Jakob Nielsen, who you of course know as “the usability Pope” and “the next best thing to a true time machine,” recently published an essay titled “Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes”.

I’m going to run down his ten-point list and weigh his “Alertbox” pages against my blog according to each of his criteria. Now, you might say that this isn’t fair since Alertbox is a newsletter, not a blog, and that he’s been doing it since 1995, long before “blogging” was even a word. I say it’s a “web-based publication consisting primarily of periodic articles” in reverse-chronological order and it’s time to face the music!

Today Apple announced their new imaging application, Aperture.

This is clearly intended to be a high-end app, and Apple wants to make sure you get that. “Aperture: Designed for Professional Photographers.” A retail price of $499 ($249 educational). A website that reads: “Whether you’re a fashion, wedding, sports, portrait, fine art, commercial, or editorial photographer…” And the recommended minimum hardware: dual 2GHz G5 PowerMac with 2GB of RAM.

It’s more of an image processing application than an image editing application – pixel-level editing tools are scarce in Aperture. Browsing the gallery of screenshots I see no pencils, brushes, dodge and burn tools, clone tools, erasers, etc. Except for a handful of iPhoto-style fixit things like “dust, spot, blemish, red-eye, and patch tools,” Aperture seems to be almost exclusively focused on whole-image adjustments. It’s iPhoto on steroids/speed/Red Bull.

Each time you visit the randomly selected Shakespearean sonnet page, you’ll see one of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets. If you don’t like the one you get… reload! There’s also a search box so that you can narrow the possibilities down to, say, the two sonnets in which he uses the word “snow”.

The page is currently the #4 hit on Google for the phrase “Shakespearean sonnet.” It’s a little sad that so many of the substantive web pages on Shakespeare’s poetry don’t rank higher than my cheap parlor trick!

Though LightTPD (or “Lighty”) is the darling lightweight webserver of 2005, Jef Poskanzer’s thttpd has been serving static content securely and wickedly fast since 1995 or so.

O’Reilly’s ONLamp.com recently posted a tutorial, “Lightweight Web Serving with thttpd”, which is worth a look if you run a high-traffic site or have underpowered server hardware. The article walks you through installing and configuring thttpd, setting up CGI and virtual host support, and using thttpd as a static content server behind a more full-featured server like Apache.

Via Rafe I learned of an astounding Javascript hack done by a MySpace user. Excerpts from the summary, allegedly written by the creator:

…anyone who viewed my profile who wasn’t already on my friends list would inadvertently add me as a friend. Without their permission.

8:35 am: You have 74 friends and 221 friend requests. Woah. I did not expect this much. I’m surprised it even worked. 200 people have been infected in 8 hours. That means I’ll have 600 new friends added every day. Woah.

After a little over three months I’ve crossed the hundred-post mark. Averaging around a post a day hasn’t been hard at all, and blogging is proving to be a fun way to return to regular writing. My thanks go out to everyone who has been reading (I’m sure someone has) and commenting. I do it all for you. OK, I do it mostly for me, but I do think of you sometimes.

It’s been a sore point among Macintosh users that almost all of Google’s desktop software is currently Windows only. A couple days ago I learned that Google had started a search for Macintosh developers. As of today, listings for Senior Macintosh Developer (8+ years experience) and Macintosh Developer (3+ years experience) are on Google Jobs.

Only Google can say what they’re up to, but note that Google Earth, Google Desktop, Picasa, and Google Talk are all mentioned in the ads.