Archive for the ‘General’ Category
Jun
04
2010
at 12:21pm
Running a webmaster forum is a difficult thing to do. I’ve been running The Webmaster Forums for almost 5 years, and moderating for 6 years before that. It’s a part of me. The problem? We get a lot of spam. In fact, I spend at least half an hour every morning taking care of spam. The outright spam needs to be removed. Links pasted within posts need to be edited out. User IP’s need to be checked to make sure these spammers don’t have multiple accounts. Some users need to be sent a private message with a warning about breaking the rules. Our moderators spend time on this too. It’s endless.
This takes up time. Time I could be spending with more valuable contributions to the forum. I could write more valuable posts. I could add more functionality that would be helpful to users. I could write more blog posts. I could write more articles for A Padded Cell. I could clean my house. Read more…
Posted in General, Personal, Web Culture | 1 Comment »
Jun
05
2008
at 8:38am
I just got my new Thinkpad advanced dock (so I can hook my laptop up to my DVI monitors with a KVM switch. V. l33t 
). The docking station came with a users guide and a “Read This First” safety booklet. The problem is that the user’s guide includes about 13 languages and the safety booklet 34 languages. Do I need those languages? Of course not. It’s a waste of paper. And in this case it’s even worse because there aren’t separate sections for each language, it’s all mixed. You have to flip past all kinds of spanish and chinese to get to the English bits. The user’s guide also has about 6 pages of extra information for Turkey only.
What else could they do?
- Provide an language option when purchasing the product and only provide documentation in that language.
- Skip the paper documentation and provide a little card with a link to the download site. Nobody reads the documentation anyway, might as well save some trees.
And the worst part about it is that the user’s guide is mostly a bunch of bullshit. Thank you for purchasing this product blah blah blah, this is what it’s does, and this is what’s included in the package. Um, I bought the product I think I know what it does!
The connection instructions are on a separate poster with diagrams only, no words at all. I’m not sure which is worse.
The dock was also wrapped in molded syrofoam, unlike the LaCie external hard drive that arrived yesterday (not for me), which had egg carton like cardboard packaging. Boo to Lenovo (although I really like my laptop so I won’t criticize them too much!)
Posted in General, Usability | 4 Comments »
Mar
13
2008
at 9:08am
A few months ago I wrote about the frustrations involved with working with someone else’s outdated code. 37 Signals has a similar post today:
Here’s something I don’t say often: Suck It Up. If you work on more than a few projects, they can’t all smell like today’s fresh linens. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad programmer. It simply means that you’re prioritizing.
And I think that’s something that goes for any type of project. There’s rarely enough time or money to make everything perfect, whether it be a programming project at work or the paint job in the dining room. You have to find the point of balance and decide when it’s worth it to put in the extra time and/or money. Does this really matter in the big picture?
This can be a difficult thing to get over and, as a perfectionist, I know I often spend time on things that don’t matter that much.
Posted in General, Web Standards | 2 Comments »
Mar
09
2008
at 7:00pm
I have a new article up at A Padded cell about choosing a doctype for your site. The article is mainly intended for people who are just starting to work with web standards. It is a complicated problem so I tried to keep it simple. I did think long and hard about whether to recommend an html or xhtml doctype. I decided to go with xhtml mainly because it encourages better coding habits.
Read more…
Posted in General | No Comments »
Jan
15
2008
at 2:40pm
Do you ever have the task of fixing someone else’s code? Someone else’s crappy code? Don’t you wish you could just start over?
You just need to make a few small changes. But the CSS is such a mess! It would be so much better if you could just re-write it. Cut down on the crud and make it all nice and clean and elegeant. Take it all down like Mike Holmes.
But there’s not enough time for that. The changes are due by tomorrow so you have to just make do with what’s there and add in your own necessarily crappy code.
Sigh… this happens to me all the time these days. And I’m sitting here thinking, should I just fix it? How long would it take? There’s a little brick wall here — do I just climb over or do I start again?
Granted, this code isn’t *that* bad. It’s relatively standards-ey (circa 2004-ish). Just lots of layers of disorganized CSS a bunch of IE5 hacks. It still bugs me though.
Posted in General, Web Standards | 2 Comments »
Jan
13
2008
at 12:50pm
Finally, after many months of planning we’ve converted The Webmaster Forums from vBulletin to Drupal! Liam wrote a good explaination of why we made this choice in his article, Goodbye vBulletin, Part 1: Reasons to Switch. In short, we felt that vBulletin was too cluttered, too difficult to work with, and was hurting our search rankings.
We chose Drupal partly because our content site was already built on it so it’s a good opportunity for integration. We also have the programming expertise to make it work just the way we want to. With vBulletin we were often making do and putting in work-arounds to accomplish certain tasks. We also considered Vanilla and punBB – both open source, standards compliant, modular forum platforms.
The move didn’t go entirely smoothly. We decided to do it at Christmas time because we knew traffic would drop andway and if there were going to be problems, this would be the best time to sort them out. The biggest problem turned out to be the module that was generating the Google sitemaps, which brought the sever down a number of times before Liam figured out how to fix it. Unfortunately, our server admins are in the UK and weren’t availble to respond as quickly as we needed them to.
As with any change, we are experiencing a temporary drop in search rankings and visitor traffic. Members will awhile to get used to the new format, and surely some will choose not to come back. It will take some time to build the community back up again but in the end we feel the change will be well worth it.
If you’re not a member already, I hope you’ll stop by the forums and join us. We work hard to keep up a friendly, knowledgeable, spam free community.
(This actually happened just before Christmas but I wasn’t able to post because I’ve been sick for 2 weeks 
Expect a short flurry of posts as I catch up on things I’ve been thinking about).
Comments are now closed on this post. I was getting a lot of spam on it for some reason. If you would like to discuss this further, please visit the Webmaster Forums discussion on this topic.
Posted in General, Open Source | 4 Comments »
