This has got to be one of the oddest but most welcome holidays.

Odd? It doesn’t have a set date. It’s something to do with phases of the moon, I believe. Who works it out? Every year, calendars tell us when Easter is. Who tells the calendar manufacturers? They could print all the diaries and Western calendars in the world by just working out the leap years and setting the length of February – making sure they remember the old “February has 28 days clear… etc saying” to work out how long the months are. They can easily set out the dates of Christmas and New Year and May Day. But when it comes to Easter and Whit and Pancake Tuesday and all those other days (sorry, Days) that depend on Easter – who tells them?

Also odd, because if it’s supposed to be the date of the crucifixion, then why not just set one, as has been done with Christmas? The obvious argument is that it’s the old spring festival and reflects the progress of the northern hemisphere’s yearly cycle. Which is obviously true and fair enough. But why doesn’t this apply to Christmas? It’s always a couple of days after the Winter equinox.

Welcome? Good Friday is the only bank holiday that’s on a Friday, which makes it seem particularly well-named as Good. All other bank holidays allow you to miss a work Monday, but there isn’t that much you can do on a Sunday that requires an extra lie-in on Monday. Bank holiday Mondays turn Tuesdays (so-so) into alternate Mondays (bad). Good Friday turns a Thursday (so-so) into a Friday (good) AND gives you an extra Saturday (excellent). And even gives you an extra Bank Holiday in the next week.

Even better, Easter comes at a time when you have to be clinically depressed not to feel some optimism relating to the next few months of warmer longer days, no need to wear overcoats and boots and tights (this is only an advantage if you’re a woman, normally). This year it was perfectly timed to match the first decent weather seen all year in the North of England.

More good things – even if you have 30 kids, nephews, nieces, friends’ kids, grandhildren and great-grandchildren to buy presents for, you can get them all an Easter egg and have change out of £40. Try doing that at Christmas.

(Buy them Cadbury’s Creme Egg multipacks and you’ll have change out of a tenner, but you have to be on the dole or a pensioner to get away with that, really. Even better, you can get those candy-coated little chocolate eggs that are speckled to look like real birds’ eggs. However giving one of those would probably be worse than just not giving anything. Ideally, you have to put a few in tissue paper in a fake bird’s nest made out of Flakes. )

And you don’t have to go round a million shops choosing things. If it’s chocolate and it’s even remotely oval* – it will do. They’ll not notice any difference after the first one or two anyway, and it’s ten to one they’ll vomit them all up within 3 hours of waking anyway.

Altogether, it’s hard to find anything bad to say about Easter as a holiday season. As a religious festival, it’s hard to say anything that won’t offend somebody in some way, so I won’t.

… Or not much anyway. This is a bit related to its religious side. The music is rubbish. Christmas has fantastic carols. Easter doesn’t have much in the way of songs. “There is a green hill far away” is about it. This has miraculous powers to bring tears to the eyes of any child who’s ever had to sing it in Assembly. However, set it against the full set of carols and Christmas wins hands down over Easter. But that’s probably the only thing its scoresheet is down on.

So, Happy Easter

* A Terry’s chocolate orange will do at a pinch. In fact, a box of chocolates is OK as well, unless it only has square ones, in which case it’s all nougat or toffees and NO ONE will thank you for it.

Not wishing to completely alienate the last two posters here 🙂 (http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/04/14/experts-on-the-internet/ and http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/04/14/web-design-articles/) I still feel the need to defend .net slightly and possibly play devils advocate.

As a magazine, .net has no pretences of being a scientifically rigourous journal and there certainly isn’t any peer review process…, so it is a bit unfair to critise its articles in that light. The magazine is a “trade journal” and as such is supposed to be targetting its articles in that direction. The e-commerce competition was (IMHO) more a case of seeing what can be done to the standards and requirements of in-house judges – not a test of cold, hard, customer service. I am not saying they are right in doing this, but you would hope any website which was planning to introduce an e-commerce application would conduct extensive customer research, not simply rely on the opinions of three “ivory towers” types.

I agree with heather’s comments that the internet using public dont really care about what backend technology is in place – all they want is to achive thier goals (find information, buy things, play games etc) with the minimum of hassle. The fact a site is open or closed source is largely irrelevant. However, .net magazine is aimed at other Web Builders (webmasters, web designers etc., whatever you want to call them). This means the back-end matters. The update process matters. The ease of construction matters. The ease of update matters. And so on.

In my mind, this is what .net magazine was targetting and, to an extent it has achieved it’s goal. Now, the important question is “should it change its goals?” Personally, I think so. It is trying to be all things to everyone and as a result it is failing badly in some respects.

This months magazine has a section where it tears Tesco.com’s website / user experience apart. This is all done from the “fellow expert” point of view but it is couched in “customer-focus” terms. Now, I am not disagreeing with the comments .net has made (tesco’s website certainly could be improved) but the resounding fact of the matter is that despite its “failings” this is one of the biggest online grocery sites there is. That certainly means more than Gareth Knight’s judgement on its style and system.

I think there is a very real risk that dedicated net-geeks may get snared up in a circular self-fulfilment, where the opinions, judgements and criticisms move further and further away from the mainstream (and therfore “public” opinion). That is ok if your website provides a service to nothing but other geeks, but if you are selling to the public make sure you get their feedback!

.net is really good so I don’t want it to seem that this blog is full of  rants about it. This entry is meant to be seen as constructive criticism. On the positive side, it shows that we are paying attention.

However, the expert panels are often quite annoying. Contestants in the weekly challenge tend to be reasonably new web designers who want to get their names known, unsurprisingly. The “expert” judges get their names known, with an “expert” tag attached, which gives them all the publicity adavantage that the challengers get, plus extra kudos. And sometimes, one suspects that they are not so expert after all.

However, it is the whole idea of the expert panel that is the most dubious part of the exercise. For most sites, appealing to experts is of little value. The general public is not concerned about the issues that concern web designers.

As a rule, the internet-browsing public don’t care if the site fits the current web fashions. They don’t care about much except whether a site does what it is supposed to. If they want information, they expect it to turn up in a readable and usable form.  If they want to buy goods online, they expect the process of finding what they want, working out the cost and how to pay and arranging delivery to be straightforward, fast and secure. They will just give up and not purchase anything if it seems like more trouble than going to the shops. So why get experts to judge the user interface of an e-commerce site? Stop a dozen people at random. Choose teenagers, students, pensioners, cleaners, factory workers, bar staff and office workers rather than “experts” and it will be obvious what e-commerce sites work

Following up on an old article on this, where I pointed out the “issues” I had with .net’s e-commerce challenge… (read the original article)

Recently I got an email from Phil (www.branchesdesign.co.uk) about the write up we did, and largely he agrees with what we said. He also pointed out some things we missed – but generally it supported the “concern” that the software match off was a bit biased.

He said:

I found your site whilst looking through my stats and found you linking to the .Net demo site we did for Olivers Organics using ‘out of the box Actinic’. I have to agree with you whole-heartedly. The so- called panel of ‘experts’ at .Net just… wasn’t! I don’t understand why they just didn’t have a wander outside their offices and grab 10 people off the street to have a review session.

I couldn’t agree more. That would have been a MUCH better idea, and really would have actually provided some insight for other developers.

Whilst I agree that Hannah’s {the “winning” entry} design was very nice indeed, it did appear as though some of these ‘experts’ didn’t even look at all of the sites in much detail. For instance, on ours a reviewer said there was no special offer on the home page. In the screen grab accompanying the review it can be seen! Oh dear.

The winning web site was evry nice – we said that the first time round, although on subsequent comparisons I am not really still sure it deserved to win. I had missed the special offer thing – but it is a good example of the problem with using industry “experts” to review a site.

.Net’s credibility, unfortunately, took a bit of a nose-dive in my estimations. Still, we haven’t done too badly out of it with lots of hits to the Organics site… c’est la vie.

Sadly, I cant really say I ever gave .net much “credibility” as far as its experiments go (it could have a whole site of bad science…) 🙂 It is good that it has generated traffic – the organics website (http://www.branchesdesign.co.uk/oliversorganics/) is very good, as is the designers site – www.branchesdesign.co.uk. It gives a feeling of “Cosmic Justice” to think that, despite the poor structure of .net’s code-off the entrants are getting some reward!

On an unfortunate note, this month’s .net magazine shows they refuse to learn from their mistakes and have set aside the best part of six pages for a “bad science” special. The article is about how a website has 50 miliseconds to make an impact… Now, I am sure .net are just faithfully repeating a research abstract but they should know better. Without going into too much detail about how this article is really not much more than a “filler”, I will highlight one question – when does the time start? From when you click a link to when the page renders is going to be about 100 times longer than that – even for a well optimised page on a LAN. It is an example of a farcial headline grabbing statement, which then descends into a mediocre peice about web design.

Well, it seems that despite the linuxquestions site giving great and helpful information – and my YaST apparently having installed Apache 2 and PHP 5, I still cant get the thing to work.

My love of Linux is rapidly running out. This is very frustrating, especially as setting up Apache/MySQL/PHP/CF on a Windows machine took about 10 minutes top and worked perfectly out of the box.

I will perserve but any advice / tips welcome.

Well, the longstanding diatribes against Ubuntu not withstanding, I have spent a fair amount of time on this in the past few weeks. To such an extent that when I came back to the SuSE machine (which I am using for this), I had pretty much lost the ability to do anything.

The shame will never end.

In short, the SuSEbox has been largely untouched for the last month or so, so when I came to it today it needed a fair amount of admin doing – packages updating etc. I also decided this was a good time to bin the old apache 1.3 it was running and install apache 2 with php5.

What a mistake.

In the last month or so, it seems like I had forgotten how to do the simplest of admin tasks. I couldnt add new repositories to download up-to date software and had to resort to installing (often followed by repeated uninstall, reinstall farces) the software from a CD burned months ago. It was a nightmare.

Fortunately the wonders of Google saved the day and I got to http://www.linuxquestions.org/ – which fortunately had pretty much the answer to every question I was suffering.

Sadly, for some reason (and even though CF, MySQL, Perl, Ruby, Python etc are all fine) I cant get apache to serve PHP pages properly. It still sends them with an unknown mime-type. (And yes, I have edited the config files by hand…)

Oh well.

Now, most (if not all of you) will be aware that the Linux Site is getting out of date and we were about to do an overhaul to bring it kicking and screaming into 2006. However, as things were about to begin a debate opened up as to keeping it “for posterity.”

Overall, I am not a nostalgic person, however some of the comments made did make sense and now there is a bit of a rething going on.

Plan A (the original favourite) is that we use the current site, bin all the old data and revise everything in line with 2006 software, hardware and prices.

Plan B (which is growing in support) is that we retain the “old” site and create a whole new section for 2006 – new style, new prices etc.

Please, feel free to let me know what you think (email/posts/news/blogs etc) and in a couple of weeks the outcome of “public opinion” should be visible on the site 🙂

It is with great pain and suffering I have to make this rant today. I am a big fan of Linux and love it. It is running now. I am using it to play music, download USENET artciles, render and image and burn a cd all at the same time – right now!

However, I have to confess to one pretty significant annoyance.

Webdesign.

Now, given *nix’s functionality on the internet, you would think that it would be the ideal platform for web development. Largely it is. Native FTP / SSH is wonderful. It is an easy task to SSH into the webhost and make changes directly. I can set up cron jobs to automatically update / refresh / back up my files etc.

However, there is big failing – there is nothing to compare with Dreamweaver. Nothing. Nvu is good – very good – but at anything other than static HTML pages it becomes a terrible chore to use it. I have been trying to use it for site development for quite some time now – and overall, I have had to resort to going back to the Wintelbox and using Dreamweaver.

Now, on price issues NVU wins hands down. If I was purchasing this for my own use I would never have even contemplated DW. There is always the chance that years of practice fighting DW may mean I am biased but I would be interested to see anyone who has tried both, and finds NVU is better for PHP/ASP driven sites.

For some reason, over the last five hours or so Wikipedia hasnt been showing images. Is this price of fame, or has upload.wikipedia.org just gone down?

This is in addtion to the problems I have had over the last few weeks where typing www.wikipedia.org or wikipedia.org into the address bar of IE causes it to crash – only en.wikipedia.org works here.

Odd to say the least.