Handy pointers

This month in DigitalWeb mag, Jeff Lash talks about using Information Architecture to promote business goals as well as user needs:

Using information architecture to meet business goals by focusing on user needs not only proves your professional worth, but makes users happy and helps businesses succeed – something that wouldn’t be possible by a focus on users alone.

For those of you so inclined, SitePoint has a handy article on mod_rewrite: A Beginner’s Guide to URL Rewriting. mod_rewrite is an important tool in securing database-driven sites and making them search engine friendly.

Want to buy a book or two on usability? John S. Rhodes talks about his Eight Favorite Usability Books on WebWord. I have to agree with his number 1 – Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug is simply wonderful (and wonderfully simple).

The Register is on a mini-crusade to highlight the bad boys of cross-browser support in online banking. Kudos to Lloyds TSB; pants to NatWest.

Spam goes from bad to refers. A few weeks ago I noticed in my referrers log a referral from some page on mastodonte.com. The page in question was a sales pitch trying to persuade me to sign up with this company who seed referral logs with links. Yep even our referral logs are not sacred from the spammers. It seems I’m not the only one to be pissed off by this. I’ll be filtering mastodonte out of my logs in future. While we’re talking about referral mechanisms, Dean has published his referral code (like mine, it’s written in PHP).