I am now posting links to blog articles that I find interesting. They should be coming up now on my blog’s sidebar and RSS feed. By the way, I am sorry for spamming links earlier. I wanted to post links to all my shared items in google reader. Unfortunately, this meant that people subscribed to my RSS feed would see an abnormal amount of activity.

Now that I have my shared items importing to my blog, you should be able to unsubscribe from my google reader feed. All the shared items in google reader should also appear as links in the jkwiens.com RSS feed. Additionally, now that I’m posting these links, you will be able to comment on them directly from my blog.

jkwiens.com has finally undergone another facelift. I was starting to get really sick of the old design. The site was starting to get really cluttered and messy. The new design is very loosely based on Warped Visions’ design. Warped Vision’s design is simple… but professional. This is exactly what I wanted in the new design. I was able to maintain the essence of the old design while drastically simplifying the layout. I still have a lot of work to do on the site, but it is a significant improvement (I think).

It seems a bit counter-intuitive that a simple professional design would be so difficult to design. Simple professional design is all in the subtleties. When your site is more complex, you have more opportunities to distinguish yourself when compared to a novice designer. A novice designer would make a complex site unusable. The reason for this is because of the sheer number of “design decisions” that go into a complex site. When you compound all the non-optimal design decisions a novice designer makes, you end up with a messy and unusable design. Since a professional designer would make fewer non-optimal design decisions (and certainly wouldn’t allow the problems to compound), the differences in the sites would be obvious. However, when you reduce the amount of design decisions in a site, what distinguishes you from a novice? The answer is “not very much”.

The key to simple designs is in making subtle design decisions. This is the difference between a simple site designed by a professional and a novice. A novice wouldn’t waste his time making subtle decisions. However, these subtle decisions compound. When a professional makes his font color #222222, a novice would leave it as black. When a professional plays with the spacing pixel by pixel, a novice would set it to an arbitrary value. This is why simple designs are so hard. You have to be absolutely annal about your design. In a complex site, you can afford to overlook subtle design decisions. However, you don’t get that luxury with simple designs.

I am proud to unveil a new support system that I have been developing at bugz.jkwiens.com. The project is still under development, but the base functionality is complete. I would appreciate any comments that you may have with the site. I am always looking for ways to improve it.

The big question that everyone is probably wondering is “Why build a support system?”. A support system isn’t an original idea. If I needed a support system, why not use an open source project or buy one. Well… the answer is that I’m a programmer. We build things so that we can learn from them. In this case, I wanted to learn python and django. However, even though I was building it for the hell of it, I still wanted to create something useful. Since I had an existing project called Simplaris Blogcast which needed a support system, it became an ideal project. Additionally, I had already designed a support system for Trinity Western University. This meant that I could focus on learning django instead of worrying about design decisions.

Wolfram|Alpha, which is a computational knowledge engine, just launched today. If you haven’t heard about it, wikipedia has a nice explanation.

Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine, as it does not look up answers to queries on an index of web pages or documents. Queries and computation requests are posed to it via a text field, like for a search engine, but it computes answers and relevant visualizations on the fly from a knowledge base of curated, structured data. Alpha thus differs from semantic search engines, which index a large number of answers and then try to match the question to one. Wolfram Alpha synthesizes knowledge by making advanced inferences from a smaller set of core information.

This search engine is a game changer. It is absolutely amazing what this search engine can do. It won’t replace google, but I think it will change how we get information.

I composed a list of interesting searches. I would also be interested in seeing your own favorite searches.

• Jeffrey – Stats on people named Jeffrey
• Macaroni and Cheese – Nutrition Facts about Macaroni and Cheese
• 5*y” + t^2*y = t, y(0)=2, y’(0)=1 – Solves the differential equation
• lord of the rings book – General Information about the book
• tokyo – Map, Population, and other general information
• carbon steel, red brass – Comparing Composition of Materials
• unemployment rate US, Canada, Mexico – Comparing Unemployment Rates