It is with very sad heart I have to announce that
As a result of this, it is not intended for us to ever produce any updates, new posts or changes to this blog.
The English language does not contain suitable words for how sorry we are that she is no longer with us and I hope anyone who has ever read, disagreed with or even enjoyed a post here will join us in saying that the world has become a slightly less wonderful place now she has gone.
RIP Polly Unsaturate. 1950 – 2016.
Just to update you, Ogum Photography is now online and selling prints at great prices. Order soon to make sure you have your fine art print presents in time for Christmas.
Sorry about the recent full blown outage we’ve suffered. To be honest, at the moment, I still have no idea what caused it. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.
As you may see from the site, we have taken the plunge and gone for a whole new style here. This has been designed for us by Compuskills and as far as I am aware it will be made available for free download from the compuskills blog site in the very near future.
This theme has also been tweaked a little to try and address some of the issues this blog has been having lately. Hopefully you should now find the site faster and more responsive. If you have any questions or issues with this theme please let us know. We are genuinely interested if you have any problems with the navigation or find the style is broken in anyway.
Thank you for your patience.
[tags]Site Admin, Style, Themes, Compuskills, Blog, Blog Software, WordPress, Downloads[/tags]
As mentioned previously, we were intending to upgrade this site to WordPress 2.2. This upgrade has now been completed and everything seems to be running fine. If you encounter any problems or inconsistencies, please let us know.
As you may have noticed over the last few weeks, we have been trying out new themes for the blog (the joys of WordPress).
It looks like this is the one we are going to settle on, and it will remain in use for the next few days. Can you take a moment to let us know what you think please? Good and bad comments are welcome here.
It seems the current “issues” with getting connected via Virginmedia are still alive and kicking. Hopefully this will not last for two long and normal service can, eventually, resume.
Until then – thank you for your patience.
This is from the WordPress development blog and worth noting if you run WordPress as your blog software:
Long story short: If you downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days, your files may include a security exploit that was added by a cracker, and you should upgrade all of your files to 2.1.2 immediately.
Longer explanation: This morning we received a note to our security mailing address about unusual and highly exploitable code in WordPress. The issue was investigated, and it appeared that the 2.1.1 download had been modified from its original code. We took the website down immediately to investigate what happened.
It was determined that a cracker had gained user-level access to one of the servers that powers wordpress.org, and had used that access to modify the download file. We have locked down that server for further forensics, but at this time it appears that the 2.1.1 download was the only thing touched by the attack. They modified two files in WP to include code that would allow for remote PHP execution.
This is the kind of thing you pray never happens, but it did and now we’re dealing with it as best we can. Although not all downloads of 2.1.1 were affected, we’re declaring the entire version dangerous and have released a new version 2.1.2 that includes minor updates and entirely verified files. We are also taking lots of measures to ensure something like this can’t happen again, not the least of which is minutely external verification of the download package so we’ll know immediately if something goes wrong for any reason.
Finally, we reset passwords for a number of users with SVN and other access, so you may need to reset your password on the forums before you can login again.
Well, in the last post about .net magazine we made the promise that normal service would be resumed – it now seems that was too hasty and the magazine has escaped the brunt of criticism this month (partially down to the crazy people who worship their invisible friends I suspect but never the less it has escaped).
Now, before accusations of “going soft” get bandied about, I have to highlight that the reason .net gets off “lightly” is the magazine is very bland this month. It is hard to criticise what they say, when they don’t really say anything. The main sections are how to make money from your site (which basically says sell thing well… duh!) and the pro tips which pretty much say “AJAX and Flash are the Future.” Not exactly stuff to get fired up over – even if they do repeat the tired old mantras about how this year is the year flash becomes dominant (now, I wonder if that has ever been said before…)
The showcase sites, while looking good in a graphic art magazine, generally show unusable (often incomprehensible) sites whose designs are totally at odds with what is advised in the tutorials etc. No change there then. The focus on “badges” is comical – a whole page about how putting a little “sticker” on your web page is the coolest, best thing in the world. If you don’t know what they mean by “badges,” an example is on the Zookoda.com website – where it says “Yeh. It is free.” Seriously. This gets a whole page with comments about how this particular badge “cuts through the visual clutter and delivers a crucial message.” Amazing, isn’t it?
This theme continues into the bland tutorials which range from extending phpBB to using CSS to get rid of tables (what year is it?). The only bit worthy of a rant is the evidence that there is still abysmal editorial oversight and quality control on their articles.
In the expert advice section, Paul Boag is responding to a writer who wants a print stylesheet to have a page break before or after the div tags so the text remains together. The advice given is:
… two CSS properties will help: “page-break-before” and “page-break-after.” Attach these to your div tags from within your stylesheet and you can control whether a page break is inserted before or after the div. So, for example DIV { page-break-before: always} would add a page break immediately after each div.
I think I can work out what he is trying to say here (the writer had multiple divs, one after each other) but in reality, what he is saying is the opposite of what will happen. CSS is often viewed as a dark art at the best of times. Nonsense doesn’t help.
Tags: .net Magazine, Web Design, Technology, CSS, Stylesheets
Just a quick one, there have been a couple of changes to how the styles on this blog are handled. Mainly this has involved the introduction of a few new clasess (download, code, note, taglist, alert, new, construction, taglist and information) which can be added to <p> tags to give a bit of inline style alteration.
The taglist class is already in use, but we are not going to go about add retrofitting it two hundreds of messages.
Let me know what you think, or if there are any other things you think we should add.
What is it about “Web 2.0” sites that they feel the need to wrap error (or unavailable) messages in all manner of flowery nonsense? In the past, technorati has often returned a spurious message about the monster escaping and now it seems Flikr has followed suit.
For those who were wondering where the images on the right hand sidebar have gone – this is the answer:
Now, I am sure I am not alone in thinking that is a lot less than an I would normally think of as an answer. If you follow the link to the Flickr Blog page you get some more details, but surely that defeats the point of having the error message?
Not to long ago, every site which considered itself trendy had “doorway” pages, which were normally little more than a flash animation or a “cool” (i.e. crap) logo which they wanted visitors to look at before they got into the site. This lasted a very short time (although there are still sites which do this…) and very quickly people realised that it was madness. When people visit a site, they expect to see the site – not some artistic nonsense. That error message is basically useless. It tells you nothing about what is going on and forces you to continue to visit more pages just to find out what the problem is. What lunatic thinks this is “usability?”
Likewise, when people see an error message they expect to be told what the error is, not some attempt to be trendy and humanise the website. This is what the blog says:
Downtime tonight
UPDATE@11:50pm: Still going smoothly. Looks like we might finish up a few minutes early.
UPDATE@ 9:40pm: Flickr’s now down and busy bees are switching and racking and installing and setting up. All proceeding wel!
Tonight at 9pm (San Francisco time – view in your local time) Flickr will be down for maintenance for up to four hours. We apologize for the length of this downtime, but we’re making some big changes which will enable us to roll out new features faster. So … it’ll be worth it!
As usual, photos will still be served, but you won’t be able to access Flickr site or API. We’ll post here once we start and when we’re ready to come back up. Thank your for your patience!
Now how hard would it have been to put that on the previous page?
Tags: Flickr, Technorati, Error Messages, Web 2.0, Bad Ideas, Useless, Technology, Rants
Only a few days after 2.0.6 was released we are now on to 2.0.7. At least this time the security fixes seem somewhat trivial to put in place (only six files to upload). Hopefully this will be the last update before 2.1 comes out.
I wonder how much impact 2.1 will have? (I suspect this is a future rant in waiting)
Well, its 2007 now so time for a new category. Following recent poor customer experience with a variety of online retailers, I have decided to provide space here to “name and shame” the wrongdooers.
Basically, companies which provide members of Why Dont You…? with poor products or poor customer service will be discussed here. If a company you like gets caught in the spotlight then let us know and we can consider revising our opinions.
Historically, this blog has enjoyed criticising .net magazine for its poor content – always with the admittance that writing about web “stuff” in print media is a difficult task to say the least. Recently, after an editorial change, .net magazine improved dramatically and it’s content went from strength to strength and here at WhyDontYou we were happy to admit this.
Sadly it seems the wonder days of June 06 are a distant memory. After an excellent start with a nice layout, good articles and decent expert advice and tutorials, .net magazine has let itself slip back into the swamp.
Trying with a smaller sized picture
