Many large sites use member registration to give their members extended features. But a hell of a lot of them are not very usable. In the nice (Dutch) usability book Website Usability, written by Ward van der Put, I found five guidelines for login-screens and member area:

• Use for login-screens only user name and password combinations.
• Don’t use an e-mail address as user name, since people might think they’re gonna get spam.
• When personal details like addresses are being viewed, use a secure HTTP connection, SSL for instance. If you don’t, these details can be viewed by third parties like hackers.
• Give users the possibility to change their passwords. If strong security is needed, auto change the passwords when users don’t do it by themselves.
• Give logged in members the opportunity to log out. Technically it’s not needed, but it gives members a secure feeling.

I haven’t had time to read everything, but Metaprogramming JavaScript looks great. I will definitely have a close look soon. The tutorial is more readable than his presentation slides, I think it was a really ‘technotalk’ presentation… not that I mind, though.

Metaprogramming is a technique to write code, by another block of code. In a more practical sentence: you’ll save time with it.

Two appendices and one chapter from the book Microformats: Empowering Your Markup For Web 2.0 are free to download. The book itself is for sale since today.

The first appendix contains the Microformat specification, while the second one covers the most frequent used patterns. The chapter is a guide to markup your code with geo information. User agents like search engines or Google Earth can these to view the addresses on maps, or add it to an address book.

Past Thursday and Friday I became a ‘one day student’ Artificial Intelligence at Groningen University. I have to select a nice study next year, so some orientation isn’t bad at all.

I liked the study very much, so it is definitely one of the options to pick. Many of my interests are part of the study, like language, technique, psychology, usability (they call it cognitive ergonomics) and robotics.

A public review of the Dutch accessibility guidelines was announced, to receive opinions of web workers not involved in the project. They also came up with a first version of an English translation of the guidelines (MS Word document, 1,54 MB).

The Dutch guidelines are a result of the ‘ICT for an inclusive society’ meeting in Riga last year. By 2010 all government web sites need to be accessible:

Promote inclusive eGovernment by promoting and ensuring accessibility of all public web sites by 2010, through compliance with the relevant W3C common web accessibility standards and guidelines. Calling upon the private sector to do likewise, to consider accessibility principles from the outset of the web development process, and to develop the appropriate authoring tools and software.