Shuffling faces

Being interested in interactivity and interactive sites, I decided to search for some easy, intuitive interactive sites. I came upon this flash site that allows the viewer to morph peoples faces. It has a simple interface of just clicking the eyes, nose, mouth or the head or shoulders to change the image of the corresponding body part. Since there are multiple pictures of body parts that could be selected for the face, it seems like they wouldn't be able to make the different body parts visually fit with all the different faces and body parts without looking poorly done. This is the total opposite. The different shaped and sized eyes, mouths, and noses, although they look funny, fits well together. The mixing of the body parts doesn't look like a bad photoshop job or like frankenstein. There are 759,375 possible faces that could be made. Here are some examples of some faces that could be made. 

http://www.mono-1.com/monoface/main.html

PHP code for a simple shopping cart

While researching about web site shopping cart, I was curious how difficult building a shopping cart would be. I would like to try to see if I could implement this one my Interactive Tutorial website but gozips doesn't allow php code to be implemented. I came across this site that gives a very easy tutorial on how to make a php shopping cart.

The shopping cart uses the server-side language PHP and a MySQL database. Some of the code can be confusing to understand but if you look at it carefully it can be under stood. I have never coded in PHP before but I can kind of understand this segment of code setting up the database

1. CREATE TABLE books (
2. id int(6) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
3. title varchar(100) NOT NULL default '',
4. author varchar(100) NOT NULL default '',
5. price decimal(3,2) NOT NULL default '0.00',
6. PRIMARY KEY (id)
7. ) TYPE=MyISAM;

The id will be an integer with the maximum of 1 million books. I think the varchar(100) give the title and the author a 100 character maximum. The price decimal(3,2) makes the price a decimal with 2 decimal places and the maximum be $999.

This shopping cart will also give you a running total of the price and of how many items are in the shopping cart. It show you how to remove, update and add more items to your shopping cart.

http://v3.thewatchmakerproject.com/journal/276/building-a-simple-php-shopping-cart

Simplifying complicated search menus

As I was researching tutorial websites, I noticed that many of their websites are hard to navigate. It is extremely hard to try to search for certain tutorials on those sites. The tutorial websites either give you a list of all the tutorials they have or sometimes they might break the tutorials into categories. Even when they are broken down into categories, it can be difficult to navigate because of the shear amount of tutorials. It can also be hard to find exactly what you are trying to search for into words that would bring about the right tutorial.

I found wefeelfine which has a unique and intuitive search menu. You can look through a list of words that you want to search and then narrow your search even more by selecting ages and or genders. I think that this could be a good concept to have for a search on a tutorial website. It would give list of words that describes what the user is looking for and then allows them to narrow down the search easier than most websites.

The wefeelfine website searches for blogs on the web with certain key words and you can search for how many people are feeling a certain way.

Possibly a good book to learn how to design for Web 2.0

The term Web 2.0 describes a resurgence in the web economy and a new level of interactivity between the internet and the viewer.

The main idea of Web 2.0 is to make website more simplistic. The images and words that are selected for the website should be simple and concise enough to make sense. The images need to be more about communicating the message of the site and not just to decorate it. You should think of pixels as a resource that you have a limited supply of. You don't want to use too many pixels when you could do it with less.

Web 2.0 should be "simple, bold, and honest". This is why lots of web 2.0 sites are center. It feels more honest.

The book, Save the Pixel, looks like it could be a good read about designing for Web 2.0. It has 20 full web redesign case studies. It helps a designer learn to simplify web pages.

http://savethepixel.org/

A web site about Save the Pixel. It goes more into depth than the savethepixel.org.

http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/web-design/web-2.0-design-style-guide/