The Time Sink

Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday

But before we do that, Jakob Nielsen is stirring things up in the world of personal web pages. I'd comment heavily on his latest, but Rick Saenz outlined things rather well in his Sunday post. The Metafilter link is a long one with some significant forking from the original point, but the other links are a quick enough read to get you through your morning coffee.

...and I happen to have an opinion or two on the whole thing, as this site is encoded in raw HTML and my alternate site uses Manila running on Frontier servers to automate many of the routine tasks. Both methods work, but when the time comes for Shelley to put up a Netwidows page, I'm betting the path of least resistance is the one with the flattest learning curve<g>. So, I have the tool that Rick mentions for getting the content up; do I have the content creation tool for her to use? Well, what about the concept of email as a content creator? Cut and pasted into the other tool? ...and remember the old saw, "If you don't know what to write about, write about what you know." I think there could be some comfortable synergy here...

...once again brought to you by the bluefish HTML editor running under Mandrake 7.1. ...and a battle it was! When one is a Linux newbie with hardly any grasp of tactics, frontal assaults uphill against fortified positions rarely work. "Failsafe" mode worked only as long as I was in it; but it led me into a forest I'd never been in before. I managed not to get lost, but it also proved to me that a flanking attack wouldn't work either as the brush was just too dense.

So I resorted to simple sneaky underhandedness: I threw in the boot floppy. ...but not the towel! I figured maybe I could salvage at least a tie if I didn't have to bare-metal the drive. I had some hope that an "upgrade" over the old install would give me my keyboard and touch-pad back.

Camouflage on, I went for it. Considerably less time passed than for a conventional install... Geeky things happened... Reboot... Hey, I'm back up! ...and, as far as I can tell, about where I was before I started monkeying with the external keyboard and mouse. All my defaults are intact and the few packages I'd added were still here.

Now, none of this is critical; this install is a learning installation for me. I've managed the bluefish install from an rpm and next up I'm going to see what the wireless rpm will do. I did learn on the last round (Caldera 2.2), that putting on a conventional network followed by the wireless trashes both. One step at a time this time. Until I forget....

So I get some family time and a post for my efforts and learn at least one way to recover from trying to do too much at once.

...and the first thing I see when I go seplunking is that The Evil Empire and those Crazy Canadians have made up and are playing kissy-face! Good Flippin' Grief. JHR has been sounding the alarm on this one all along. ...and all alone.

Hey there, it's hump day. But I feel as though I've been on the receiving end of it... Somehow Tuesday just came and went. ...and I missed it. Now, it could be that part of my confusion came from being up Tuesday at 0'dark30 with kids and cats and such... Compounded by two meetings during the day that I can best describe as "survived". Add a dash of confusion when the upgrade to the Frontier servers over in UserLand bollixed up IE4 users for a time...

That one was an exercise in How to Do It Right: the upgrade was applied overnight; by morning the first reports came in that IE4 users were essentially locked out of their web sites (and some others had formatting problems). With two hours, a temporary fix was in place to allow users access; by the close of business, the problem had not only been completely rolled back, but an option put in place to allow three selectable levels of control over the site's editing tools. Not bad, folks. Not bad at all.

So, what to do with my evening? Nada. Survive until the kids are in bed. Catch up on things? Let's see... Once again Mr. Bilbrey has found yet another way to teleport himself around in cyberspace. Ya' know, one day Marcia is going to come home to find his slightly confused-looking face peeking out from one of the monitors... And an email asking if she could look around and see if she could find his corporeal body...

...and JHR's wielding a Perl-handled .32... Dunno, John; please be careful with that thing.

Doc Searls has a comment or two from Monday about professionalism and how the software industry may be paralleling the construction industry...

...and thanks, Dan for the additional link to Kaycee; it sounds like she is doing much better. Oh, and she sent you all a card (drop down to her Monday post) <Yeah>! Hmmmm, could be the Truth is out there<g>.

On the local front, I see that Pepsi, the outside cat, is sleeping in the shelter we made last weekend. No one believed he'd actually get inside except me, the old cat herder...

...and I bought a couple of sanity-saver CDs over the weekend. So far; so good. I'll send DocJim a review when I have a moment and we'll post our thoughts when we can. ...along with a discussion group. That concept was suggested by a reader; give me a little more sleep and I'll be right on it. Right after I post a piece on email courtesy from Ed Hume. ...and the humor update I promised someone else. ...and the other piece I mentioned to Rick.

Well, I was minding my own business today, when I stumbled over Jakob Nielsen's update from September 28 on his Spotlighted links page. ...and that sent me off to this place where the designer found his hits went up when they moved to a "yahoo-esque" layout. Hmmm... Anything there in common with Jakob's piece on Why Doc Searls Doesn't Sell Any Books? Sure, and it gets back to his piece from November 1999 and boils down to the observation that most users do not want to take the time to learn a new interface.

Two observations on this: First off, the change on the Frontier servers yesterday was met with a variety of responses, from 'unfit to print' to 'way cool'. The big issues centered around sites providing customer services. ...because there's something in the human animal that emulates the 'inertia' component in the laws of motion: we tend not to want to change. ...especially on zero notice. ...and most especially when we need or want something Right Now. Bad time to introduce change...

...and who are the customers on the internet? Refugees from the MTV generation? (who learned their sound bites in micro-seconds) Old farts? (who don't want to change what they've already learned) Gen-Xers? (I want it now) Call your own shot on this one. But the bottom line is some sort of consistency across the web that you browse.

I really enjoy one lady's stories over on Weblogs. ...but she hard codes her site to a font size that is just too small to read. Can I recommend her here? No, this audience is pretty well used to the Verdana font that can be resized on their browsers. Bad enough you have to shift your paradigm without a clutch when you drop by the alternate site. But even there, I dug around until I found a pre-set theme that used the familiar left-hand links column and presented the text in re-sizable Verdana. ...and would work in Netscape for the Linuxen<g>.

But the second observation was the one that rocked me back a little. I like to think of myself as open to new things. I help out with site testing whenever I'm asked (and have the time). But last week, while in Pressure-cookerLand, I needed to make a quick single-item order from a company I do occasional business with. They're cutting back on their phone staff and trying to shift their business from brick-and-mortar to web-based. Okay, I'll give it a go. ...with less than satisfying results. For whatever reason, they decided the existing systems on the web were unworthy of their attention; so they redesigned the paradigm of web ordering. Okay, I'll still try; after all, if I learn it now, I'll save time later. Not! I could not successfully search for an item I knew was in their catalog. I had to look up the part number and input that. But I wanted to see related items! No go. Okay, I'll go with the current item and do my research on the next order. Through the Looking Glass of their check-out system... Bonus points: very slick. ...until it gave me an un-recoverable error when it tried to submit the final page. Sheesh, back to the phone and voice mail as it was after 1700 on the east coast. ...with my time irrevocably gone.

Contrast that outfit with W.W.Grainger's web site: after their last redesign (with lots of input from customers who used the old site), their new one is a piece of work. I can set up lists by departments and order from those. Item lookup by their part number, manufacturer's number, or category... Ship to multiple locations... Okay, a few rough edges, but they went to their customer base and asked, "What do you want?" ...and got the answers.

Questions: if you are developing a website, whether for e-commerce or even a vanity site such as this, who are your customers and where are they coming from? What are they expecting to see? Sure, there are variations on a theme, but people will tend to stay and sit a spell if they are comfortable there. Cutting edge is cool. ...and I drop by enough of those sites in a week to get real sick of Flash. But what gets the job done is a hook to draw people in and a comfortable site to keep them there.

Wooo Hooo! They did it! Who says "you can't fight city hall"? ...or Redmond? Ha! These ladies did. ...and won! Big time. ...and Microsoft's response sounds a lot like "I didn't want to play your dumb game anyway; I'm going to take my ball and go home..." Some background here.

Shorter posts on the weekends? Yeah, especially as there's lots of work to do... Seems there's a storm enroute and I see a hatch or two that hasn't been secured. Shelley mentioned "rain due on Wednesday"; but, when I looked at the forecasts, they've moved things up to Tuesday and are calling for thunderstorms.

...and why do they 'call' for thunderstorms? Me, I'd settle for simply reporting the weather rather than asking for more than rain. I mean, if you're going to 'call' for something, why not call for weather from SetoLand? ...where it gently rains every evening after everyone is in bed and clears up in time for a nice breakfast on the veranda<g>.