sandwichesandapples

GoMediaZine implores us: Don’t Be A Whore. It’s 10 tips to help designers avoid being taken advantage of. Wish I’d read it 10 years ago.

Great article from Aaron Greenspan explaining how and why he sued Google. As you might imagine, Greenspan had some difficulty in getting in touch with Google. It’s a problem I’ve noted before.

I freaking love Boing Boing. It’s absolutely one of my favorite blogs and I read it every day. Yesterday, they posted a plea for their readers to take a survey which would help their publishing partners Federated Media connect with appropriate advertisers. No problem. I love giving feedback. Click.

One of the first questions was what was my birthdate. Not “what is your age?” but “what is your birthdate?” They gave an example date to show the format. Okay. So I enter the sample date. You want to know my age range or even my age, no problem. You want my birthdate. Nah.

The questions continued in that vein and most were required. I ejected.

I don’t think surveys should even have required fields. I don’t think surveys should be that damn long. And as one commenter suggested “none of Boing Boing’s business” should have been an option for nearly every question.

I’d have left a comment on Boing Boing’s site to note all this but they require registration to leave comments which I also believe to be bad user experience. I’m trying to cut down on the number of sites that have my email and a password, not expand it. I never register to make comments.

I’ve taken a corporate contract job for reasons I may or may not write about here and I’ve now been in the position long enough to be pretty dulled by the buffoonery of the whole enterprise. I’m in the web department doing front-end code for a major company on a very specific project so I know my experience doesn’t reflect the entirety of their web business. That said, what this corporate business has done is not streamline their business to work better online but instead taken the speed, flexibility and general all-around usefulness of the web and reduced it to the drab, over-bureaucratized, over-analyzed snail’s pace of every other aspect of corporate work.

Take for example their “content management system” — a dinosaur called TeamSite from a company called Interwoven. I put “content management system” in quotation marks because it actually isn’t a CMS but instead a file management system. The corporation has never implemented the software as a CMS (I don’t know how long they’ve had it) so all TeamSite does is upload files to their server. But in a slow, byzantine way. It serves no purpose to have an expensive piece of software like this and use it as a shabby excuse for an FTP¹ program.

We are promised an expansion to TeamSite called SitePublisher which will give us very powerful content management and presentation tools. I’ve seen several demos but I have yet to see any feature that isn’t found in the best open source CMS software and many features lacking that are out-of-the-box in WordPress. (I’d put Joomla and Drupal up there as enterprise level open source CMS packages even though I have very limited experience with them so I can’t speak to their features.)

Yet in the meantime, as we await SitePublisher, we are unable to simply put our new project online. It must first be “imported” into TeamSite and then deployed to staging (the permission to do this has so far been denied me by the IT department). Then someone with permissions even higher will deploy to the actual web server.

If this all sounds like Greek to you, let me simplify: armed with WordPress MU and $120 for a year of commercial hosting, I could have 40 sites on line within two weeks. I would charge substantially more per hour than I receive as a contract worker but I could have it done.

The web encourages immediacy, action, engagement. And I know I can’t stay for long in a position which denies all that to its web department.

¹ File Tranfer Protocol applications are programs that connect to a web server and give the user a file view of the files on the server and the harddrive. Users can simply upload files from their harddrive to the web server and they’re live on the site.

A few years ago, an elementary school, having made the awful decision to switch to Windows machines, was selling off their fleet of Mac iBooks but only to employees and their relatives. They originally tried to get a couple hundred dollars for each iBook but the cheap machines had a huge caveat — they were running OS 9 and would probably need a memory upgrade to run OS X. Also, the batteries sucked. Since upgrades to make it run like a decent laptop would cost me as much as a new machine, I passed. (continue reading…)

The only reason the non-special edition of Iron Man exists is so customers will think “hey, the ultimate edition is only $5 more!”

Step Brothers is $23?