47 posts tagged “website”

This time, it did take a few hours before Vox allowed me to compose again. I have heard from Robin, who logged on as me using one of those newfangled Iphones in Las Vegas, and he could get this screen, though there were still some issues.
   But at least Daisy has confirmed that she, too, cannot get the compose screen once logged on as me.
   Meanwhile, this is not the only website that has gone weird. Here’s how the The Wall Street Journal now looks online, after I clicked through via Google News:

I am not sure how we are expected to read this properly. There are some weird stylesheets at play here.

Oprah Winfrey was named for Orpah in the Hebrew Bible, but a spelling mistake led to her unique name, one which is in the global consciousness today. (Search for Orpah and Google asks if you are searching for Oprah.) I’m sure she’d be thrilled to find out that the spelling has been fixed by ABC News:

This probably means very little to others, but I thought it was interesting to see some of the fall 2009 US TV shows being advertised on the Lucire site. A couple of years ago, we had Ugly Betty and other shows being pushed heavily on our site; this time around, it’s Eastwick, Cougar Town and Californication, which are a little more adult:

Disqus is the latest site I managed to find a bug with (sigh).
   I have tried to upload an avatar to it. Now, I am pretty sure I had my photo set in Disqus a long time ago, but the site seems to have forgotten that setting and put me on to the default.
   Not a problem: let’s try reloading one.

Based on my experience, getting to this screen is a 2 in 4 chance. But that’s all right: maybe we can put the two failed attempts down to timeouts and other internet issues. I’ve now highlighted the part which I want on my avatar. I click ‘Save changes’.
   There is a 2 in 7 chance that I will get to the next screen, which confirms that the photo is saved. (The other five times, I was taken back to the screen that I had before this, with the old avatar in place. Reloads would not change it.) But on those two times, what’s happened? Did I ask Disqus to squash the photograph?    I don’t know how these websites work. I suspect there is a magic Harry Potteresque sequence of words I have to mumble while drinking spirulina to get the photograph right, which I utter while pressing the ‘Save changes’ button with my little right toe.
   Friends joke that I have a Frank Spencer reaction to computing (and I encourage the jokes, because I find it funny). But I also argue that I am doing what everyone else is doing, but that the sites themselves are imperfect and untested. The difference is I am less willing to tolerate it when websites go buggy, and I expose the errors. (I know our own sites are imperfect, too, but at least we believe people when they alert us.) And since support staff no longer listen to complaints (note: I have not told Disqus of this error yet but their instruction page is a bit hopeless), I use blogging to vent.

You just have to admire some ad creatives. There are some ads that aren’t particularly relevant which come in through the networks, but this one on Lucire’s website is very entertaining:

Oh, wonderful. I can finally get back in to Vox’s compose page. Since my last post, I have written to Six Apart directly, so hopefully they are now alerted about Vox’s recent and frequent problems.
   Below are some images I wanted to share. These are from a website at aharef.info, and are plots of the various web pages I fed in to them (see my post at my main blog here). Most of these are web pages our company made or is associated with. Head here to make your own.

The more complex ones at the end are from Stefan Engeseth’s Detective Marketing and our Font Police site, both of which have PHP code and are not based around stock HTML. This perhaps shows how much more downloading goes on with modern sites. The first five are based around older code.
   To further this point, I made two extra shots since my blog post yesterday. The first is from the Lucire ‘Insider’ page, which is run off PHP:

This is from the Willis Street site, and I quite like the image and the typeface choice:

   English might be my second language, but I am pretty sure there is no such word as restauranter.
   Unless there’s a new word out there for someone who builds restaurants, and that the 222 Willis Street location is prime for that construction.
   But a website with a non-existent English word, no big deal.
   I mean, it’s not as if there’s a one-storey-high sign in central Wellington with the same mistake. Aw crap.

This is unbelievable in a modern European country in 2009, from Time:

The election campaign in Germany took an ugly turn last week when the country’s far-right National Democratic Party (NPD) threatened a black member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party. Angolan-born Zeca Schall, who has German citizenship, was featured on CDU campaign posters in the eastern state of Thuringia, which is holding a regional election on Aug. 30. The posters went up on Aug. 1; 10 days later, the NPD attacked Schall on its website, calling him a “n_____ for the CDU party quota,” telling him to “go back home to Angola” and urging its members to deliver the message to him personally. In an act that had tones of a modern-day lynching, NPD supporters tried to march to Schall’s house in the central town of Hildburghausen, but they were stopped by police. Since Aug. 11, Schall has been under police protection.

   Mr Schall has lived in his town for 20 years and isn’t even running for office, but it hasn’t stopped some racists nutters from the threats.
   Time, meanwhile, has the following as a related article on its site:

The writer of this review of District 9, Andrew Ricks Jr, has good phrasing, and seems to know his stuff. However, it reveals that someone did not do any checking at the Examiner, whether it’s the writer (I am the first to admit it is difficult to proof your own stuff on-screen), the proofreader (who should be skilled enough to do this) or an editor (who really should be). And this paragraph is where I stopped reading because I was way too put off by the errors:

With my tongue firmly in my cheek, I must make these nine points.
   1. What are gansters?
   2. Which single African nation is the writer referring to?
   3. Is a prolifigate where pro-lifers gather?
   4. Must be the French spelling of activities.
   5. It is shakiest ground?
   6. What is permissiable?
   7. I haven’t seen the film, but I am pretty sure director Neill Blomkamp will be delighted to know this is how his name is spelt.
   8. I know, sometimes I am insenstive about these things.
   9. Which other is he referring to?
   10. A demonstate must be a pretty evil place to live.
   My worry behind this is that kids will grow up thinking having a dozen errors in a paragraph is OK for communication, when the reality is that it is distracting and does not serve the purpose of communicating.
   Our publications are not perfect but I don’t think we mess up this much.
   I have even been nice here because in print, we would have to mark all the “dumb” apostrophes.