larryaronson.com

Two new Web browsers have recently become available for exploring the Internet. Google Chrome and Flock take radically different approaches to the browsing experience and I recommend you take a look at them when you get a chance.

Google Chrome is a minimalist’s browser. It doesn’t offer a multitude of features, but it’s very fast and solid as a rock. It relies heavily on tabs when visiting different sites and each tab runs in its own process. This keeps the browser from crashing from a page error or some misbehaved plug-in, and prevents pages in the background from slowing down the foreground window. I like Chrome’s history function. When you open a new tab or window it displays thumbnails and links to your most recently vistited pages.

Chrome offers a single address bar for both URLs and keywords. Google is the default search engine, but it can be switched to others—Wikipedia, Aol, Yahoo, etc. The address bar has a fast auto-suggest function. For flying around the Web from site to site, Chrome is a jet fighter. However, if you mostly stay put on a collection of actively fed “home” pages, Flock may be the browser for you. It’s a mega-cruise ship.

Flock is Firefox on social media steroids. Flock takes a framed approach to visiting the Social Media Web, grabing feeds from places, such as: Facebook, Twitter and MySpace into sidebars and YouTube selections into a headband. Flock works best opened full-screen on a big, wide, LCD display. Beware! The shear number and variety of tool bars, control tabs, bookmarks, menus and search boxes can overwhelm.

Flock, by default, remembers the sites you had loaded when you last quit and reopens them. It also opens a generated page, “My World” that captures all your various feeds, messages and pings.  I like the way Flock integrates with Gmail, and find it useful as an “active desktop” – a one-stop site that I scan every so often to keep in the mix as I’m doing other work. Flock pops-up a standard blog editor when I want to post something and just about anything can be shared with a drag-n-drop action.

The online support documentation provided by the these two new browsers also provide a facinating contrast. Google wrote a Chrome comic book that teaches you how to use Chrome with a technical depth that’s actually readable. Flock has uploaded a series of youTube videos showing Flock’s Features in action. Check it out, you’ll get a better idea of what Flock is like and I won’t have to insert a screenshot here.

Google Chome is only available now for Windows. When it becomes available for the Mac, I’ll probably be using both Flock and Chrome more often than Firefox and Safari.

— Larry

Here are some of the sites I’ve designed and built for clients in the commercial and fine arts. I offer them as examples of the simple, static, Web 1.0 sites, done very quickly for friends a few years ago. Today it’s much easier and more effective to establish an online presence using Web 2.0 tools and social media services.

Suzearts is the online showcase for my best friend, Susan Thornton, who creates wonderful images from the land and sky scapes of New Mexico and Fire Island. We put this simple site together in an afternoon several years ago for the New York Licensing show. Today, you can do a lot more to showcase art and music by using services such as flickr and photobucket, to organize and tag your art, and social media services like Facebook and Twitter to promote your work across a web of networks, groups and friends.

Mick Kolodgy Fine Art

is an online gallery of his paintings. I developed the horizontal gallery design with rollover menus at both ends and tied it all together with a compact image caching and navigation scheme written in Javascript. This was fun to build but I can’t advise artists that having your own showcase site is the best way to leverage the Web anymore. There are many web services companies that want and need your content; provide a wide range of options for organizing, displaying and selling it; can boost your search engine juices and connect you to networks, groups and forums of people interested in what you do.

Smart Medical Consumer

Smart Medical Consumer is a new Web-based service business conceived and designed by a remarkable person, Banu Özden, providing free health issue forums, resource directories, secure medical document storage and a sophisticated medical records manager.

I designed and programmed the records manager, MySMC, which was released this Spring in a limited, early beta version. MySMC is a LAMP application with HTML, CSS and AJAX, on the front, and a MySQL database with Perl CGI on the back. It manages health service provider invoices, insurance claim benefit statements and patient payment receipts.

MySMC features easy input and editing, strong searching and reporting, automatic error detections and comparison checks. Each registered MySMC user can define any number of patients making the system usable by individuals, families, organizations and companies.

Riverside Marketing Strategies

This is the website of a wonderful, online marketing consultant, Heidi Cohen. The design and layout was done by Michael Pinto of Very Memorable Media who provided a Photoshop file to work from. Ms. Cohen set precise standards for usability and searchability. The resulting collaboration resulted in a near perfect website.

Pass Open Records

This blog, subtitled: A Movement to Lift the Lid on Pennsylvania Government is an initiative of the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association. I did the blog installation and configuration using WordPress, adapting and modifying a third party theme, Misty Look, under contract to Howard Greenstein who provided the association with the online strategy and training to make them bloggers. The project was conceived and designed by BravoGroup, a specialist in government communications.

I’ve known Howard since the early days of Silicon Alley. We’ve worked together on several dot-org projects and it was a pleasure to finally work with him, B2B, on a project.

Welcome to LarryAronson.com, my professional and personal blog.

2007 was a busy year with good news and interesting projects.

Best wishes to everyone for a happy new year.

larry