How not to design a web site

Earlier today, while I was on my computer, my brother walked in, asked if he could use it for a second. I gave him my Android-running tablet and kept minding my business. A while later, he came back saying "ugh, it's a Flash webpage and it won't run on Android, can you look up something for me please?"

While listening to music, I opened the URL he told me to. However, I was listening to music at that time... And of course, as expected of a Flash website, it started playing its own music... My first reaction was to turn off my speakers, and then I looked for the tiny "Mute" button on the webpage".

At this point, I was obviously a bit frustrated. Now, imagine yourself owning that webpage. Do you want your visitors to be frustrated by just opening your page?

More and more users lately browse the web on a tablet. By using Flash, you are automatically excluding these potential visitors. Furthermore, you hijack back buttons, middle clicks, copy-paste, and so on. Not to mention that Flash is one of the most anti-SEO things you could do to yourself. As this site points out (it's a worthy read), not even Adobe's own site uses Flash!

Now, about music... Please, have some respect for those visitors who are already listening to something else. Or who don't like your music. Or who just put their baby to sleep. Or who clicked to open 4-5 new tabs in a row, and are rushing to close the one (or, even worse, two!) that started yelling behind their backs. And, if you are still not convinced, at least have some respect for corporate visitors, potential clients of yours, who open a website in their office and suddenly get ridiculed at the face of their boss. Another worthy read over here has even more reasons for you to read and enjoy.

My personal favorite example of "how not to design a website" used to be a restaurant (they changed their page now).

Imagine a hungry customer, wanting to order food from them and looking for the menu. This customer is welcomed by a "Loading..." screen, then is greeted by ... a house... OK, but where's the menu?...

Oh - actually, you can interact with the house's windows. After some clicky maze, you are given two options:

1. See the story and cooking secrets of our best dishes
2. Look at the menu

There it is, FINALLY! You click 2, just to see another "Loading..." screen, and a beautiful animation taking the house away. At this point, if you haven't looked for another restaurant yet, you're probably closing this page and looking for something else. There it goes - one more lost customer.

Now, given my blog's audience, you may think I'm preaching to the choir. On the other hand, it's us who should raise awareness about this issue. The poor site owner may not be that tech-savvy, and might even be enjoying this good-looking page. It's up to us to email them and kindly inform them that it's not a good practice at all. Don't blame the recipients of the email; it's most likely that they aren't aware of all these reasons. Be polite and try to help them understand.

Ho Ho Ho!

- How does Santa have time to bring gifts to all children in the world?
- He gets online and uploads them! That's also why you don't see him!
- How about the sleigh and the reindeers?
- He just doesn't want to hog his home's connection, so he goes to each country's central server and uploads the gifts in batches, one country at a time.

Christmas news!

One month to Christmas, and various funny news keep popping up.

For example, someone in Austria suddenly found 14 tons of Christmas trees in their garden: http://www.9news.com/news/sidetracks/301411/337/Christmas-tree-shipment-dumped-in-Austrian-garden-

As in, "sorry I'm late, I got lost in the forest in my garden!"

And someone in Canada got arrested for telling kids Santa isn't real: http://gawker.com/5962591/police-in-canada-arrest-devil+horned-grinch-for-telling-kids-that-santas-not-real

Santa's press office has not yet commented on the incident.

HTTP Status Code Post Office

So I went to the post office the other day and picked number 402. It was already on, but the employee in charge wasn't there...

Then 403's turn came, and as there was nobody with it, i went there and explained my case - but they told me I should just wait for my real turn.

The post office was empty anyway, so I figured my best bet would be to just pick the next ticket (which was 405 in the meantime) and wait to see which would come first. 404's turn came, but whoever took the ticket apparently walked away instead...

It turns out that 405's turn came first - but if we interpret 402 as another HTTP status code, it turns out that what I should have done to use the ticket was a bit creepy...

PS:

On "illegal" online content

Whoever thought that SOPA/PIPA/ACTA were dead must think twice. New similar laws keep getting sneaked in through the backdoor. One such example is this: http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/09/eu-wants-mini-acta-by-the-backdoor/index.htm

In short, that talks about a new EU law that (as of today) is trying to be sneaked in, about N&A (Notice and Action) methods to force hosting providers to take down "illegal" content.

Wait a second - What is "illegal" content? It covers a broad range, from child pornography to copyright infringement. Do you think these two are unrelated? Think twice!

In this article, a music industry spokesperson says that "child pornography is great", because it allows them to have a stricter control on the online content.

Of course, the problem with N&A is that it's often abused to take down legal content, which may range from parodies to playing a piece of classical music on your own piano. Yes - there have been videos of people playing well-known simple pieces of classical music on their own piano being taken down. Apparently, there was some CD with the same piece being played on another piano, and they happened to sound alike...

In theory, N&A notices should contain enough proof that the material in question is illegal, and, in most cases (excluding child pornography, for obvious reasons), wait to hear from the person who uploaded the material first, before taking any action. In practice, this never happens with DMCA takedown notices, why would it happen now?

On the other hand, when it comes to child pornography, the police is already doing its job, and we already often hear about people who owned child pornography being arrested - without needing to distribute it.

Someone tell me - what exactly is N&A supposed to solve? Legal content will be compromised while illegal content is already being taken care of.

555 luck!

So, my wireless keyboard broke earlier today... I unscrewed it in a rush, found nothing... and then had to go. I stopped by a computer store and asked for wireless keyboard+mouse combos - wanted one with music controls on the keyboard and also a small dongle (instead of a box with usb cables), but these were out of stock. Then I went to get my new passport, and I got ticket number 555. I thought "hmm, maybe this brings me good luck in electronics?" Indeed, I went back home, and fixed it! (Probably some loose contact)

Then I was browsing a strange Youtube video, and it had 555 views... What's next, should I get some lottery ticket??

PS: I know that's nothing interesting to talk about, but hey, I don't blog that often so you can't quite say I'm flooding you, in fact I blog so rarely that even this might be better than nothing!

Some piracy-related thoughts

Act 1:
One of those parties, where the laptop is connected to YouTube and guests are free to play whatever music they feel like listening to. So, at a certain point, we realized that the spontaneous playlist had become pretty nice and decided to save it with a succession of back-copy-paste. When we tried playing the same playlist again a few months later, several videos had been taken down due to copyright infringement.

(While I love Spotify, it doesn't have an agreement with Japan yet, and thus doesn't include the Jpop we were trying to listen to.)

Act 2:
Once I was talking with my dad and the beginning to one of his stories was: "When I was a kid, around 10-12 years old, a single with two songs inside had the price of a cheap bread snack, so we'd go out and buy whatever song we seemed to like". This phrase alone was much more interesting than what he was actually trying to say.

Act 3:
I'm not a gamer overall, but I recently decided to try Portal, just for the sake of it. I created a Steam account and bought it without thinking twice, even though it was already on my brother's computer anyway, because a) it was easily accessible to find and download, b) it would stay on my account even if I wanted to play it on another computer, c) it's online so there's no risk of destroying the physical medium, d) it was really cheap after having been out for several years.