of color blindness (even true color blindness of the rare monochromat).
This is the nutshell; please visit the color blind mode page on Summize to read a full account of our effort.
As you can imagine, after the initial launch of Summize we received "hate mail" from many visually distraught color blind users (one such user regarded our site a "torture chamber for the color blind"). To those users: we thank you for your advice and good humor; your feedback has gone directly into the new design.
What do you think?
