Out on a Stormy Night
We left home in a subdued, late-afternoon sunshine, picnic in tow and appetite cranked up, hoping for a mellow setting and a dry patch of grass. By the time we reached the Brooklyn Bridge Park, however, hope had faded, replaced by menacing clouds and a bone-chilling westerly wind.
Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan
We setup our kikois anyways and endured the freezing evening while strange clouds zoomed past us and Manhattan sank into darkness. There were good reasons for us to hunker down, as we soon discovered. Marie had chosen our charcuterie masterfully and the simple saucisson, cow milk cheese and orange-peel-flavored paté de campagne were divine, and blended perfectly well with a contraband white wine, if maybe a touch sweet as all Rieslings but nice and clean-cut nonetheless.
So we ate and watched and talked and shivered and analyzed the sky and took deep breaths. While the walls are closing in and threatening to crush one, it's always good to seek open spaces and a wider perspective, to broaden the scope of one's worries and mingle with a world that has not yet been overwhelmed by defeat and petty failures. There, in the glory of all things daily but often ignored, lay the
Blogger Takes a Step in the Right Direction
All web traffic is, I believe, driven by three factors:
1 - Pure content. Speaks for itself; if a user is seeking information, then relevance and quality are prime retention triggers.
2 - Look and feel. This is my description of user experience. The site's interface, design, color scheme and interactivity level are key.
3 - Speed. 'nough said. If it ain't loading, I ain't staying.
I suppose each web surfer has a personal recipe involving the above three ingredients. Some people favor speed above all else, others just care about content. Me, I like a smooth balance - and I must admit I have a sweet spot for the look and feel. Bad design, broken links, boring pages and lack of interactivity are my deal breakers.
Of course it wasn't always that way. The web was, for a long time, a very bleak, static place. But the recent coming of a Web 2.0 attitude and its Ajax magic wand changed everything. Web 2.0 was the designers' response to the fact that people were bored on the web and wanted to have fun. They wanted to be engaged and entertained. Web design became more polished, interfaces were tweaked, interactivity took on a major
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