Why Dont You Blog?

This is by way of being a response to the Web 2.0 blog. I have to agree with the view that people don’t usually want all-singing, all-dancing websites. They particularly don’t want to return to them.

I accept that this isn’t strictly true for novelty websites. There is always room for sites that you visit to go “Wow, what a fantastic effect!” and recommend to your friends. However, this is a very limited market. It’s hard to see where money can be made from these sites. They only have value to business when they are promoting a band or a movie. So, there is no one to pay for the development time. This means that these sites tend to exist only as student exercises.

Otherwise extreme use of the newer capacities of the web usually only exist to promote web design companies. Even more, they mainly exist to promote web design companies to other web design companies, which seems a bit pointless.

If there are problems with the Web from the end-user’s perspective, these are not usually along the lines of “If only there was more pointless moving around of icons and text and a few more flashing lights” Most problems are more like - This doesnt work as I expect. I have to log in to do anything. Do I really have to enable Active X to buy a mouse online and so on? Why does it take as long to buy a train ticket online as to go to the trainstation and buy one?

My main whine about the web is that sites are all starting to look the same. And this is not notably pretty. There used to be a much wider range of web aesthetics, from much more beautiful to much uglier. Now most of the web is just boring. The web has settled down to a common dull aesthetic. Maybe if some of the genius needed to pick up on a dozen new technologies went into a more experimental approach to the look of web pages, we’d all start to get excited about it again.

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A new form of Trojan holds your files to ransom (according to http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-6066636.html). Not having files of value >= 10p, this doesn’t exactly put me in a flap. But, as I am fair game for getting almost any malware, I could still find myself horribly inconvenienced.

According to zdnet, this is the third such attack in about a year. There are lots of details about the new Trojan attack on Sophos. (http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/articles/2006/04/ransom.html) Its characteristics include a seemingly modest $10.99 ransom demand, together with a pretty unreasonable demand to pay within 30 minutes, which must be unmeetable unless you live in a Western Union office. Oddly the messages don’t inpire much trust in the promise that paying up will halt the trojan, as the message provides a Yahoo email address for you to contact if the removal code doesn’t work.

The basic design flaw in all this from the criminal’s viewpoint must be the same problem faced by all extortionists - picking up the cash. Western Union may be international, but it is not anonymous. There can’t be a Western Union office in the developed world that isn’t covered by the currently ubiquitous cameras. A huge influx of $10.99 Western Union orders to one office would be its own trail anyway, unless, there is a computer wizard isomewhere so bored that they would bother to write and propagate a Trojan for $10.99. In which case, they could probaly get away with it but might be better advised to get a more profitable line of work.

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Finally fantastic film.

Like the other FF films, everything is computer-generated. The graphics are just superb. It is visually stunning and the images just keep getting better and better.

(No I didn’t understand the storyline. It doesn’t matter if the story and characters are silly or the facial animation is sometimes wooden.)

You still can’t take your eyes off the screen. It’s almost the pinnacle of artistic expression using three-D graphics.  I’ll write more on this when i have watched the dvd-extras and may be more coherent and less gushing.

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It’s not often that your email can make you feel sick but seeing a returned as undeliverable email that was supposed to have originated from my account and which was a Barcalays Bank scam fills me with a mixture of rage and horror.

>:-(

Checking my traffic logs for the past few days I have found a huge pile of IPs with Afrinet domains apparently sending and receiving packets from my coomputer plus a huge number of malformed and bogus packets today. I seem to have sorted that out or its stopped of its own accord.

Any sensible ideas about what I should about it? I have already run a virus checker and I have a firewall and my browser is supposedly so well defended that I can barely view a web page without having to enable a scripts for every dozen words on the page.

The remaining choices seem to be (a ) ignore it - the most likely given my life track record ( b) complain to my ISP (c ) do something else that I haven’t thought of. So - anyone who’s reading this, and has any ideas at all, please tell me.

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Found this from the sitepoint link posted in a previous article:

Ajax is meant for those situations where you have a small part of a web page that you want to update with information from the server without reloading the whole page (often a single word or a small set of links). If you are looking to replace more than say 10% of the page then you need to rethink whether Ajax is the appropriate way to do it. At least some of the Ajax that people are currently writing is more so they can demonstrate that they can write it rather than that the page actually needs it. Once Ajax ceases to be flavour of the month then it will go back to being used only in those situations where it is appropriate (the way people used to use it several years ago before the name Ajax was applied to this particular technology).

(Posted by felgall - URL: http://www.sitepoint.com/forums /showthread.php?t=371856)

I thought that was an excellent summation.

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Today, I have been wasting most of my life on the sitepoint forums. Not wishing to be some one who encourages others to while away ten hours reading about things they will never put into practice I am loathe to suggest you visit them yourself.

However, being someone who likes to encourage others to idle their lives away - I have to say, check them out yourself if you dont believe me

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Sorry to keep beating this one - but the site at http://www.lastcraft.com/blog/index.php?p=19 “Listen Kids, AJAX is not Cool” is excellent. If you are planing to ajax-ify your website or application then it is well worth adding the Last Craft site to you list of research material (you do research dont you?). This article highlights some of the more common AJAX-esque mistakes and, to an extent, typifies what is at fault with the web 2.0 buzz.

In a well written manner the article goes into what is wrong with most of the AJAX demos and, alludes to the general pointless-ness of it all. For me, the idea behind the new technology is to make life easier and improve the “user interface.” From what I have seen to date, AJAX does neither.

Strangely, when you read the comments it appears some people have taken an active dislike to the author, is this die-hard AJAXers defending themselves?

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Sorry, I forgot to add this to the last one.

If you want to use AJAX, then it is definitely worth your time checking out http://alexbosworth.backpackit.com/pub/67688

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Having tried to avoid ranting about the “web 2.0″ nonsense that is being thrown around the web and USENET at lot these days I have finally had to succumb to the temptation and rant a little.

If you have an even passing interest in web design, and you haven’t had your head buried in sand for the last twelve months, you cant have missed the hype surrounding how Web 2.0 technologies (mainly AJAX) will be the future of the web. Internet (and to a lesser extent general PC) magazines have been falling over themselves to hype the “new” way of doing things (even though the XMLHttpRequest it hinges on is ancient) and websites which have adopted the web 2.0 mantras are pushed remorselessly. (Flickr, del.icio.us etc.,)

Now, generally speaking here at Why Dont You we are more than happy to adopt (pointless) new technologies just for the sake of it. I mean, we even use Ubuntu… However I cant help but think the Web 2.0 obsession is getting out of hand. It’s “poster child” is AJAX and, while this is useful, there are massive limitations to its implementation. Add to this the potential learning curves involved and round off with the browser problems (what happens if the client doesn’t have a JS enabled browser…) - all of a sudden it seems that this is actually a niche technology.

If you are designing a cutting edge site, geared to impress other web designers with your jedi-like editing powers then go for it. Web 2.0 your site to death.

If however, you are designing a site for the general public then steer clear. When people are trying to do their online shopping they dont want fade in / fade out effects. When people are using the browser provided by their ISP along with whatever net-paranoia software they can get their hands on, all that finely crafted event-driven JS vanishes. This is the sad reality of the internet, away from the excitement of web magazines. People want websites which function. All the glitter that Web 2.0 / AJAX provides is (IMHO) pointless.

Most sites (and most designers) have enough trouble getting their sites to work in two different browsers when it is plain HTML and CSS. Add in the new platforms we are constantly being told are “the way forward” and it just seems that Web 2.0 is all hype and no function.

For thoese who have converted, some decent enough AJAX sites are:

• http://www.ajaxian.com/
• http://www.ajaxmatters.com/
• http://ajax.sys-con.com/
• http://www.w3schools.com/ajax/
• [Blog] http://sourcelabs.com/ajb/archives/2005/05/ajax_mistakes.html
• [Blog / Toolkit] http://twilightuniverse.com/resources/code/sack/
• [Spoof article about why AJAX sucks...] http://www.usabilityviews.com/ajaxsucks.html

Enjoy.

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I know I have complained in the past about the poor standard of web design “IDE” software (see the sulk about NVU for more) and sadly in the intervening week very little has changed.

This is a shame because I really do like linux and much prefer working on the SuSE machine to any of the others. (I will try not to let this become another anti-Ubuntu rant :-)), I am sure that if anyone could proprerly reproduce the functionality and capabilites of Dreamweaver for the *nix platforms they would be on to a winner.

However, until the day when nirvana arrives, the best alternative I have come across so far is Bluefish. (http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/) While this doesn’t have the capabilities (ie. site definitions and inbuilt ftp etc) that dreamweaver offers it does provide an excellent set of text editing functions. It deals with a variety of formats including C, HTML, PHP and SQL. It has good, useful, syntax highlighting and is generally an excellent bit of software. I really cant recomend it enough!

Sadly this software is only available for POSIX compatible operating systems because, from what I have seen of it so far, it would be great even on a Windows PC.

While there still isn’t (currently) something I can use to totally replace DW and the Windows PCs, this is certainly “the next best thing.” If you know of any other good *nix web design IDE / HTML editors please let me know.

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