thingoid

Just passing on a fraternal thump on the back to woowoowoo. I don’t know what’s been going on down there but he must have been having a “fun” time last week: this cartoon illustrates what it’s been like in his sphere recently. Caged rats as web designers—sound familiar?

I’m just happy that the little corner of the web that comes under my administration these days is largely mine alone to control. Who has the time or energy for pointless hoop-jumping?

There was a time when the HTML <BLINK> tag was the defining feature of one of two particular kinds of web designer: either the raw newbie (intent on using anything and everything in the web design toolbox) or the terminally stupid. Its problems include being one of the uglier design options for highlighting text, being non-standard, and having serious usability/accessibility problems.

But above all else, it just plain pissed people off.

So why (oh why, oh why) are so many bloggers repeating almost exactly the same problems with the Snap Preview Anywhere widget?

I can’t say it any better than Nick Wilson:

Its intrusive, obstructive and unuseful in almost every respect and use case. The fact that so many big blogs are using it, big well respected blogs, does not mean that it’s useful, it just means that they, like most bloggers, have all the self restraint of a magpie in a sparkly things factory.

If I want to see what someone else’s web site looks like I’ll bloody well go there when I’m good and ready. Sheesh, don’t be in so much of a hurry to get rid of me!

For a good laugh, have a look at the testimonials on the Snap Preview Anywhere page. I notice that a number of the testimoners—including one who said “we’d probably pay for the service”—no longer use it on their sites. I wonder how many complaints they received (or how much traffic they lost!) before they woke up and removed it.

Nick Wilson again:

All joking aside, SPA is not helpful, it’s not cool, and it’s not winning you readers — It’s bling, a silly little shiney thing designed specifically to increase awareness of Snap.com — no bad thng, and certainly an shining example of how to use widgets to gain links and attention, but, come on ladies and gentleman, show a little self restraint, show a little consideration for your users.

Now, can you all stop using it please?

I’m sure I’ve got a short attention span. And I guess I can be easily distracted by pretty, shiny things. So although I haven’t really begun to get to grips with Zotero (still trying it out), I’m already moving on…

My latest distraction is a handy complement to the Snipshot online image editor that I thumbsed-up in June. Gliffy is a tool for making vector diagrams. You know, all that flow-charting / floor-planning / UML-ing / network-diagramming / general-jiggery-pokery that you can do with Visio, OmniGraffle and the like.

There’s a reasonable set of shape templates, all the usual features for editing properties of shapes, and being an online tool, it’s got the collaboration and online publishing features that you’d expect. You can also export diagrams as JPEG, PNG, and very cool SVG.

They don’t have a pricing model as yet, but it appears that there will be a subscription version with all the attachments (including the thing for getting stones out of horses’ hooves) for the corporate presentation-making power user, and a free, ad supported Gliffy with limited feature set for the miserable skinflints like me.

Now this looks very, very good:

Zotero is a free, easy-to-use research tool that helps you gather and organize resources (whether bibliography or the full text of articles), and then lets you to annotate, organize, and share the results of your research. It includes the best parts of older reference manager software (like EndNote)—the ability to store full reference information in author, title, and publication fields and to export that as formatted references—and the best parts of modern software such as del.icio.us or iTunes, like the ability to sort, tag, and search in advanced ways. Using its unique ability to sense when you are viewing a book, article, or other resource on the web, Zotero will—on many major research sites—find and automatically save the full reference information for you in the correct fields.

Will it have the folks at EndNote shaking in their shoes? Probably not. But for many a struggling scholar, the price is certainly right!

Seriously have a look at this thing—it may not be the EndNote-killer but if it’s half as good as they say, it could well be the killer extension for Firefox 2.

Unfortunately I don’t have Firefox 2 setup on the office beast just yet, so I’m leaving right now to install this beauty at home…

[via Linux.com]

This blog is possibly the quietest corner of the web. So when a comment arrives, it is usually cause for much celebration.

Actually, that’s not true. It’s usually cause for me to delete another round of comment spam. Usually it’s pretty easy to spot: obscure comments, mangled language, generic congratulations, and yet another remark to the effect that my site is very cognitive…

“Small problem…”

So how concerned was I when I got this comment from ‘Green_Monkey23′?

Sorry for your time…. Why i can’t see images on this resource? My Browser is: Opera. Thank you.

Mildly. For about the half a second it took to get my brain into gear…

(more…)

You probably know that on many web pages you can make a link directly to a specific spot within the page. For instance, let’s say you wanted to point someone to the information about the Web Site Design SIG at Melbourne PC User Group - it’s at this web address:

http://groups.melbpc.org.au/

But there’s a lot of other information on that page and you can be even more helpful by directing your friend right to the relevant part of the page, by doing this:

http://groups.melbpc.org.au/#webdes

Where there’s a marker in a web page, called a “named anchor”, you can link directly to that spot by adding the name of the anchor (in this case “webdes”) onto the end of the web address with a # symbol.

Seen it?

Well, you’ve probably seen that trick before - but did you know the same idea also works for PDF files? There’s something about PDF files on the web, isn’t there? They’re often huge and they’re always harder to navigate than a normal web page - so much the better then if you can offer a link that takes people right to the relevant page.

Now let’s say you also want to recommend some books on web development to your friend. Well, the Melbourne PC User Group library listing is available at:

http://www.melbpc.org.au/library/Library.pdf

But it’s 26 pages long! How could you help your friend locate the relevant books? They are listed at the bottom of page 6 and the top of page 7, so perhaps you could provide a link that goes straight to the top of page 7:

http://www.melbpc.org.au/library/Library.pdf#page=7

Do you see how it works? Nominate the appropriate page number and add it to the web address with a # symbol. And unlike web pages, this works for all PDF files without needing to have special anchors included in them.

Open parameters

There are several of these “open parameters” that you can play with, for example:

http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/acrobat/
PDFOpenParams.pdf#page=5&pagemode=bookmarks&view=fitbh,400

Since I was shown this trick by a friend at work, I’ve used it frequently and I reckon you’ll find it handy as well.

More information

For more information on “named anchors” in web pages, see:

• the HTML specification, or
• W3Schools

For more information on PDF “Open Parameters”, see:

• Adobe’s Open Parameters

I might as well join the crowd who are clamouring for geriatric1927 over on YouTube.

Surely, this is really what YouTube was invented for. This is only his first try, so make sure you check out his other videos as well.

Internet folklore in the making…

Well Photoshop it aint’, but Snipshot doesn’t intend to be. It’s just a site that provides “Basic editing tools like crop, rotate, resize”.

Keep this one in the toolbox.

[via templatedata]

According to a report in The Age, Melbourne is the second most lonely city in the world - based on a Google Trends search for the word “lonely”. Talk about drawing a long bow!

A search today shows the following as the top ten searchers for “lonely”:

1. Dublin Ireland
2. Melbourne Australia
3. Auckland New Zealand
4. Sydney Australia
5. Perth Australia
6. London United Kingdom
7. Vancouver Canada
8. Brentford United Kingdom
9. San Francisco United States
10. Manchester United Kingdom

But how about searching for “lonely planet”:

1. Dublin Ireland
2. Melbourne Australia
3. London United Kingdom
4. Auckland New Zealand
5. Sydney Australia
6. Brisbane Australia
7. Adelaide Australia
8. Perth Australia
9. Edinburgh United Kingdom
10. Bletchley United Kingdom

That’s almost identical, isn’t it? I think The Age could just as easily have reported that Melbournians (indeed, Australians in general) are avid consumers of travel guide books.

Even trying some synonyms like alone, loneliness, and isolated don’t show anything conclusive.

Why?

The Google Trends about page explains:

Keep in mind that instead of measuring overall interest in a topic, Google Trends shows users’ propensity to search for that topic on Google on a relative basis. For example, just because a particular region isn’t on the Top Regions list for the term “haircut” doesn’t necessarily mean that people there have decided to stage a mass rebellion against society’s conventions. It could be that people in that region might not use Google to find a barber, use a different term when doing their searches, or simply search for so many other topics unrelated to haircuts that searches for “haircut” make up a very small portion of the search volume from that region when compared to other regions.

One could substitute “lonely” for “haircut” in that explanation and using Google Trends data to conclude that Melbourne is the second most lonely city in the world is shown to be incredibly foolish.

Apparently the story originates from Reuters. Wherever it came from, that’s sloppy, sloppy journalism.

There are some web sites to which you keep returning. Maybe not every day or even every week - but you keep going back. They are the kind of sites that never fail to delight. Such sites very quickly become old favourites; so maybe they are old news but that doesn’t mean you don’t keep revisiting them.

For example, let me give you “Reader’s Indigestion”: three sites that help this bookhound satisfy his reading appetite (more…)

Target.com is currently the subject of litigation over poor web site accessibility:

The US National Federation of the Blind (NFB) has brought legal action against Target corporation (a major US-based discount retailer which operates more than 1,300 stores in 47 states) because their web site is not accessible. The NFB has raised the issue with Target Corporation before

It seems that some of the accessibility blunders are pretty fundamental (lack of alt tags, image maps without alternatives) but some actions can not be performed on target.com at all without using a mouse.

And here’s a real gem of good advice:

Word to the wise - if you are making accessibility changes to your site based on feedback - make sure you document your process so that you can at least show that you’re doing something to address the issues, and if you are doing it incrementally make some sort of public announcment with each improvement you make, ok? You know - that would make good business sense.

(via molly.com)

Following the recent nonsense over the Firefox Myths web page, it’s interesting to see in Information Week that more data has come to light about spyware and browsers.

Researchers at the University of Washington have been looking at the prevalence of spyware on the web, and in the process they did a side by side comparison of spyware attacks on IE and Firefox. (more…)

If I may get diatribal for a moment, there are a few things that have turned up in the last day or so that need comment: IE7 bugs, the ‘Kama Sutra’ worm, and Firefox upgrades. (more…)