Give ’em what they want

The link to vote for Clagnut is up and running. I notice Jeremy isn’t among my fellow shortlistees, which was something of a surprise (not that the others aren’t worthy, you understand).

Bowing under the pressure of his readers (‘and because he really, really loves us’), Zeldman has stopped his third party links opening in a named window. And about time too. While I admire the man and his work, I always found this practice irritating and the named window method only served to confuse things further.

If I did want a link to open in a new window, I’m perfectly capable of doing that myself. I don’t need other people to do it for me, especially when I didn’t ask them to. And if did want a link opened up elsewhere, it would be in a tab not a window.

And this also applies to all those other sites out there who think that by opening a new window for me, I won’t be leaving their site. Wrong. All you do is make it more difficult for me to get back to your site, because you’ve just broken my back button.

37signals have designed a Better Google. Unlike their other Better… redesigns. this one (understandably) makes very few changes, but does make an excellent suggestion.

How can you know if “african coffee trade” is a better search than “africa’s coffee trading” when you’re doing research? You can’t possibly know, but Google can.

And so Google could look at your search terms, suggest some slight variations and show how many results you’d get for those searches. Of course Google might well say ‘Whoa, no thanks. That means our number of searches treble overnight’. But it’s a neat idea.

Talking of Zeldman and 37signals, the Z-man points to a [corrected 15/05] 37signals-designed personal project: Colouir. Looks lovely, but I reckon it could be better if the zoomed image didn’t open in a new window; it could instead expand over the thumbnails and description, with a little [-] graphic to close it again (maybe even animating the transistion – that would be nice).