Designing the Obvious is a book I ran into at Books a Million a few months ago. Usually when I head out to bookstores I grab a handful of books and end up scanning over them for tips, maybe reading a few relevant chapters, then putting it back. Very rarely do I end up reading through the entire book at one sitting at the bookstore. That’s just what happened with Designing the Obvious. After reading through the entire book I put it back on the shelf as usual. On a second trip to the same bookstore later I ended up reviewing most the book, gleaming new shreds of information from each chapter. Rarely have I spent so much time on a book, better yet seen relevant bits a second time through. Eventually I ordered it from Amazon and have re-read most of it since then. If you want to check out a sample chapter from the book, it’s available for free on the authors website.

The author, Robert Hoekman, Jr., also has a second book coming out just this week called Designing the Moment which seems to pickup with more concrete examples and run with them. Obvious was more general in what you want the user to think and what you want to convey in your app, while Moment seems to be more about analyzing actual examples. Anyone interested in creating kick-ass interfaces that people love to use should consider reading both of these. Moment comes out this week, so it’s a good time to grab one or both if it’s a topic you enjoy. Like Obvious, there’s a sample chapter on the authors website.

Once again it’s CSS Naked Day, a time to strip your site bare and see how good it looks without all that CSS. If you’re using Wordpress, you can grab the CSS Naked Day Plugin and not have to worry about disturbing your layouts once the day is through. So far I’ve been extremely happy with this theme, which although I’ve only done minor tweaks with, it’s been easy to expand upon while keeping the same tone and color. I didn’t notice until now though that the comments are above the posts themselves which does look a bit odd.

Zen Habits has become one of my most looked forward to subscriptions lately. One of the most important things when reading a blog to me is that you either 1) learn something new or 2) have a call to action that hits close to home. Posts always come through with one of those, and usually two — calling for action and showing you how to do it. This month they launched an October Challenge where they put out the idea that if you do something consistently for 30 days it will become a habit.

So what habit am I trying to train? I’d like to consistently work on web projects, rather than just doing short spells on them “when I have time”. We all know that you only have time for something when you make it, so if I can get myself into the habit of making just 30 minutes a day to work on some web project (anything), then a month down the line I’m hoping it’ll be enough to carry on. To start off, I’m working my way through the Agile Development with Rails, doing the examples using Rails 2.0 preview release and the Blueprint CSS Framework for layout. This is probably the set of resources I’ll be using for my next project, assuming things go well here. Either way I’ll certainly get a better handle on both, while having a book at my disposal to fall back on. Dreamhost has Rails and SVN hosting, so at least I’ll have a place to post it as things come along.