Jakob Nielsen, famous for his lists on usability offers some suggestions on Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes. I have to agree with him on the calendar issue. One of the reasons that you don’t see one hear is that I think calendars are actually a fairly useless way to navigate a weblog. The exception would be if you were running a political or current events blog, where users would expect to find relevant information about an event that occured on a particular day.

I live in British Columbia Canada, where right now our Provincial Government is involved in a battle with our K-12 teachers. In a nutshell, the teachers and province were attempting to negotiate a new collective agreement, when the government decided that the two sides were so far apart that they would impose a contract, thus denying the teachers the opportunity to negotiate. So the teachers decided to walk off the job which was followed by the government declaring the strike illegal. The teachers then decided that they would remain on strike, defying the court order to return to work. This was followed by the provincial goverment freezing the assets of the union, meaning that the teachers’ union can no longer pay their members strike pay.

In my opinion, this is a horrible way to treat our teachers. First off, they deserve the right to negotiate a contract, and failing the ability to negotiate a deal, they deserve the right to strike and withhold their services.

Our teachers play an important role in shaping the minds of our youth, by engaging, inspiring and challenging them. I have a long list of teachers who have impacted my life, but one really stands out.

I would not be where I am today if it were not for my grade nine math teacher Mr. Attiana. One day, a TRS-80 computer was placed in his classroom. He had never used a computer before, but promised us that by the end of the semester he would teach us all how to make computer programs. “How cool was that” I thought. Sure enough, by the end of the term, myself and a few other of my math classmates were cranking out simple programs.

In my grade 10 year, I once again had Mr. Attiana as a math teacher, and this year he was given an Apple II. He continued to teach us as much as he could, but probably realizing that we were learning at a faster pace than he could teach us, he began to keep his classroom open for a couple hours after school each day so we could have greater access to the school computer and learn at our own paces. He didn’t have to do this, but he did.

What Mr. Attiana did was he created an engaging environment where we could learn and discover a new passion. For me, the discovery of this passion has lead me for my entire career, and I will never forget his contribution to my happiness.

It always pisses me off to hear people make the comment that “those who can do, those who can’t teach”. People who choose to teach as a career do it because they love to teach. They inspire, engage and help us discover our passions.

It’s for this reason that they deserver our support and our gratitude.

Do you have a similar story about a teacher who has left an indelible mark on you? I’d love to hear it, so post your comment here.

The blog at A Venture Forth is offering a list of the Top 10 Ajax Applications currently available on the net. For the most part his list is very complete, although I would suggest that he is missing the most impressive one which is Zimbra, an open-source collaboration server with an awesome AJAX based GUI.

Microsoft Team RSS Blog has stirred up quite the controversy over The orange RSS icon. They are looking to create an icon for the upcoming release of IE 7.0 and are asking for input on the five icons they have shortlisted. There has been much discussion on the icon in the comments below the post, but for me, I don’t really care what the icon looks like, but rather what it does when I click on it.

Right now, RSS has a huge usability problem. For example, I needed to write a bookmarklet to subscribe to an RSS feed using Google Reader. If I want to use Bloglines or MSN Start I need to use other bookmarklets. To me, this is the bigger issue that needs to be sorted out. Extensions and Bookmarklets are not the answer IMHO. My dad or brother who I consider to be average computer users don’t know how to install or use bookmarklets or extensions – so I consider these solutions to have their own usablility problems.

I hope the browser makers can get together and collectively agree on how to deal with this usability issue, beyond supporting their own proprietary solutions (ie. integrated RSS readers in their own browsers like Safari and Firefox). I’ll start holding my breath now!

Squidoo is a new, about to be released, Web 2.0 application by a company lead by Seth Godin. Seth is the former VP of Direct Marketing for Yahoo, and the author of a great book called Unleashing the Ideavirus.
Squidoo will be a site that aims to make it easy for you to create, share and discover meaning online. It will be a co-op of experts, called lensmasters, who build lenses on topics they care about. The lensmasters will create pages with links to sites that they feel are extremely relevent about the topics they care about. There is also an interesting revenue model that will help good lensmasters generate cash from their love of their topic(s).

Although the site is not yet available for public consumption, the Squidoo Blog has posted a PDF document called Everyone is an Expert that explains the ideas behind this neat new service.

Remember The Milk is a new AJAX-based Todo list manager that might just help you organize your day and workgroup. Lots of great features including the price – FREE!

Instant Rails is a cool project that provides developers with a contained sandbox for working with Ruby on Rails. In fact, Instant Rails is a one-stop Rails runtime solution containing Ruby, Rails, Apache, and MySQL, all preconfigured and ready to run. No installer is needed as you simply drop it into the directory of your choice and run it.

A Japanese blogger has posted a technique for Drawing your ToDo List the Stress-Free Way. The method simply has you draw larger circles or bubble around the largest tasks and smaller circles around the smallest tasks, allowing you to visuallize your day.

Erik Veenstra presents a very complete tutorial describing how to Distribute Rails Applications.

CollaborativeRank is a del.icio.us search engine that ranks results based upon how many other people have bookmarked a particular resource.