Alex Le’s Blog

I’m always a huge fan of the Last.FM site. I love the idea, the tracking ability, the community aspect (even though i don’t use this much, but they do have a very active community), and especially the design. They changed the design last year sometimes and it rocked! I absolutely love the bold, solid, no-compromising blood red they chose. The layout was SO clean and beatifully crafted. Now they changed, again, for better or for worse. I voted better for functionalites but worse for the graphics.

First of all, this new gradient red/ white color theme makes me feel the site is somehow … cheaper. The white buttons from before now becomes something like grey - a much less vivid color than the original pure white. The shiny gradient is not that special whatsoever. Technically speaking, playing with 1 single color is a lot harder to make things look nice and clean, which one thing the previous design has done so well. The added gradient for this last.fm version 3 something just kills it.

About the new boxy design: it sucks. Look at the title! Another windows XP and windows media player design clone! I’m tired of looking at the WinXP GUI already (I’m using the Classics theme for windows by the way, no shady blue gradients allowed!), now the Last.FM team just shoved it there.

Talking about advertising effectiveness: the new text-ads area for the advertising is very obscured from the view. The old one nicely blended the advertising into the page, when one scans through the page, s/he can read the ads at the same time. The new advertising box is just off to the right side, away from the eye-scannable area. And the new text-ads have the look of being endorsed by LastFM, don’t you think? I suspect that Last.FM will loose lots of clicks with this design. And I wonder since when they switched to AdBrite instead of Adsense.

Personally I think the old design works so much better and visually more appealing. After much said and criticism, I still have to admit that I’m addicted to Last.FM no matter what.

First, look at this screenshot of www.petsorfood.com

Is this for real? Humh, I’d to have a slice of the Komodo Dragon then, rare and bloody. I wonder if this is a pratical joke or another crazy and outrageous idea from this one guy Sidney Zwibel, the self-claimed entrepreneur behind ClickMonkeys.com.

I’m still waiting on my order to complete…

Besure to read the Testinomials, they are hilarious in some mysterious ways similar to the mysterous meatloaf at at NY school in one of the testinomials…

Check out this artilce at instructables.com about making a solar fan.
Incidentally, I just bought 2 solar fans for 2 of my friends for $14.99 a pop plus a hefty $7 something for shipping. The package is still in the mail but this raise the interest of the relevance of the instructables’ usefullness and its articles and community’s growth.

I have known about instructables a while ago as it’s another web2.0 company, and you have to read about some web2.0 companies at some points in time (I regularly follow UnderTheRadar.com and SiliconeBeat.com blogs.) The idea of instructables.com is such a good one that everyone knows that someone’s gonna do it. There are lots of people out that with interesting ideas and pet projects that they are willing to share, and there are even more people who’ll be curious to keep on reading what’s on.

Even though Wikipedia provides a way of free knowledge contributions, one thing for sure is instructables.com handles users’ input much better than wikipedia.com as there is a higher level of community-driven factor. Moreover, instructables.com has better support for graphics and images to make the artible more visually attractive and clear (the on-photo-comments is a great feature to have) as a picture worths a thousand words. Comments are generally welcome, making the community interaction even better.

I’d say instructables.com’s success in terms of scaling up and a stronger community driven by the noble purpose of knowledge sharing is guaranteed, it’s just a matter of time and words of mouth.

After another all nighter, I proudly announce the release of Stripe Designer 0.1 for Web 2.0. I guess you have seen those stripes of Web 2.0 applications and wonder how they did it. Or in case you already know how to make those stripes in Photoshop, you know it would take a while to actually make them. Now behold … here comes Stripe Designer to the rescue.

I won’t be explaining much for now as Stripe Designer is a product of merely 4 hours of my sleeping time — it’s not primetime for the big trumpet announcements and big-word proclamation. Just have a look at the Flash demo and give it a shot at Stripe Designer. I will do some more work on the interface and adding more features to it, or even write an article on the coding part (if there are enough requested, I mean just ask)