It’s Worse Than You Can Imagine

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At first I was optimistic that the Lockergnome redesign wouldn’t be that terrible, I mean they have smart people there. Then the evidence mounted that there wasn’t going to be any good hybrid approach. Why go backwards? Is it a joke? Is ruining their website some twisted form of RSS evangelism?

Earlier today a comment from Simon said:

Well, the redesign appears to be out now and it�s much worse than I expected – blockquotes for indentation, paragraphs with non-breaking spaces in them for added vertical spacing – tag soup if ever I�ve seen it. Yuck.

He expanded his thoughts illustrated by the code snippet:

<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="778"
bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
<tr><td align="left">
<div id="footer">
<blockquote>&copy; 1996-2004, Lockergnome LLC. ISSN: 1095-3965. All
Rights Reserved. Please read our <a href="/about/privacy-policy.phtml">
Privacy Policy</a> and <a href="/about/terms-of-service.phtml">
Terms of Service</a>. Web site hosted by
<a href="http://www.webair.com/cgi-bin/in?51">Webair</a>.
Email newsletters powered by <a href="http://www.whatcounts.com/">WhatCounts</a>.
Domain registered at <a href="https://www.gnomedomains.com/">GnomeDOMAINS</a>.
</blockquote>
</div>
</td></tr></table>

One can only assume that the newsletters will be following suit, and no one wants that kind of filth in their inbox.

All joking aside, I am going to be unsubscribing from all Lockergnome newsletters. I am not under the illusion that my action will be anything more than a number blip to the people there, but principle of the matter is I don’t have a lot of respect for them anymore. How can I take web development news seriously from an organization that is in the wrong decade code-wise? Even worse, they had something great and threw it away. If enough people were to do the same and unusbscribe they might take notice, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.

I might even be forgiving if their markup (which is invisible to the user when it works) devolved but the site was much easier to use or aesthetically pleasing, but the site has degraded in every conceivable way. I decided I could tolerate the design long enough to unsubscribe, but couldn’t even find that on the site. Google brought up a cached page that no longer exists which pointed to the correct URI, which incidentally still has the old design. So if you also disagree with the recent direction things have taken, unsubscribe from Lockergnome.

Looking for something to fill the void? It didn’t come to mind the other day, but I highly recommend the SitePoint newsletters for web development topics. Blogs are also great, but sometimes it’s nice to get something in yoru inbox. I’m open to suggestions for other newsletters.

Update: I’ve written a new entry that explains why I care.

New Gadget Weblog

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I always liked Gizmodo before, but I stopped visiting for ethical reasons. The currency of weblogging has always been the personal voice of the writer, not the weblog itself. I followed a link to Gizmodo the other day and it was nothing like I remembered, and I thought to myself “When did this jump the shark?”

Well apparently the soul of Gizmodo, Pete Rojas, is now blogging at a new gadget weblog, Engadget. It looks great so far and I’ve added it my daily visits. Weblogs Inc. looks interesting in general, and worth watching.

Jay-Z Construction Kit

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The Jay-Z Construction Set is a toolkit with all of the necessary software and raw material to create a new remix of Jay-Z’s Black Album. It includes nine different variations on the Black Album, over 1200 clip art images, and a couple hundred meg of classic samples and breaks.

It’s the Jay-Z Construction set, as featured in the New York Times. Taking Grey Tuesday to its natural conclusion. I came across this via Mr Haughey, who should be ostracized for mixing Kenny G with anything. Wasn’t the Louis Armstrong incident bad enough?

Oh, and their hype blog runs WordPress.

Essential Software

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My laptop is approaching a level of instability that only a truly borked Windows installation can match, so I think it’s time to make a list of my essential software so when I format and start over I don’t forget anything important and have to install it in a pinch later. So here is software I use on a daily basis and find important enough to reinstall:

Fin! Now if I can just find the restore CDs for my laptop, I’m good to go. Wish me luck.

Protect Your Wireless Traffic

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On my giant todo list for SxSW this year was double-checking that all communication I would be doing over the wireless network would be secured against possible sniffing. Most of my traffic isn’t a problem: I use SFTP with CuteFTP Pro and Dreamweaver MX 2004 to update sites, terminals are (of course) SSH, and all my incoming and outgoing email is over SSL. I’m worried about the errant website login, and maybe AIM. Better safe than sorry, right?

Well Mr. Haughey is going to be using VPN through an inexpensive third-party provider. Of course! Why didn’t I think of that? I thought about setting one up on my server at home (or maybe the colo) but then I remembered that I have a VPN account through UH that is very fast. They require using the VPN software to connect to any of the Cisco access points they have all over the campus, in fact I’m on it right now. Problem solved. I would still like to bring back the secure Photo Matt though.

More on the Gnome Regression

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Another newsletter, another reason to worry. Here’s the quote:

We’ve spent a lot of time and effort on our cutting edge CSS layouts and, while they are definitely fancy-schmancy, they detract quite a bit from our core efforts which are great content and easy access to it. So, as Chris put it in yesterday’s Windows Fanatics, we’re taking a mulligan and calling a do over. Lockergnome is changing looks one more time and moving to a more traditional layout and coding structure. This, my friends, successfully filled the rest of the time between when we last graced your in-box and now. I’ve been locked in my office, nose to the grindstone, hacking out automated content updaters, link rotators, and convoluted include structures hand over fist. Now here’s the part that’s going to get resident Web-Gnome, Foofy Mathews, on a plane to throttle me in my sleep… All the layout is based on tried and true HTML tables.

Dave and Paul have already added great thoughts to the discussion, so I’m not going to address the “tried and true” web techniques of the mid-nineties again. My previous optimism is waning, and I hope someone at Lockergnome is listening and will come out of the echo chamber and let us know what’s going on.

Update: I’ve written an update that explains why I care.

Clever Virus

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Just in case anyone has seen this one going around yet, it is the most clever and well-done spoof I’ve seen in a long time. I have been getting dozens of these and they are humorous because I run my own email systems, so the email just doesn’t make any sense. However I’ve gotten several questions from people I host asking what this means. Here’s what the email looks like:

To: m@wordpress.org
Subject: Email account utilization warning.
From: management@wordpress.org

Dear user, the management of WordPress.org mailing system wants to let you know that,

Our antivirus software has detected a large ammount of viruses outgoing
from your email account, you may use our free anti-virus tool to clean up
your computer software.

Please, read the attach for further details.

Attached file protected with the password for security reasons. Password is 88315.

Cheers,
The WordPress.org team       http://www.wordpress.org

So if you get this, please ignore it like you ignore all attachments that you aren’t expecting.

Invalid Gnome

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I get Chris Pirillo’s Windows newsletter (currently called “Windows Fanatics”) in my inbox this morning and was shocked that he seemed to assert that Lockergnome was going back to its old style, or lack thereof. Maybe it’s just Chris’ flourishes, but several things gave me cause for concern.

Remember what the Web was like when the BLINK tag roamed the earth?

Off to a bad start. We all know there’s only one good use for <blink>.

There were only a handful of browsers, and it didn’t take much to make a page “look good” on all platforms.

Maybe I missed these times. I remember pages “Made for Netscape” or that “Require Internet Explorer.” I remember having to essentially code two sites to work with two radically different browsers. I remember single-pixel GIFs and tables nested ten deep and bad typography. I try to forget, but I can’t.

It doesn’t take much to push the envelope, but sometimes (as we discovered) the envelope pushes back. You might recall the somewhat-simplistic design of our site before we dove head-first into Cascading Style Sheets. Despite its shortcomings and lack of finesse, the sucker worked – and we had few complaints.

I find that surprising. Here’s one: it was one of the ugliest sites I’d ever visited, and the bizarre look turned me off from subscribing to the newsletters even when I had heard several recommendations, because I assumed they must be unprofessional. I’m not trying to be mean, just honest.

Lockergnome.com is about to become less confusing as it goes back to more a basic code structure. We’re going to unbury the menus and options and chalk up the past few months to experience. I’m not saying that we won’t employ fancy scripts now and again, but we’re refocusing our new(er) layout on the thing that most likely brought you to us: the content. Right now, Jason’s putting the finishing touches on the overall structure and functionality…

The attraction of Lockergnome is the content, and the site could use better information architecture, but I hope this does not come at the expense of clean, fast-loading, semantic code and the distinctive aesthetic the site currently has. Though I’m not crazy about parts of it, their current design is pretty good in my opinion. It has some very nice elements that are impressive to me both as a web developer and a consumer. It’s not perfect, but a darn sight better than what was there before.

Is this going to be a step backward? In a way, yes. I’ll certainly miss certain aspects of our ultra-hip CSS implementation. However, until 99% of the installed browser / e-mail client base supports the same standards, we’re gonna leave the fancy-schmancy stuff to other online resources.

Mind pointing out these fancy-schmancy online resources so I can read them instead?

For what we do, and how we need to do it, advanced “hacks” just don’t work well.

What about web standards? Graceful degradation? From a purely business and marketing point of view, is the couple of percent of users on browsers so limited and hardware so old that they can’t appreciate modern web pages (and not just yours, also ESPN, Wired, PGA…) a demographic you want to cater to at the expense of the other 95%?

Furthermore, the old Lockergnome got eaten by spam filter several times because its markup was similar to the spam I got. Since the redesign, nada. Maybe it’s just my Bayes scores or installation of SpamAssassin, but I can’t imagine my setup being different from many others. If a newsletter falls in the spam box and no one sees its ads, does it make a penny?

I doubt it.

I could just be worried over nothing, their redesign could be impeccable markup combined with simpler CSS that works better than their current across browsers and platforms. The only reason I put my thoughts to words is that I’m on the cusp of several decisions. I’m examining my subscriptions; they recently cancelled the Linux channel (which was quite good) and the Web Developer channel is in a state of flux (it was pretty bad for a while). Also the affordable Gnomedex is coming, though my decision on that will probably be more influenced by its speakers. On one hand I have a lot of faith in the Lockergnome team to do the right thing, but the standards-lover in me is just terrified of the prospect of a site going backward. Not to mention the masses who subscribe to the newsletters that will draw the conclusion that “CSS isn’t ready for big sites yet,” in 2004. I can think of nothing further from the truth or more subversive.

Browsing

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Just a few links and excerpts I’ve come across lately.

Use absentee voting ballots so there will be a paper trail:

Michaan said, “I consider this to be the greatest threat to our democracy of anything we have ever faced in this country. There is so much possibility of fraud that there has to be a voting system that is verifiable with paper trails. Absent that we’re totally at the mercy of whoever controls this equipment.”

I have always thought it interesting that Diebold, known mostly for ATMs, has said that it would be too much trouble to have voting machines give voting receipts or some physical record of the vote when ATMs have no problem giving you a paper record of every transaction.

Quarantining dissent: How the Secret Service protects Bush from free speech:

When Bush went to the Pittsburgh area on Labor Day 2002, 65-year-old retired steel worker Bill Neel was there to greet him with a sign proclaiming, “The Bush family must surely love the poor, they made so many of us.” The local police, at the Secret Service’s behest, set up a “designated free-speech zone” on a baseball field surrounded by a chain-link fence a third of a mile from the location of Bush’s speech.

Similar suppressions have occurred during Bush visits to Florida. A recent St. Petersburg Times editorial noted, “At a Bush rally at Legends Field in 2001, three demonstrators — two of whom were grandmothers — were arrested for holding up small handwritten protest signs outside the designated zone. And last year, seven protesters were arrested when Bush came to a rally at the USF Sun Dome. They had refused to be cordoned off into a protest zone hundreds of yards from the entrance to the Dome.”

When the police attack sparked a geyser of media criticism, Mike van Winkle, the spokesman for the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center told the Oakland Tribune, “You can make an easy kind of a link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that’s being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that protest. You can almost argue that a protest against that is a terrorist act.”

Why does this secure CIA form for reporting terriosts use a Netscape favicon? I suppose I would be more scared if it was a Microsoft favicon. Maybe they should read my favicon tutorial.

The Myth of SUV Safety:

In a thirty-five-m.p.h. crash test, for instance, the driver of a Cadillac Escalade–the G.M. counterpart to the Lincoln Navigator–has a sixteen-per-cent chance of a life-threatening head injury, a twenty-per-cent chance of a life-threatening chest injury, and a thirty-five-per-cent chance of a leg injury. The same numbers in a Ford Windstar minivan–a vehicle engineered from the ground up, as opposed to simply being bolted onto a pickup-truck frame–are, respectively, two per cent, four per cent, and one per cent.

Matthew Thomas: Why I use WordPress:

WordPress is licensed under the GNU General Public License. I generally prefer GPLed software, because over a period of decades, it maximizes the rights of those who use it. (In the short run things may be different, but I’m a long-run sort of person.)

Right on. Plus all the cool Matts are doing it.

Grants for captioning? How quaint:

The U.S. Department of Education has apparently decided that certain programming will receive sponsorship for captioning and certain other programming will not.

Joe is also running WordPress. He uses more lists than anyone I know. I wasn’t sure if Joe, a militant hand-coder, would appreciate a fully dynamic content management system, but he has taken to it swimmingly.

Curious QRIO

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QRIO, our new robot overlords friends. Hat tip: Robert. Some videos in Windows Media format:

I’m really at a loss for words.

QRIO knows your face. It’s equipped with a camera and the ability to analyze the images it sees. It detects faces and identifies who they are. It can even learn the faces of people it just met. And it responds to specific people individually, adding to the fun.

QRIO is equipped with wireless networking equipment, and can connect to your home wireless network out of the box. There might even come a day when it serves as a guide between people and information technology.

We made QRIO as quiet as possible when it moves to help it fit in pleasantly in a home. Its motors and gears turn when it walks or moves, but the vibration-resistant frame dampens the noise. You’ll be amazed to see it move so silently.

Well Designed Weblogs?

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Or not.

Lars Holst, who has a beautiful WordPress-powered blog, has been doing a bit he calls Well-Designed Weblogs. I have been pretty disappointed with the second round (and to some extent the first round) of “Well-Designed Weblogs.” It is subjective, but quite frankly there are some sites I don’t see anything in. To me some look plain, unimaginative, squished — overall badly designed.

For the list to be a useful Lars should put a blurb about why a site was chosen so if there is some nugget of inspiration there that I’m missing, I can be enlightened. It would also shed some light on the subjective process he’s going through, which would be interesting. Round 2 has 37 entries — some great, some mediocre, some bad. If it could be distilled to the five or six very best, in Lars’ opinion, it would be a lot more meaningful than the catalog it is now.

But if it’s just a list with screenshots, there are better places to go.