March 24, 2004
I've found the Anti-Site
I was going to write about my Web Site Pet Peeves of the Week, but then I found one site which encapsulates them all:
- Individual java applets for navigation.
- Invisible frames to keep the URL in the location bar nice and neat, making bookmarking pages impossible. (I'd be linking to each of these examples if it wasn't for this "feature.")
- Said navigation disappears on second-level pages. (Hell, is you must use frames at least put that fancy java navigation in one.)
- Under construction pages. (Just don't link to the damn page.)*
- Bad, useless animation which consists only of buzzwords flying around purposelessly.
- No contact information. Anywhere. (Boy, your business must have gone through the roof after this site went live!.)
The one web site atrocity this site doesn't commit is putting a midi sound effect which automatically plays when the page loads.** (Bonus points if you don't give the user a way to turn the sound off.)
* Actually, the link to the under construction page is not visible, yet its spot in the navigation (lower-left) is still linked. Nice touch. This is so bad I had never even thought of it.
** This site does actually contain sound which plays automatically, however, if you found the example of the cheesy animation, you also by default found the annoying music you no doubt tried but couldn't turn off. Technically, it's also on a completely different site (with its own set of bad java navigation), however there's no advance notice or indication in the slightest that you are being taken to a new site. And of course, the URL in the location bar is of no help here either.
March 17, 2004
Clear!
I don't get "Clear" or "Rest Form" buttons on the average web form.
When have you ever gotten finished filling in all the necessary fields on a form and said to yourself, "Shit. I just entered completely incorrect information into that form. I need to wipe everything and start over."?
And the information one is usually entering into a form is one's contact information. How often does one mess this up? Entirely and to the point that the easiest way of fixing the problem is to do it again from scratch?
Do you expect that even once someone has not only entered in completely unsuitable (or even specious) information but only realized this at the very end of the process? How often do you type information into a form without regard to it's accuracy and only check it for errors when you are finished? This just isn't they way it's done.
More often these buttons are probably only ever clicked accidentally with an errant click or because the user blindly thinks it is the submit button.
May favorite occurences of these exhaustively dysfunctionally-used buttons is when I see them with one-item forms, such as an enewsletter sign-up form which only requests one's email address. If I were to make a mistake, pressing a separate button to clear my entry would actually be made harder (in a relative sense, of course) by way of adding a click to the process. This extra click with my mouse would also require me to take my hands off my keyboard - where they had to have been for me to provide the proper information.
It's just not happening, people. There is no need to reset a form right before one would likely be going to there submit the form.
Now, I'm not just one to bitch and moan about something without offering a solution. If you don't want to waste the brain cells that are holding the <HTML code> for a clear button, how about pre-filling all your form fields with sample data for the user to peruse and putting that button at the top of the form?
Now that's a clear button I could love!
Disclaimer: I am referring to only the average web form in this tirade. I have seen excellent uses of clear buttons on forms in web applications and their ilk.
Oh, the irony.
If only Alanis Morissette had as good a grasp on irony as Wired.com.
(If you don't get it, that's a video ad over there on the right. And the content ads displayed on the article page are either video or Flash ads as well.)
March 11, 2004
Kerry/McCain 2004
Again, I find myself in the unusual mood to talk politics.
It's a total pipe dream, but I would love to see John Kerry pick John McCain to be his vice-presidential running mate.
I'm sure it would alienate some democrats, but not enough, I wouldn't think, to balance the number of republicans that would jump on board. And in an election year like this one, where the vote is largely to just "beat Bush", hardcore democrats that didn't like it would have no choice but to vote for this ticket anyway.
Dare to dream.
March 08, 2004
Spalding Gray's body found in East River
Not that I have tracked Spalding Gray on this blog or at all really, but after my original post, I feel an update is in order.
News outlets are reporting that Gray's body was found in the East River off Manhattan on Sunday. He was wearing only a pair of black corduroy pants when found. There was no wallet or cash in his pockets, as expected.
March 07, 2004
Gimme a decagallon of beer.
The whole centiliter thing has been on my mind since yesterday. It's just an impossible number to accurately guage in your mind. One hundredth of a liter? When the numbers get so big, like 330cl for instance, one has to do some hardcore figuring to come up with how much one is dealing with.
Can you imagine if we Americans used a gallon as our standard? A 12 ounce beer would be a decagallon (1/10th), I suppose.
What is even more baffling to me is the "stone" as a unit of weight measurement. This goes to the other end of the scale. My weight, 165 pounds, measured in stone is about 11.8. Really, how accurate can one be with this low a number?
At about 13 pounds per stone, English folk have to really do some work to show improvement when losing weight.
"How's the weight loss regimen going, Nigel."
"Not good, Charles. I've been at it for a fortnight and I'm stuck at 17 stone."
And what's more, the silliness continues with the fact that stone is both singular and plural. How frustrating.
So, I don't really get the metric system. I'm typically American for this.
The good news is that the internet gives me the power to turn these incomprehensible figures into amounts that make some reasonable sense.
March 06, 2004
Trappistes Rochefort 10
I'm not one to spend a whole lot of time talking about beer, or drinking it for that matter. That said, I do feel a bit bad for not telling the world about its best beer, Trappistes Rochefort 10. Named in the old style, the 10 denotes alcohol content, but in this case the actual beer differs in that it is 11.3% ABV.
You read that correctly, 11.3% ABV. For over seven dollars for a 330cl bottle, this let's you know you got your money's worth.
That's 330 centileters, which means just as little to me as the abbreviation. Apparently that is an actual unit of measurement, but it certainly means nothing to me. It's enough to know that the size of the beer is smaller than a regular American beer but bigger than a so-called pony beer. End game: one of these gets you tipsy, two gets you drunk.
It's a dark, rich beer, but it's not dinner either. It's surprisingly light and utterly drinkable. It is one of the best night caps I can think of having.
But good luck finding it. I am lucky that my local Fresh Fields (I don't care what the company's called now, I call the place Fresh Fields.) usually has a couple in stock. I have never seen more than 6 on the shelves anywhere. It is somewhat rare, but worth finding for sure.
Drink it.
God Hates Shrimp
Totally inflammatory, but this is too good to pass up.
From the creator's (not THE Creator, mind you) site:
"If you're gonna justify your arguments with Leviticus, you better be prepared to go the distance, Godboy."
Oh, man. That cracks me up.
I happen to agree with God on this one. I have for years called crab and the like nasty little bottom-feeders, and I don't eat them. Since I'm on God's side on this one, I'm hoping he can overlook all the other things we disagree on (agree to disagree) and we can be friends anyway.
I just hope he considers chickens "clean" birds. If not, I think we may have irreconcilable differences, and I fear our friendship may be forever (oh, and I mean forever!) in jeopardy.
March 05, 2004
Pancakes and Bubba the Love Sponge
Make whatever comical or detrimental comparisons between the US and Britain you want. We are brought together by the silliness of having "bubba the love sponge" and "pancakes" on our respective list of top Google searches for the first week of March 2004.
March 04, 2004
Safari bookmarks, you did me wrong.
I found out the hard way a big problem with the Safari bookmarks page, and it's functionality in relation to the site you were visiting when you clicked over to your bookmarks.
I was buying something from a site and had gotten to the end of my transaction. I was about to print the this page as my receipt and inadvertently clicked the bookmarks icon in my Bookmarks bar. No problem, I just clicked it again thinking I could easily return to the page I was on.
It seems that Safari doesn't cache this page - or thinks it must reload this page - so when the page was reloaded I was greeted with an error message from the site telling me that my transaction was complete and the page could not be loaded. This is because the page was the result of a form submission, not simply a static page.
I have not tested this on other pages to see if this happens all the time, but the fact that it happened once is enough testing for me. Safari should keep this page in memory, as if in an invisible tab, not reload the page from the site. This can't be too hard to accomplish.
Insipid, generic electronica.
Some of the coolest sites on the web are developed entirely in Flash. This is great and fine. What bothers me is that a great many of these sites also choose to play music for you, since Flash gives them the ability to do this very easily. I have serious problems with this.
Many of these sites are uber-hip sites that cater to the digitally hip. I'd venture a guess that visitors of these sites - at least their core audience - have picked up an iPod or some digital music player, or use iTunes, or at the very least are playing music while surfing via some device, connected to their computer or not. Hep cats listen to music a lot, we all know that.
So these sites, when I load them and their insipid, generic electronica (it is invariably insipid, generic electronica these sites think is cool), are seriously hurting my viewing experience by forcing their choice of insipid, generic electronica upon me.
What's worse is when I am listening to some song in iTunes, really rocking out with the volume turned up, I am blown out of my chair by their low-fi insipid, generic electronica competing with my personally-chosen musical selection.
Why then do these sites feel it necessary to give us music with their sites? These are not sites for bands, mind you. These are sites for web design shops, high-end hosting, super-cool blog-types, etc. That is, sites that have nothing to do with music or audio of any sort. I've missed the connection, if there is one, as to why music is pertinent to these sites.
So, I say to all Flash developers, resist the urge to throw in that hackneyed yet ubiquitous music player with fake EQ feedback animation into your sites. It's old, impertinent, and most importantly rude to your users. And if you must make me listen to your music while on your site, consider yourself original by not using some insipid, generic electronica as your musical selection.
Thank you. Drive-through.
You've played this song over 1 billion times.
I plugged in my iPod yesterday and noticed that I had some rather strange play count statistics on some (812 of them) of the songs on it:
I took care of this by simply resetting the play counts for the effected songs, but I'm still searching for the cause of the anomaly. Any help is appreciated.
I'm still jonesin' for a new firmware update. Especially one that will do away with the pause between the end of one song and the beginning of another. I know that the iPod looks ahead to see what song is next and loads that into memory to decrease hard drive accesses, so I'm baffled as to why there is a pause. iTunes doesn't exhibit this behavior.