Lately, at work, within our department we’ve been discussing company culture. A while back, we read Delivering Happiness, the book by Tony Hsieh about the history of the company and culture of Zappos. A few months ago, a Googler accidentally posted an internal memo on Google+ that showed the world a lot about Google culture, especially with the fact that it was allowed to be left public and did not receive any negative repercussions (as far as we know). We’ve also been mulling over the Netflix culture presentation over the last few weeks. I love what I do and where I work, especially the team I work with and the department I work in. I’m always encouraged with a discussion about how we can improve workplace culture, so I was very interested to dive into a study of workplace culture and how the corporate presentation of culture and actual practice line up.
I wanted to use Google Chrome to create this post, but I had to use Safari
I started using a MacBook Pro a few months ago and haven’t had many issues with the transition. I’m finally getting used to the differences in how the operating system works and all the differences that you find out about as you go. Overall, it has been a good experience with the exception of all of the problems I have had with fonts. I have a font manager installed with way too many fonts and so I’ve been trying to pare them down to something more usable, but keep running into issues.
WordPress Font Messed Up in Google Chrome on Mac
The first issue I had was with the Arial font. It was installed, but not active (or something like that) and so sites using the Arial font ended up showing a serif font instead. As a web developer, it was a little frustrating, but wasn’t a great hindrance to browsing or productivity, however. After playing with the font manager for a while, I finally got Arial to show up.
Posting From WordPress to Google+
I’ve been working for the last few weeks to try and figure out an easy way to automatically add posts from my WordPress blog to my Google+ page. Hoping that someone else had already created a plugin, I searched in vain both in the WordPress plugins directory, as well as other WordPress sites and forums. I thought I had finally found a way, however, convoluted to be able to semi-automatically add a blog post to my Google plus page. However, it seems like every time I almost figure it out, there’s still one piece missing.A cool thing, though, is that if you use the Google+ badge on your site, you can +1 your post (which you should do anyway for all of your posts, right?) which then allows you to share the post on your wall. It’s an extra step, but it makes it easy for you to easily share your latest post on your Google+ page.
Exploring Standard Ad Unit Sizes: Google AdSense 120×600 Skyscraper
Next up in the series of posts on Google AdSense ad sizes are the ads in the Google Adsense “Other – Vertical” banner category, starting with the 120×600 skyscraper. The reason the ad unit is called a skyscraper is because it is tall and thin and can dominate the space, like an actual, physical skyscraper. This ad unit is not in the AdSense top 4 recommended sizes and is listed in the Delisted Standard Ad Units category of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Ad Unit Guidelines. Microsoft Advertising, however, continues to list the 120 x 600 – Skyscraper as part of its standard ad unit sizes, both for marketers and agencies, as well for small and medium businesses.
The original skyscraper was thinner than the current commonly used version of the skyscraper, to accommodate the small side rails in the layouts of many web sites. As site design has changed and elements, including sidebars, of site layouts have gotten larger, the Google AdSense 160×600 Wide Skyscraper has become the more prominently used ad unit.
Exploring Standard Ad Unit Sizes: Google AdSense 300 x 250 – Medium Rectangle
CNN Web page has 300x250 Display Ad in the right sidebar
This is the first of a series of posts on Google AdSense ad sizes. The main reason I’m doing this is for my own reference. There won’t necessarily be any great insight or advice on how to use these ads. It is mainly a test environment so I can see all of the current AdSense options in action.
Four Recommended Ad Sizes
AdSense has four main recommended AdSense ad unit sizes, which are the following:
- 300 x 250 – Medium Rectangle
- 336 x 280 – Large Rectangle
- 728 x 90 – Leaderboard
- 160 x 600 – Wide Skyscraper
The 300×250 – Medium Rectangle
This ad can contain either text ads or banner ads. This ad unit can be seen throughout the Internet on web sites everywhere and is not only the main recommended size by Google AdSense, but also by the Yahoo! Advertising Network, Microsoft Advertising and the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
Noah Iliinsky – The Steps to Beautiful Visualizations
UIE Web App Master’s Tour – Seattle, Washington – May 23, 2011
Noah Iliinsky - The Steps to Beautiful Visualizations
How do you start from a mountain of data and create something presentable that conveys the message?
Analysis vs Presentation
Data Visualization vs Infographic
Data Visualizations are generated
Infographics are designed (manually drawn)
Education vs Persuasion
Education distributes information without a message
Persuasion has an agenda
Complexity
The number of different information axes represented
Large number of targets
Finite number of visual properties
Qualitative relationships are more difficult to represent because there are no standards and the reader has to be educated before the reader can understand the data.
Intentional choices are superior to arbitrary choices. You need to make intentional choices when presenting data, not just use a template of what you’ve done before.
