sandwichesandapples

I really dislike blogs and sites who provide only an excerpt of a post in their RSS feed instead of the entire post. I understand the thinking behind this limiting move: website publishers want readers to visit their site to stick around, read more and see more ads. These publishers do not want users reading entire articles in a feed reader.

But it’s a lousy user-experience in my opinion. I use Reader to follow hundreds of blogs and sites. If I can’t read an entire article in Reader, chances are, I just move along. I have other shit to get to. So websites who provide only the excerpt are really overestimating their own importance. And they need to make a decision about which is more important: their content or their site. I would read more of their content if I didn’t have to visit their site to do so. But because they think the experience of their site is more important, I usually just skip by the articles.

While publishers may think this is no great loss — they’re neither gaining nor losing a reader — here’s where this becomes a huge faux pas: The web, as the name implies, is a bunch of connections. When I read something I like in Reader, I click the share button. This not only shares it with the friends I follow through Reader but to the wider world since I publish the feed of those Shared Items right here on S&A. I’m also more likely to email articles that I can read in full in reader.

So basically, by trying to outwit users who consume posts through RSS Readers, publishers are simply denying themselves the multitude of connections those users can provide.

Of course, the main offenders are major media outlets which simply means that I read more content from Boing Boing than Wired, and so on.

Here’s a short list of the publishers who bum me out because they only provide excerpts:

• CNET News provides only short abstracts in their RSS feed and as a result I read very few of their stories.
• Many feeds from Wired provide only an excerpt and those I skip.
• The Onion provides only excerpts.
• TechCrunch, oddly, sometimes provides more of an article on their site.
• One of the inane pop culture blogs I tune into, F-Listed recently changed their feed to provide only excerpts. And there is almost no reason I would regularly visit a pop culture blog. Their designs are universally awful. So I basically don’t read them anymore.
• Likewise, Egotastic.
• Finally, I’m extremely bummed that Slashdot and the new site Dangerous Minds only provide briefs.

I’d love to read more from these sources, but until they provide full articles in their feeds, I don’t have the time.

I am still in a contract position as a front-end web developer. So I’m constantly sending out my resume and interviewing for full-time positions. Recently I filled out an online application for a position in my field. I received this:

Hello ___, Our records indicate that you have applied for the position of ___ position at ___ within the past six months, but we have yet to have the opportunity to meet with you. We would like to meet you this Monday, June 1st! We will be hosting a booth at a career fair on MONDAY, June 1st, from 6:00pm-7:00pm and 8:00pm-10:00pm. Two of our top executives will be there to briefly interview you. This is a special opportunity to meet with them in person, so please try to attend. To set up an appointment to meet with us, please contact ___ or ___ at (___) ___-____ between 8:00am & 5:00pm. We will be accepting appointments until Monday afternoon the day of the career fair. You are being invited specifically to meet, and if this meeting goes well you would be invited for a longer, formal interview at a later date. So don’t miss your opportunity on the 4th because we’re running out of time slots!
The career fair is located at ___. This career fair will host a number of companies so be sure to look for the ___ booth and bring a fresh copy of your resume to come meet us! If you are unable to attend please still contact ___ or ___ and let either of them know as we will not keep you in consideration if we do not hear from you. We hope to see you! ___ ~Please Do Not Reply To This Email~

Other than the parts I’ve redacted, that’s the email I received verbatim, including the formatting. Yes, it was one long run-on paragraph. This is actually the second invite I’ve received from this company so obviously this career fair is a regular appointment for them.

These impersonal form letters relating to a job I applied for really rubbed me the wrong way. So after a few days of thought, I decided to let the company know. Even though the email said “Please do not reply,” it had a reply-to address that appeared to be an actual person (as in firstname.lastname@companyname.com) not a listbot. So I sent this:

Hi ___,

I hesitated to write this letter but decided to go through with it in the spirit of open communication. I hope you will share it with anyone at ___ who cares about your firm’s image.

I am greatly turned off not only by a form letter response to my application but also to the invitation to meet with unnamed executives from ___ at a career fair who will “briefly” interview me.

While I have no doubt that in this economic climate ___ will have no shortage of applicants to take you up on your offer, I will not. The invitation is impersonal and cold and makes me feel like I am just another anonymous body queuing for ___’s attention at a cattle
call. I’ve received more personal attention from HR departments at faceless major corporations.

I have ten years of excellent work on the web to showcase for any firm who can be bothered to set a personal, private interview with me. Interviews are not only a chance for you to meet me, but for me to size up the company for whom I might like to work. Since you’ve already made your impression on me, I will be showing my portfolio elsewhere. Please withdraw my application from your system and do not send me any more notices like this.

Just thought I’d share. User experience counts everywhere. Even for potential employees.

A friend emailed me through my contact form and asked:

So what's the 2+2= thing below? Is that a security measure? Is it a way to keep out stupid people? Is it totally for fun?

It’s an anti-spam question. Spambots attack contact forms pretty regularly. Questions like that usually stop them. It’s the same principle behind a CAPCHA image (those annoying squiggly words you have to enter on some forms.) CAPCHAs are a pretty poor user experience and my 2+2 question isn’t much better.

One of the best anti-spam techniques I’ve heard of involves adding an input and making it invisible in the browser (display:hidden in the stylesheet) so humans don’t see it. Spambots don’t actually look at the web; they just dumbly fill in fields in a form. So when something fills in your hidden fields, you know it’s a spambot. You just add a little logic to your form — if that field is not NULL, don’t submit — and presto, spambot caught.

But I’m being lazy and using a WordPress plugin called contact form iii and not even changing the default question. I believe spambots have cracked contact form iii because I’ve gotten what looks like automated spam on another site using the plugin. Luckily the plugin allows you to change the antispam question and answer which stops the bots. I hope.

An update on the netbook:

I’ve been using my Dell Mini 9 pretty much as my main machine. Even coding on it. I just like the portability of it. This past weekend however, things went awry.

A batch of routine updates caused my install of the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) to break. At the same time, my network connections broke. No wireless and no ethernet. And though Ubuntu has a different way of managing packages and updates than Windows and it’s frustrating to have to open another machine and look up the instructions for Ubuntu, I gotta say, it’s nothing compared to the frustration of dealing with Windows’ blue screens and broken .dll files.

After much struggle and many choice words, I got the network connections back up. And after several attempts, I got JRE repaired and properly installed. But Firefox was acting crazy. The back and forward buttons didn’t work. The search bar didn’t work. And the Ubuntu toolbar was busted. When I’d click on the power switch to shut down or restart, the whole toolbar would just disappear. (I eventually found the Terminal command to shutdown so I didn’t have to do hard shut-downs.)

I decided to move from Ubuntu 8.04 which came pre-installed on the Dell Mini to 8.10 and 9.04 to try to fix all these remaining problems. The hiccup here was that the 8.04 version installed was a Long Term Support (LTS) version and not automatically updated with every new release. To change this I needed to go to Software Sources and change the Update option. But my Updates tab had also disappeared.

So after all these hours of working on it, I finally decided this combination of problems was a Dell-created error and not Ubuntu.

Today, I bought a new 2GB USB stick, downloaded the Netbook Remix of Ubuntu 9.04 on my Windows machine, used the Disk Imager to create a disk image on the USB stick, booted up the netbook from the USB stick, played with the Netbook Remix for a while and did the full install, wiping my machine of Dell’s version of 8.04.

So far, it’s working like a charm and I love the Remix desktop.

One further note: when I bought the netbook, I wanted the netbook qua netbook so I went with Dell’s default 4GB harddrive. Little did I know that Ubuntu 8.04 took up 3.5GB. Ubuntu 9.04 uses 3.8GB. Though I’m not planning to keep any files on the netbook, I have few resources left for additional applications which I might one day want. This annoys me. It’s bad service from Dell. Just as their custom version of Ubuntu is bad service.

But their hardware is top-notch. So I’m torn.

I heard today that Dell is actually going to discontinue the Mini. I wonder what the reasons behind that are. If a Mini 9 with 16GB harddrive goes on sale for less than $200, would I buy?

For starters, I think I’ve completely learned my lesson about suggesting innovation in a corporate environment. I’m just not going to do it anymore. It frustrates me more when they won’t move on anything. Unfortunately, and unhealthily, it just encourages me to sit back in my smugness and watch as they project manage with spreadsheets. But that’s easier than hoping they’ll innovate and watching them stagnate. So forget that post I just made on not being snarky.

I just brought up to one of my corporate overlords what I posted about here: that we should adopt a more web savvy approach to project management. He pointed out that everything that’s being done on spreadsheets could be done in SharePoint but users don’t want to have to learn something new.

Is that true? We hear that so much that it’s almost a tautology. I mean, don’t we all feel that way: that once we’re comfortable with something we don’t want to have to learn something new? That’s why so many office workers turn to Excel for everything. They know it already.

Here’s another perspective:

Users don’t want to learn a new piece of shit.

SharePoint is made by Microsoft and I’m sure it will come as a total surprise to you that it isn’t user-friendly. Naturally, it doesn’t look like its developers are remotely aware of the past decade of developments on the web. It includes features like a Task List and a Wiki but neither works in a way you’d want them to. The Wiki has nothing in common with actual wikis. And the task list takes several steps to add a task while simultaneously not giving you all the features you’d need in a task list.

It’s got a calendar that works all right. But similarly, the method to add an event to the calendar doesn’t quite make sense. If there’s another even on that day, you have to view it and then add your own. So you’re a bit confused if you’re adding to the existing event or to the day.

There’s a simple reason Google’s suite of tools are so amazing: they work. They work naturally and intuitively. Stick Google Calendar in front of someone and it won’t take him long to figure out how to add an event to it. Gmail may work differently than most other email apps in its conversational-style view but there’s no learning curve required to use it. And once you do, it seems natural.

Too often, we are afraid of using new tools whether on the web or in the physical world not because we’re actually neophobic but because the designers and developers of those tools haven’t put the proper care into make them work well.

The solution to getting people away from using antiquated spreadsheets for project management isn’t to move them onto another shitty tool like SharePoint. The solution is to find a tool that works easily and intuitively. Or build it. We are the web team for Christ’s sake.

After re-reading my post on corporate insecurity, I added the tag of user experience because one of the main victims of all the nonsense corporate IT security is the experience of the end user. It’s awful. Users have to keep up with tons of password and ID combinations. Rarely do the passwords expire at the same time. Often the password requirements vary. It’s a completely terrible experience. And IT seemingly doesn’t care.

The point I was making in my previous post is that they’re not actually making the company more secure. Because of the multiple passwords and IDs and requirements, users resort to insecure methods of remembering them. At one company where I worked, it was common knowledge that everyone had a Post-It stuck to the underside of his keyboard with the system password on it. This was in case an employee was out and the group needed info off that computer.

My current boss made a comment this week that if IT had their way, they’d shut down all IM programs including the one we use officially in the company.

In this way, IT departments are tiny fascists insisting that they’re making us all more secure by sacrificing our electronic freedoms. And this notion is wrong and old-fashioned.

So in my corporate contract position, I am put through the usual nonsense for an employee regarding IT security. My computer has a start-up screen that requires a user ID and password. Then I have a required system password just to get to Windows. The file management program we use for the website has an ID password. I must enter my time into two separate programs each of which require completely different IDs and passwords.

Various other programs require passwords as well though, for the most part, they just use the system password. Nonetheless, it’s a whole lot of user IDs and passwords. At least five different combinations, none of which expire at the same time.

Last week my system password began the incessant and irritating countdown towards password obsolescence. Each day, the two login systems reminded me with a loud beep and a pop up window that my password expired soon. Also, I received an email each day reminding me of the fact.

I let it all go. If the IT department wants to play by these stupid rules, then let them. My password expired over the weekend.

On Monday, I started up and was prompted to change my password. I did. The second password screen which boots me into Windows didn’t allow me to change the password after expiration. It simply said “This user has been disabled.”

So I called the helpdesk. To make a very long story short, it took them two hours to reset the system password for me.

At the end, I had a brand new password to remember.

So I wrote it on a Post-It and stuck it to my desk.

Is the company more secure for all that?