Joshua Allen Holm

Authored Comments

It is great that Image Comics is going DRM-free! Their redesigned website is nice, but the search feature seems to be a little wonky. I can only get <a href="http://www.brianwood.com/"> Brian Wood's Mara</a> to show up by searching for the creators' names!? Typing in Mara doesn't get me the Mara comic, but I do get several results (both series and creators) that contain mar*.

I really like GitHub's ChooseALicense.com; it makes it easy to select a license, but every time I see something like ChooseALicense.com, I think that someone really needs to create a <a href="http://movies.disney.com/schoolhouse-rock">Schoolhouse Rock</a> style animated short about open source licensing.

Not so keen on the the redesign for data.gov. I think they've <strong>oversimplified</strong> the site's navigation in favor of their search box. KISS designs can be good, but they've taken it a little too far. A government data website is the kind of thing that should have a fairly complex navigation scheme. The new design is nice, but still has some kinks to work out. I like most of the site's look, except for the text being rgb(105,105,105) instead of black. (I'm not a big fan of grey text on a white background.) What strikes me as kind of odd (and a little bit silly) is they want feedback, but the two options are Twitter and Quora!? Give us feedback, but only 140 characters of it! (Quora isn't so bad, obviously.) An open government website only asking for feedback through two private services (even if they are free) is odd when they could easily collect feedback via a contact us page in addition to the two options they've already given. Data.gov, the current site, has a contact us page, while the new site doesn't. If they want the discussion to be completely public, make a page with comments enabled (the site is running WordPress so that would be really easy). If you want feedback, don't make someone have to go through the effort of signing up for an account somewhere else just to give you an opinion.