Stupid Usability FAIL!
Ok, I know I have been neglecting this blog for a long time. Thats because most of my technical rantings have moved to Fliquid Studios. But, I needed to share one of the most ridiculous usability failures I have ever experienced.
Today I was searching for a simple tank volume calculator to work out how many US Gallons my fish tank is (179 for those interested), so I made a quick search on Google and then clicked on the second result. Well, the page loaded and then a javascript alert popped up saying "The Lightnin Tank Volume Calculator currently supports Netscape Navigator 6 and Internet Explorer 5." which wasn't too bad but then by clicking yes, sent me back to my Google results! So, basically they are saying that because I don't use IE5 (released in 1999!!!) or Netscape 6 (released 2002) and that Firefox only accounts for 20% of the browsing market share, I cannot view the page. Of course, I could disable javascript but why? If they don't want me on their site then that's up to them, but I can't see how they still have the 2nd spot in Google with this stupid approach to web development.
</rant>
Save the net!
Terrorism for sale
Almost an hour ago (or maybe more) one of the worlds most popular blogs, mashable, posted about Google Ads for Terrorism. Basically, Googles automated ad server, which picks up on keywords and displays ads based on those words, seems to advertise a lot of bad stuff.
eBay had this problem for a long time. A Google search for 'live slaves' would bring up eBay ads for 'Cheap Live Slaves!'. Fortunately, they have now been removed and the only ads for 'Live Slaves' now are for women. Phew.
Anyway, so I was thinking to myself, that if one of the worlds largest, most popular blogs posts about something that is very offensive to a lot of people and being perpetrated by the worlds largest and most respected internet behemoth, they are likely to fix it quick smart, right? Wrong. The thing is, this has been happening for a while A quick search on Google reveals hundreds of thousands of results. Interestingly, the first link I clicked on that criticised Google was apparently a malware site.
I continued to the site anyway despite the multiple full page warnings. There were a bunch of great examples of this approach to automated ad campaigns;
I thought I'd try this out for myself. So I went to nytimes.com and did a search for 'terrorism'. Low and behold, look at the ads Google decided to give me;
Surely, in this extreme technological period. The worlds largest online company can come up with an algorithm that would stop this from happening. I personally, having never been directly affected by terrorism, dont find it very offensive, more surprising. Still, I find it very odd.
ER Diagrams from SQL files
A lot of people these days use graphical clients for creating their database schema's and therefor start with the Entity Relationship diagram and then have it generate the SQL for them. I prefer to write SQL directly as I seem to have an ongoing misunderstanding with most graphical clients but then I would need to somehow create an ER diagram for the SQL I wrote and this meant I'd double up on work a little bit. Today while searching for another application to do just what I want (and not cost me a cent) I found a post about something that will be extremely handy.
SQL Fairy is an ER Diagram creator for Mysql and other databases but uses the raw SQL files and includes relationships (like foreign keys etc).
Its not perfect by any means, but its easy and gives a great representation of the database relationships. The lines representing relationships actually go over the tables which is a bugger and as it outputs directly to an image, you cant edit it. But, for a quick and easy ER, its bloody good.
As noted in the post I found this little gem at, its super simple to install and use, particularly if you are using Linux. I am on Kubuntu (for the record, my distro of choice is Fedora) and installed it as easy as this;
sudo apt-get install sqlfairy
Then, to generate the diagram was as easy as this;
sqlt-diagram -d=MySQL -o=sample_schema.png schema.sql --color
Unfortunately, it did fall over when my schema contained a SOURCE within the SQL, but apart from that it was quick and simple enough for me.
Now, if I can find an app that does the same thing but allows me to edit my ER first and give me multiple saving options (XML, SQL, etc) then I'd be extremely happy.
sqlt Man page
sqlt-diagram Man page
EDIT: About a year ago, MySQL released an application named 'Workbench' for this very purpose. An ER diagram program with reverse engineering capabilities from .sql files. The application was used by me on Windows for a while before a Linux friendly version was released. But, when Sun bought MySQL earlier this year, they made most of the MySQL applications commercial and were charging for licenses. Thats why Workbench was not mentioned above.
I am pleased to announce that it appears Workbench is free for download again. More information on Workbench can be obtained at its website.
This is the same schema as the above diagram done in Workbench using reverse engineering from an SQL file.
‘The Bird’ cursor
About a year ago I came up with a funny idea to replace the finger cursor on links to a slightly modified version that I like to call 'The Bird'.
I drafted my friend Lauren to do the work as I am not as useful behind a Photoshop enabled pc as she is.
Anyway as I am not using the cursor (I will put it as a mouse cursor on one of my sites at some stage), I feel it is wasting away. So, I present to you, my loyal readers, 'The Bird'.
Its as beautiful today as the night it came to me in a dream after many-a-drink at the pub.
Will the internet work for your business?
The short answer is no. The internet will not do everything for you. It will not work for you.
You will only get out of the internet what you want to and it will be directly related to how much you put into it.
Businesses consistently believe that by simply having a site with products and / or services on it that suddenly their sales will increase and this, for the most part, is simply untrue.
In Australia, the e-boom is taking a lot longer to gain momentum in comparison with America. Australian businesses simply do not consider the internet to be a vital marketing resource and are unwilling to invest into it. This causes a lot of businesses to do more damage to their brand image than good.
If you come across two websites with the same product or service and the first website is professionally designed with a good logo, easy navigation and fully functional, you will likely pick that business over the one that has a site that looks like it was designed by the neighbours 10 year old for his school project. In fewer words, cheap looking sites make the company look unprofessional, also, cheap looking sites do not build confidence with visitors who are being offered products to purchase online.
In addition to this is the lack of time being invested into email correspondence. Whether you like it or not, most communication derived from your website will be email. Its easy, its fast and people can use it in their own time. The problem with this is the amount of businesses that do not treat emails with any sufficient level of priority. Emails go unanswered. A lot. People get frustrated and angry and your brand damage continues to grow. Its not a bad thing to only offer phone details on your site if thats the only method of contact you are willing to accept. Fewer potential customers will contact you, but thats better than more potential customers going unanswered via email.
Small business in Australia need to get out of the mentality that the internet will be everything to them and all they need is a 'presence'. There is a very new feeling the the net these days and as much as I hate using buzz words, its 'web 2.0' and because of 'web 2.0' there is this new surge of competition in both design/development and site owning businesses to outdo each other. Simply, if you cannot devote them time and money required into your 'web 2.0' presence, stay offline. You will do less damage.
Interesting Google results
About a year ago I started generating XML sitemaps for Skylines Australia. At the same time I started pushing a bunch of other SEO strategies like friendly URL's, metadata and a search engine friendly 'skin' for my site which is a publically available 'text-only' skin. Its also good for PDA's and mobile phone access.
For a long time, my 'Sitelinks' (displayed under search results where my site comes first) have been made up of members' profiles. This irritates me a lot and I have blocked the links through the Google Webmaster Tools every time I notice them. These are not the pages I want emphasized. So, I added a nofollow to all the links to members' pages that I could find but Google persistently added the members' pages as my Sitelinks. It was becoming desperate. I even asked my friends at SEOmoz (Where I am a pro member). They suggested sculpting my links to move the search engines towards my busier sections.
Anyway, last week there was a breakthrough. I upgraded the SEO software for SAU and decided to rebuild all my sitemaps as I know that Google was finding a lot of errors in the existing ones. I realised that my members' pages were being added to the sitemaps! And, likely, above the other (more important) pages! So, I turned off the adding of members' pages into my sitemaps and already I can see that Google have added my more important pages as Sitelinks (not live yet, but I can see them in the Webmaster Tools). Precisely what I wanted and I can't believe the solution was so easily missed by myself.
Another case of bad sitemaps. Lots of SEO'ers are against their use entirely.
Christianbiggins.com moved to Wordpress platform
I have been toying with the idea of moving to a self hosted wordpress blog for quite some time and I finally bit the bullet and did it. The main driving force behind this decision was;
- More control. I can edit code, add plugins, modify anything I want,
- Owned posts. With Google owning everything posted to Blogger, I preferred that my posts remained mine, on my servers. Blogger didn't even provide an export service to make it easier to remove your blog.
- Pages. I can post on pages about my work and my projects without needing to follow a blog-style 'post'. This means I can have non blog content.
- Hosting on my server means that I can integrate with other sites and services that I own or host.
- Still works with Windows Live Writer. This was a must. Live Writer is used for all my posts.
- Solid codebase. Wordpress is used extensively throughout the web with a huge community base. There are heaps of available plugins, widgets, themes, tutorials etc and as its PHP based, I can tinker myself.
So, as Wordpress provided an import script from Blogger, it was a no-brainer. Of course the import failed a few times and I got a fair few duplicate comments, its all here now.
So, the site is now Wordpress with the BloggingPro theme and a few other plugins used also. It is very much still a work in progress as I move over all the changes I made on Blogger. I am also going to add more content to the pages and other stuff too. Keep watching this space.
Web services that dont work. My #1 frustration
I can understand when things are in a public beta stage and are still going through testing, that things may not work. But, when a web application has been launched and there is no trace of ‘Beta’ or ‘testing’ anywhere on the site or service then you’d expect things to work ok and in this age of extremely competitive sites and services, it is simply unacceptable when they dont work as required.
Today, I decided that I needed some ‘Bookmark this’ buttons at the bottom of my posts as I have implemented on Skylines Australia.
So, as my blog is with Blogger, I thought there must be a widget or a pre-written piece of code out there to do it for me. I came across Sharethis and Addthis.
Sharethis
I registered at Sharethis and I filled out the form for my blogger button and I followed the prompts to put the widget on my blog and impatiently hit ‘save’, excited about this new addition, I refreshed the blog to be presented with this;
1. A new side widget with nothing in it. 
2. A link underneath my posts that does nothing (because of javascript errors) 
So, that was it for Sharethis. It had already wasted too much of my time.
Addthis
So the next thing to try was Addthis. Their site looked nice and to be honest, the button looked nicer and more functional than the Sharethis equivalent. So, I thought I would give it a go and register. 
This was what I was presented with after registering. No disabling of the form before putting your details in, or even a nice notification page (this is all that was on the page, just some centred text). My registration still went through as gmail was quick to notify me of the successful Addthis registration.
Maybe I just need to stop being lazy. Its not a hard thing to add to the posts and it’d only take me 30mins or so to whip something up. But after these two dismal attempts at attracting me as a user on their sites, I started to think of other sites that constantly irritate me.
Shelfari
This is actually a fairly good site. I do use it and I generally like it. But their search engine is attrocious. What respectful web site in the 21st century has a crap search? None. Searching and indexing has advanced so much in the past 10 years that there is simply no excuse for bad search engines. This site constantly makes me use the advanced search to put everything in to find a book. eg. Searching for ‘A year in tibet’ gives me a crap load of books, mainly about the lord of the rings. But if I go to the advanced search and put in the title and author, I get the book I was searching for which has the exact name I was searching for. Not to mention on this site how you can mark a book as ‘Plan to read’ and then next time you come back, its set to ‘Already read’ and ‘I own this book’… Not sure what happens between visits but I dont read that quickly.
Blackout Rugby
This site is a great online Rugby game. FYI, I love rugby. I bought a team-signed Waratahs jersey on Saturday night. Thats beside the point. This game is great, but lacks the finesse of something with more time under its belt. For example, up until a few months ago, the site used a flash-only navigation. This meant that if I logged in on my 64Bit Fedora machine (with no flash support), I had to try to guess the URL of the pages I wanted, which also lead me to a big fat SQL error (and likely, an injection opportunity which I promptly notified them about). They have now implemented a fall back navigation menu for no flash support. The other area this site falls over is in stability. The site has been down so much over the past month (maybe 5 days at least) due to them moving hosts twice. When you are charging money for a ‘premium’ membership, this is simply not good enough. You cannot expect to grow your user base when you take usability so lightly.
In conclusion
Web site owners and operators need to realise that if their product does not work, they will lose their users. It is that simple. If something doesn’t work, the user will go elsewhere. If something isn’t accessible, the user will go elsewhere. If something is too complicated, the user will go elsewhere. With the level of competition and new-and-improved up-and-comers in all areas of the internet, its never been more important to ensure that your service works. Even if it means removing functionality to ensure that the core of the system is as bug-free as possible. Or just stamp a ‘Beta’ on it.
Web applications that I could not live without
I thought it was time I post about the web services that I could not live without. Basically, last week I bought a new Nokia E71 so that I could do as much work / organisation from my phone as possible. So, my ongoing drive is to have as much of my web accessible data available on my phone. This list is almost as much for me as it is for you, so I don’t forget things.
I seriously could not live without gmail. I have gmail check all my email accounts so that my mail is accessible from everywhere. It took a while to pry Outlook from my hands, but once I had done it, I never looked back. I am also able to check gmail from my phone with ease.
iGoogle, or google.com/ig is my start page. I have everything on it from all my news from Google News, all my latest RSS updates from Google Reader, all my latest statistics from Google Analytics, plus other things like the weather, a Remember The Milk widget and even a ‘This Day In History’ widget (I love my history). This is the absolute centre of my internet.
Remember the milk is an online task manager which can be as simple or as complex as you like. I am terrible at remembering ideas and todo’s. I originally tried todoist which was good, but I much preferred RTM. I have based my RTM lists on this awesome post on the RTM blog. I can share tasks or even entire lists with anybody else on RTM which makes working with the task manager so much easier as others can update my tasks for me. Also, RTM have a widget for iGoogle and a plugin for gmail (providing you use firefox, which you should) and can add tasks to your Google Calendar. I have definitely become more productive since using this and I continue to try and hone my RTM skills to get more from it. I am also trying to get RTM to sync with google via the iCalendar service and the Remote Calendars plugin for Outlook 2003 but have so far been unsuccessful. Doing this would allow me to put my tasks on my phone.
Google Calendar is a very good online calendar but because I use Outlook via an exchange server at work and we have Outlook on the home machines, I dont get much opportunity to use it for a primary calendar. But, what I do use it for is synchronising my home Outlook with my work Outlook using Google Calendar Sync which runs on my machines and updates my Google calendar with my Outlook appointments (which then gets sync’d to my other machines!).
Twitter is an odd one. People love it, hate it or just don’t get it. There are many sites offering ‘how to use twitter’ advice but its up to you. Basically, it is known as microblogging and you get 140 characters to update your audience with. I use it to post about new blog posts or news and I follow a few web developers, designers and other influential people to see when they have updated their blogs and sites. I use it with TweetDeck which is a desktop client for Twitter and makes Twittering much easier. Me on Twitter.
Flickr is an image hosting service. I started using the service this year as an alternative to Picasa web albums. As I have started dabbling in photography, being able to view images on Flickr based on the camera used is a big bonus for me. I can also upload directly from my mobile using the mobile tools. Me on flickr.
Delicious (formally del.icio.us) is an online bookmark manager. It seamlessly integrates with firefox using the available add-on. As I have crazy amounts of bookmarks with lots of design sites, code references, inspirational sites or even just sites I like, I can tag them and find them easily. Also, as its web based, it doesnt matter where I am, I can always get the link I need. I previously used Google Bookmarks but found Delicious to be better, easier and more intuitive. I can also share bookmarks among my friends (I have 2!). Me on Delicious.
Honourable Mentions
- Zyb – For backing up and managing contacts from many different sources. Great when you go through phones as often as I do. Me on Zyb.
- Plaxo – Another contact manager. This used to be my primary manager but I found that lately it has started adding so many new features that doing simple contact management is getting to be a bit tricky. Keep it simple, Plaxo! It is also great for updating your contacts with any activity on your social networking services. Me on Plaxo.
- Last.fm – The greatest music site ever. Listen to music via the site or the client based on bands that you like. Over time as you listen to more music, your own personal station becomes more tailored to your tastes. This is almost a ‘could not live without’ but I already had too many in that list. Me on Last.fm.
- Shelfari – This site is for book management. I read a lot of books, but I also find that a lot of the time I see or think of a book that I’d like to read at some stage but then I forget it. Not anymore, I just add it to my ‘like to read’ list on Shelfari. I can also add books and reviews. Me on Shelfari.
- LinkedIn – Linked in is more of a social networking site for professionals. You create connections between friends, associates and business partners. Its like a big online resume where you can give feedback about people you have worked with or look for jobs. It is a good way of keeping in touch with other professionals and see whats happening in your industry. Me on LinkedIn.
- Skylines Australia – Shameful plug for my own site. The greatest automotive site in the history of the internet.
Thats my list. I’ll create a new list soon of web sites that I cant live without (as opposed to web services or applications).
What can you not live without online? Do you use any of these services? Got any alternatives?