The amount of online services one uses nowadays is overwhelming! I just realized that by cleaning up my username/password database.

Almost every service has it’s own user data. To make life easier, most people use the same username and password for all of them. But from a security point of view, this is bad practice. So I use different passwords for most of the services I use, resulting in a huge list to remember. Once in a while, I try to clean up that list.

I start with unsubscribing the newsletters I don’t read anymore. This can easily been done. But then comes a harder part. How do you unsubscribe to all the services you signed up for? Most of them don’t have a “sign down” feature.

Now, there are pro and con arguments to this. A few pro arguments would be:

• The service doesn’t have invalid data. Information is important nowadays, but correct information is even more important!
• Identity theft is impossible. When the data doesn’t exist anymore, it can’t be stolen. On services that you aren’t using (or at least not often), you won’t notice if someone uses it and pretends to be you.
• A smaller username/password database to maintain (ok this is a personal argument, but I think quite a few other people have such a list in one form or another)

There are also con arguments. Probably the biggest being: With the internet interconnected and linking from one system to the another, deleting data can crash other systems. For example, a Flickr account that is deleted. Either only the user is delete and his/her photos are orphanated or the whole account is deleted and everyone that links to a photo from that collection has broken links on their site.

Still I opt for the “sign down” feature (at least for services that have to public available data, like e-mail accounts or personalised preferences of a service)

Today, when accessibility and usability play a huge role in the creation of a website or application, the power of color is sometimes forgotten. Although you can’t solely rely on color to make something stand out or to give it a different function (think about the different color of a hyperlink), the choice of color you make, can determine how your website makes the visitor feel even before he/she reads a single word.

The right color can give you a warm feeling (the colors from red to yellow, including pink, orange and brown will do that because they are associated with fire) where others can make you feel distant (the colors from green to blue and some blueish shades of violet will accomplish that). Not only the warmth of a color can make a difference. Also the color value (which is the measure of lightness or darkness of a color) plays a role. A darker or more saturated color will give more strength, more importance, but also more darkness to your object or text, while a less intense tint of the same color with give you more breathing room. It will seem less threatening and feel more inviting (beware that when you go too light, text can become harder to read if the contrast with the background isn’t outspoken enough)

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