If you're familiar with Basecamp or Backpack (both from 37signals), you know that when you sign up you're given a special URL to login to your account. It's usually something like "username.backpackit.com."

Let's say that you haven't used Backpack in a while and you go the homepage and find the login link (which is tiny and easily missed) but when you go to the Backpack login page, instead of a login form, you're given instructions about your login URL.

Personally, I've never liked this system. I don't use Basecamp or Backpack very often and always forget to bookmark my login URL and am always frustrated when I can't login from the login page.

Tonight I was trying out StikiPad and found that they give users a login url, but they also allow you to login right from their homepage.

I'm a big fan of 37signals, but on this point I think StikiPad does it better.

I've been using a wiki to do some documentation recently and I suddenly noticed that the search form has two buttons: "Go" and "Search." After a some experimenting, I realized that pressing the "Go" button takes you directly to a page named whatever you typed into the text input (/wiki/test) and pressing the "Search" button searches the wiki for that term. Even if the buttons serve two discreet functions, you have to admit this is hardly intuitive.

I'm kind of an Apple fanboy, but there's this one thing that's been bothering me. Apple redesigned their site a few months ago and and combined their logo, navigation and search into a single gray bar at the top of the page. I like the simplicity, but what drives me nuts is that when I look at the site in Safari, the bar becomes almost invisible to me. It looks so much like the browser chrome in color and size that it just seems to disappear. I really don't get what they were thinking.

I went to An Event Apart last week here in San Francisco with my fellow Six Aparters Chris Basey and Byrne Reese. Overall, the conference was excellent. The two obvious highlights for me were Jason Santa Maria's "Design Your Way Out of a Paper Bag" and Doug Bowman's "Design for Scale", both of which were informative and inspirational. These guys are two of my biggest web design heroes and it was great to not only see them speak, but also to talk to them for a few minutes at the conference. Jason Santa Maria was very complimentary on the new movabletype.com design.

Erin Kissane's "Content Strategy to the Rescue!" and Jeffrey Zeldman's "Writing the User Interface" were also really interesting and gave us some great ideas.

For shear entertainment value, Jared Spool was hands-down the winner. His presentation, "Why Good Content Must Suck" was really funny, as well as thought-provoking.

This was the first web design conference I've been to and I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the presentations and the friendliness of the other attendees.