We just launched a revised version of our home page. The redesign took about 2 days from paper to screen to launch.

New on the left, old on the right.

The goal was to tighten up the design, say more with less words, and hone our overall message. We wanted to shine the spotlight on our current three paying apps (Basecamp, Backpack, and Campfire). The redesign also gave us an opportunity to commit to a new typeface we’ve been itching to use for a while now. I see we’re not the only ones who like that type.

There was one other goal: begin to unify the design, layout, and HTML/CSS of our corporate and product sites. This new design will serve as a template for our redesigned product sites which we’ll begin to roll out in 2007.

It feels good to start with a clean CSS slate. New sheet, no legacy. New foundations are fun to build.

Time’s Best Inventions 2006 has some neat stuff:

Janjaap Ruijssenaars air mattress uses a matching set of repelling magnets, built into the bed and the floor below, to support ~2,000 lbs.

The Wovel snow shovel on a wheel clears snow with a fraction of the effort and is safer on your back too. People in snowy climes will, um, wove it.

Attach radio-frequency-emitting tags to your keys or other easily lost possessions and use Loc8tor to point you in the right direction (within an inch of your item) while the tag itself beeps.

CeeLite’s paper-thin, flexible lightbulb “sheets” are funky. See a video clip of Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers drum kit hooked up with CeeLite panels.

It’s not on Time’s list but here’s another smart gadget idea: Twist & Spout fits virtually any soda or water bottle with a screw-on cap. Use the Garden style to create an instant watering can.

One more: Ecopod is a home recycling center with compaction and collection.

PlainSimple

PlainSimple’s journal is a nice minimalist offering from Utah designer Gilbert Lee.

College Humor’s weekly roundup email

College Humor filters through thousands of submissions and offers the top three in its weekly roundup email. The 1-2-3 and out approach is a nice alternative to the clutter filled newsletters that most companies send.

Demetri Martin

In this email, comedian Demetri Martin cuts to the chase.

Got an interesting screenshot for Signal vs. Noise? Send the image and/or URL to svn [at] 37signals [dot] com.

Via Hemmy.net.

Sometimes during software development you need to hack something together temporarily just to see it working. You have no intention of leaving it like that.

We recently needed to add an email field to something we’re working on. And to make sure we didn’t forget about it we made it ridiculous.

Now it works, but we can also tell it’s not finished. And we can have a laugh about it.

There are other techniques too. You could set up a CSS class called “temporary” that throws a ugly thick purple border around things you know are temporary.

Or you could just keep a log somewhere, but we think it’s better to show the temporariness on the screen itself instead of on a piece of paper that may or may not be accurate and comprehensive.

What techniques have you used to keep ugly temporarily-necessary hacks from slipping into your final release?

There should be an alternative to one-size-fits-all RSS feeds for busy sites. Too many high-volume sites assume everyone wants to read every post. That’s wishful thinking. Some readers may want 5+ posts a day from your site, but what about moderate fans who only want 5 posts a week? Or casual fans who want a mere 5 posts a month? These people just want a glass of water yet sites insist on pointing a firehose at them.

The RSS avalanche
In All Feeded Up, Khoi discusses the challenge of surviving the RSS avalanche:

I’ve collected so damn many RSS feeds that, when I sit down in front of the application, it’s almost as difficult a challenge as having no feed reader whatsoever. With dozens and dozens of subscriptions, each filled with dozens of unread posts, I often don’t even know where to start.

In the past, friends have advised me to just narrow my list down to a manageable number of essential subscriptions — a bare few that I can consume easily, day in and day out. But every time I try to do that, I find that I can’t really bear to get rid of most of these feeds. They all seem essential, and I’m loathe to give any of them up. Of course, I understand the corollary of that reluctance: refusing to part with most of these feeds means I’ll probably continue to benefit from very few of them.

I don’t think he’s alone. A lot of people want to keep up with what’s going on at a specific RSS feed but don’t have the time to read everything there. So people wind up following the advice of Khoi’s friends — ruthless pruning of any feed deemed inessential, even though some of the content there is desired.

If content was filtered better, these on-the-fence sites would at least have a chance to stick around. Here are a few options for filtering RSS feeds so they’re not just an all or nothing proposition for readers:

The author decides
In this approach, authors decide which posts qualify for a “greatest hits” feed. Those top posts are published separately in an abridged, cream-of-the-crop feed.

For example, Gawker blogs, which usually publish double digit posts per day, tag noteworthy posts “top” and then people can subscribe to this tag instead of the entire feed (top stories at Lifehacker and Idolator, for example).

There’s a big difference between trying something and using something.

Trying something is more common than using something. That’s why most products are optimized for trying.

Trying something is looking at some screenshots, signing up, playing with it for a couple of minutes, forming an opinion, and then moving on. Trying is mainly about first impressions and surface appeal.

Most product reviews are based on trying something, not using something. That’s why many reviews are pretty thin or don’t get to the core essence of the product. The real deep knowledge of a product can only come from using it. Using it is what reveals greatness or failure on an intimate level.

You don’t notice the quirks and shortcuts when you try something. Those revelations only come from real use. Eye candy shines during trial, but fades fast during use. Cool wears off quick, usefulness never does.

Think of the difference between something painted gold and something made of gold. They’re both gold now, but once the paint wears off the first one you’re looking at something different. On the other hand the solid gold one continues to be gold no matter how much you use it.

In some ways it’s the difference between meeting someone and knowing someone. You don’t know someone until you’ve really spent some time with them. How do they react in certain situations? Are they kind or only friendly on the surface? Are they smart or can they just recite a few facts? The same goes for a product. How does the product react? Is the product just clever enough or is it too clever? How does the product make you feel when you use it?

... I don’t know how to end this post, but I’ve been sitting on the content for about a week now so I figured I’d share it as is. It’s been a frustrating post to put together and I’m not sure why. I’m having a difficult time clearly explaining why the difference between trial and usage is such an important distinction. Anyone care to finish my thoughts?

Shopping guru Paco Underhill: “The perception of ease is as important as the reality of ease”

“It is very important to be cognizant that while the connection between our eyes and our brains has never been better, our eyes themselves are tired. One of the challenges that the design profession has is that the overwhelming majority of people constructing designs in 2006 are generally under the age of 30. And one of the persistent problems that they have is that they are designing for themselves and not for the larger audience…We live in a world in which time is in a state of acceleration. And therefore the perception of ease is as important as the reality of ease.”

The formula for “a truly great life”

“[The] author of the book ‘On Death and Dying’ asked people on their deathbeds what they regret the most about their lives…The number one response was: I wish I would have taken more chances. I feel like I lived my life playing it too safe. The number two response was: I wish I would have taken more time to reflect. I never stopped and smelled the roses in life.”

Caterina Fake on getting high performance out of high potential people

“Figure out what work activities turn them on and off. Then for their job, downplay the stuff they hate, or that are their weaknesses, and figure out what they love doing. Make their job mostly about the things they love doing. And figure out what they are solving for not only in their jobs but in their personal lives as well.” John Gruber recently said, “My pick for Yahoo CEO would be Caterina Fake…Almost everything Yahoo does ought to be more like Flickr in some ways.”

Self-parking Lexus befuddles Automobile editors

“Shows three men first parking the Lexus LS460 on their own in the magazine’s parking lot, and then again with the Advanced Parking Guidance System. We’ll let you watch the video to see how the Three Stooges fair against the computer power of a Lexus, but one of the two almost manages to take out a minivan and a Ford Five-Hundred.” [tx MG]

Japanese Get A Mac ads

PC and Mac, Japanese style.

Jeff Nolan’s Digg buzz wears off

“Digg really is an innovative site but I’m finished with it…Digg just isn’t doing anything for me to make my day easier. I’m finding this with a number of ‘Web 2.0’ sites, after the initial enthusiasm wears dull I’m left with a big ‘so what’ feeling that I can’t escape.”

Interesting facts about the Blue Angels

“The Blue Angels don’t wear G-suits, because the air bladders inside them would repeatedly deflate and inflate. That would interfere with the control stick between a pilot’s legs. Instead, Blue Angel pilots tense their stomach muscles and legs to prevent blood from rushing from their heads and rendering them unconscious…The Blue Angels try to be in position exactly, every time, by ‘flying paint’ — looking over at the next jet and aligning to a position based on some letter or spot on that plane.”

[“On Writing” is a new category of SvN post that offers examples of interesting online copy.]

Freshbooks responds to downtime
It’s easy to provide great service when things run smoothly. Handling problem situations is a much tougher — and often more important — test. Freshbooks’ Up and Running blog post is an example of how to do it right.

The company experienced a hardware failure which resulted in downtime and some loss of data. Bad news for sure. But the company’s response, including a detailed explanation and a free upgrade for all accounts, defused the situation and turned a negative into a positive.

Especially nice: the clearly titled sections that explain the problem, what caused it, what they were doing about it, how to tell if you were affected, what to do if your account was affected, and an apology.

For anyone who was inconvenienced by the interruption of service and/or irretrievable data, myself and the entire FreshBooks teams are deeply sorry. I want to extend our thanks to those of you who called and emailed to enquire about the problem. To a person, everyone was polite and understanding, which under the circumstances, was greatly appreciated by myself and the other FreshBooks staff who were hard at work bringing the service back online.

The result? Impressed customers who left raves like these:

Thanks for the open communication and commitment to quick resolution during this ordeal.

I for one greatly appreciate your detailed information, acknowledgement of the problem, and your willingness to provide your clients with some perks to make up for the inconvenience. Outstanding customer service is very hard to come by nowadays. I am a new trial FB user who is now sold, if I wasn’t already!

I appreciate the honesty, dedication and commitment on the part of the FreshBook staff.

Dreamhost’s anatomy of a(n ongoing) disaster
Dreamhost handled a similar rough patch with a long explanation peppered with tongue in cheek images of disaster scenes. The level of detail is impressive though it’s probably a good idea to offer some sort of Cliff Notes version for people who don’t want to read through that much text.

Our number one priority right now is getting this nagging network problem understood and fixed. Once that’s the case, we should be able to put things back in Alchemy, who didn’t lose power on Friday at least. Once things are going good there, we’ll be able to add new servers and transition old ones slowly with little to no downtime.

We’re also going to be buying our own UPSes, since we have learned we can’t trust our data center OR our building to do it. We’ll start by putting the core routers on them, then our internal databases and servers, then our file servers, and finally the hundreds of customer mail, web, and database servers.

We’re looking for video clips of Basecamp customers telling us why they love Basecamp. If we use your clip to promote the product, you’ll get a $250 voucher for Basecamp.

What should I say?
Tell us why you love Basecamp, how you use it, how it’s helped you, what you would say to recommend it to a friend, and/or anything else you’d like to share. No fancy production skills required — what you have to say is what matters here. Also, screenshots aren’t necessary. We want your story, not a tour of the product. A simple shot of your head while you talk is fine.

How long should it be?
Clips need to be under three minutes.

How do I submit a video?
Option 1: Use a file uploading service like MediaFire, DropSend, YouSendIt, or BoxCloud. Send it to svn [at] 37signals [dot] com.

Option 2: Upload the clips to your own server and send the link to svn [at] 37signals [dot] com.

Also, make sure to include your Basecamp URL.

Important: Please do not email the video clip directly to us. Also, do not use a video-sharing site like YouTube.

Is there a deadline?
No, but videos that get here sooner rather than later may have an advantage.