Peter Seebach returns with another crotchety installment of his “Cranky User” column at developerWorks. :)

A couple of my favorite points:

A shocking number of people still believe that Web pages should be designed to run only with the most common browser, because that way more people can use them. This is ridiculous; if a page works with every browser more people can use it!

Search engines go a long way toward bringing users to your site, but only if your pages are navigable by spiders. That means adding a few plain old links to the brilliant, enthralling, and genuinely challenging flash video game you use for site navigation.

I attended a class last week on “Mastering Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with UML 2.0.” This training gave me a chance to step back from Web site development and instead focus on the vocabulary and diagram standards which model software requirements and design.

This is a skillset I’ve wanted to cultivate for some time and the class happened to coincide with three other events:

• O’Reilly released a new book in its highly-touted “Head First” series, “Head First Object-Oriented Analysis & Design,” which I hope to get my hands on soon to reinforce what I learned in the class.
• IBM Rational launched version 7 of its Software Development Platform, which includes significant updates to Rational Application Developer and Rational Software Modeler.
• I passed the Sun Certified Web Component Developer exam, which is a prerequisite for Sun’s Enterprise Architect certification.

So, with these new resources and milestones in tow I intend to take some real steps away from an IT Specialist role towards an IT Architect career path.

Wish me luck :)