Went to download the latest update to Roxio’s Toast CD burning application, and was surpisingly greeted by this message:
In order to download the update you will need Safari, Camino or Netscape browser ñ downloading will not work with Internet Explorer.
This is really no better than the silly coders who disallow any other browser, it’s just that you don’t often see the apple fall on IE’s side of the tree.
Or, rather, they like my recent search engine optimization paper, just published on the venerable site.
Evolt, in case you didn’t know, is a “world community for web developers, promoting the mutual free exchange of ideas, skills and experiences.”
Read up, and hook me with any comments, corrections, or suggestions you have. Try not to make too much fun of my picture.
p.s. Yes, this is the same as this SEO whitepaper, just on a different site and in HTML instead of PDF.
Which is more ridiculous?
Posting a URL in a web community forum with automatic URL-to-link functionality without including the “http://” (?), or the fact that no forum software recognizes a URL without the http:// with its URL-to-link feature?
Yes, the latter. I agree. No forum software I know even gives you the option.
Fill in obvious rant about not placing the burden on the site visitor and putting the site to work for the site visitor here.
The Department of Health and Human Services has authored a massive paper entitled, Research-based Web Design and Usability Guidelines. The title pretty much tells the story.
This paper is nothing if not well-documented, researched, and plain old big in scope. 17 chapters, 128 pages, full of screen shots, and a handly little rating guide to help you quickly determine the relevance and strength of evidence of a particular issue. Usability out of a usability handbook. Fancy that.
Not only that, they’ve gone one step further and provided us with a web-based sorting tool for this rating system. They smartly realized that users/readers of such a cumbersome tome need many different ways to access and retrieve the information therein.
While you’re there, check out the Usability University for upcoming classes and seminars on a variety of usability and accessibility-related topics.
Mr. Herasimchuk has redesigned his Design By Fire site, but it still looks like his inspiration came from the Levitra logo. Wink wink.
All joking aside, this redesign is a step backwards from its predecessor. Where am I on this site? Why is everything pushed down so far? Even the logo at the top is a good 150 pixels from the top, but more important all of the navigation is entirely below the fold on my little Pismo Powerbook. It also gives me dreaded horizontal scroll bars. Icky.
Web designers used to get panned for trying to design the web like print. Now, “top” designers are being praised for taking this tack. Andrei himself calls this out as a goal of the redesign, “One of my goals with this redesign was to break away from looking too much like a blog, and more like a dynamic printed publication.”
This is possibly a good goal in part, as the majority of print design is much more readable than most web design. However, this redesign misses the mark. If I picked up a print publication that was this hard to “navigate,” well, I’d put it down.
I think the Design By Fire redesign should be praised for attempting to forge a new path, but unfortunately the path it forges is going to get all its followers lost in the woods.
Side note: Allow me to point out the huge headlines he uses.
My first attempt at distilling my thoughts on search engine optimization into an easily understood collection of words and phrases has been published and posted to the Erickson Barnett site.
Practical Search Engine Optimization: What works. What doesn’t. Strategies and myths.
Enjoy.
The next version of Internet Explorer, Service Pack 2 (SP2), will contain a pop-up blocker which is on by default.
Now that the browser that over 90% of the world uses will kill pop-ups (finally) out of the box, will advertisers (and porn purveyors) stop using them?
We can only hope.
I do not understand the benefits offered by so-called “text-to-html” converters (?), ala Markdown or Textile.
For the unfamiliar, the above-mentioned are tools which translate alternate text codes into HTML code. For example, if I typed *hello world* into Textile, it would translate that into <em>hello world</em>.
You’re thinking, “This is nothing more than a markup language for HTML. And HTML is already a markup language.”
You are wise.
Just when I had run out of things to learn, here comes this gem.
How is typing “An [example](http://url.com/ "Title")” any easier or faster than typing “<An <a href="http://url.com/" Title="Title">example>/a>“?
It’s not. Even though the normal HTML version contains more characters to type, you can fly through it because it’s a language you already know.
If you’re like me, typing out basic HTML for links, images, tables, etc. flows as easily as iced-tea in the summer. The last thing I need is some other language to cloud my mind and step in as a middleman between what my fingers have to type (this new language) and what my brain is thinking (my beloved HTML).
Frankly, even if you were first starting to learn HTML (or a healthy HTML alternative), it’s simply easier to learn and make sense out of HTML than these cryptic simplifications. If I told you that one asterisk equals italics and two asterisks means bold, how often do you think you’d forget that or get the two confused?
It’s not just because you’re getting older and more senile that you’d forget these, it’s because they are completely random and contain no internal meaning.
How self-explanatory would it be for you to “View Source”, see an asterisk, and determine that it means italics?
Quick, tell me what this code does:
**hello world**
See what I mean? And I just told you what the silly code does at the beginning of this post! (?)
For the same reasons pig latin is harder to speak or write than regular English.
I must be missing something. I know, having read both of their sites for months, that the developers behind both of the products slandered in this post are intelligent to a high degree. Not only that, I respect them.
So it baffles me to think that these venerable men have spent countless hours pouring over software that is so utterly useless and devising clever alternate languages for HTML.
These tools are like a hokey, web-based Pig Latin Translator forwarded to you by an annoying co-worker, but without the fun and goofy allure of the real thing.
The Weekly Standards is featuring a site designed and built by my firm, Erickson Barnett, this week.
Woot! Thanks, Adam.
Tip: Use the two inner-most areas of the concentric circles that define your selection point to zoom in and out. This took me a while to discover, but it’s a gem of a find.
Wish #1: I should be able to minimize/hide the search/info remote control interface thing-a-ma-bob with a single click.
Wish #2: There should be single-click “show all” functionality as well.
Props: I get more impressed with this site the longer I play with it. This is in no small part because I get to play with the site itself.
Type in an artist or band name in the search box. See and interact with related artists.
I wonder, are they simply hooking into Amazon.com’s recommendations?
No matter. This is cool. Way cool.
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