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In my own little CMS project, my underling and I have started a conversation (argument) about underscores or hyphens in URLs and which is better for SEO. I have read the famed 2005 post claiming Google does not treat underscores as separators, however I have since read that now Google DOES read underscores. I have since my beginnings as a designer/coder used underscores and I am struggling to relunquish them for what seems like a zero sum argument between hyphens and underscores.

Anyone have time and an inkling to jump in and provide their own personal opinion or insight?

I want to publicly apologize to all the web team members for leaving them high and dry over the last month. I started a new job and then bought my first home right when the effort to get the new computer.org launched was heating up. It was horrible timing, but something that when it happens you have to roll with it. During the moving process I was without a computer or Internet (I know, take deep breaths) for almost two weeks. I was without TV for almost that long as well.

Anyways, I am now firmly settled into my geek paradise in the attic (home server, one XP laptop, one Hardy Heron laptop) and the sound of baby birds that are living somewhere in my roof?!

If the team will have me, I am ready to jump in and help out where ever possible.

We've been going crazy getting ready for the launch of this phase of the website redesign.  I hope to have more for you very soon.

Tonight, Ty and I were doing a bit of work, and I needed to show him how to use a particular part of the system.  (I probably could have just turned him loose and he would have been fine, but it makes me feel more important to have to "train" him -- even for 5 minutes. <grin>)  Ty is out east, and I'm in the Southern California area.  We both have reasonable broadband connections.

I sent him a text message using Skype and we agreed that this was the time to do it.  I clicked on the phone icon in skype and we changed to voice communication.  (actually he also had a webcam going, but he turned it off pretty quickly.  I use Skype with a webcam every morning - works just fine.)  He shared his desktop with me using Unyte and we walked through the application.  It worked out just fine.  He and I talked verbally and I could see his screen and what he was doing and point him in the right direction.

5 minutes and I'm feeling fine about him using this application.   The features we used in both Skype and Unyte were from the free versions - all this "cost" us was a bit of bandwidth through the internet connection we're already using.  Skype and Unyte - highly recommended.

www.skype.com

www.unyte.net

Arthur C. Clarke was a great visionary.  Many will know him best from 2001: A Space Odyssey, others from various novels and works.  He conceived of communications satelites in geosynchronus orbit long before other people.  While he didn't invent them, his novel The Fountains of Paradise described a space elevator, a concept I'd love to see come to fruition.

Clarke's Three Laws:
1. “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”
2. “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”
3. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Recently Ty evaluated the three presidential candidate websites.  Seems to be a popular task.  The daily sucker from www.webpagesthatsuck.com has an evaluation of the sites, as well as being able to vote for what you think of the sites.

He also evaluates

• Initial appearance.
• Contrast between text and background using AccessColor.
• HTML validation using The W3C Validation Service.
• CSS validation using The W3C Validation Service.
• Page size and Speed Report using The Web Page Analyzer.

 Check it out here

Sorry for the interruption -- we're rebuilding the Alfresco indexes.  We're putting in a cache between Alfresco and Liferay, and needed to rebuild the indexes to make Alfresco happy to deliver all of the files using NFS.

A new Nielsen missive reminds us of one of the major tenets of usability, "the designer is not the user". And regardless of how much the designer might know about the Internet and websites, they do not know the normal users and they are probably waaaay too advanced and knowledgeable when it comes to the web to depend on "what they think the user wants".

It is hard to separate yourself from a project, but you have to remind yourself that you do not know what the user wants or how they navigate any site. You have to sit them down, watch what they are doing (and trust me many times it is painful) and then learn and see what you need to do to facilitate or empower them to find what they need (or even what you want them to find).

Many times I have developed what I think is a simple, straight forward design, IA only to watch someone sit down and struggle and get frustrated or be completely lost when trying to find something I keep wanting to scream out and point them towards. Each time I do it, it reminds me of how important it is to get user input and feedback. It is ESSENTIAL or you will fail, simple as that.

I feel I need to respond to Lee's recent post related to my post since it appears I am the only person who understood my rant about CMS/vendors, etc. As stated, I bumped this up to a posting level so hopefully we can clear the air once and for all.

I did not mean to appear to support a DIY or "homegrown" solutions, in fact I feel that those are a very dangerous thing and in fact I feel like a OTS solution that is tinkered with too much can also be a major problem, case in point the current CS CMS.

My intention in that post was to APPLAUD the current efforts of the CS IT department and their handling of the new CMS/Portal rollout. My point was that a group of dedicated and talented people can pick an open-source platform and make it work. That you don't HAVE to have vendors, as Lee says when they are good they're great, when they're bad they can kill you. I was trying to say that I think some organizations get locked into the mindset that they default to a vendor-based solution and never think about gathering a team like the one at the CS and managing things more in-house.

Jeez, I hope that is clear...creatives and IT folks really don't speak the same language do they?!

In my new position I am inheriting a vendor-based situation so I will definitely share more of my thoughts (perhaps edited) as it unfolds. I think I am a control person and I feel better when things are done in my own house, by my own people. Plus I have had horrible luck with 80% of the vendors I have dealt with in my professional career, so maybe my wounds still run deep.