Archive for the ‘Web Culture’ 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 »
Mar
09
2009
at 12:38pm
I just stumbled upon an article about the increasing obsolesence of Dreamweaver and tools like it. The point is that websites are becoming increasingly dynamic. Building static html pages with a tool like Dreamweaver just doesn’t cut it anymore.
In the relatively near future every website will be a dynamically-generated web application and all of today’s sites built on multiple static pages will be ripped out and replaced.
I was trying to explain this to people in a meeting a few weeks ago. Static files clearly can’t handle the demands of todays websites. Even attempting to build in your own functionality by coding your own php is fraught with problems. Why should you do it yourself when you could just use (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, your CMS of choice)?
Will there become a time when nobody publishes static html files anymore? Will new designers jump right into WordPress instead of building static websites first? An intersting topic to ponder.
Posted in Web Culture, Wordpress | 18 Comments »
Nov
13
2007
at 2:03pm
Today I stopped by Amazon.com to do some pre-Chirstmas shopping and was greeted with this graphic:
Front and centre, just under the search box. Now, I don’t know if this is always there… for some reason I think it might be a standard, but the recent rise in the value of the Canadian dollar changes everything. As of this morning, the Canadian dollar is valued at almost $1.04 US ($1.0382 to be more precise). This means that online shopping is a lot more attractive than it used to be when our dollar was worth 80¢. We don’t want to go to Amazon.ca where our dollar is worth $1, we want to shop at Amazon.com where it’s worth $1.04 (or $1.06 as it was last week).
To add to that, book prices are stuck where they were months ago when the books were printed. This means that the price for most books is $2-$4 higher on the Canadian site, if not more (I think Amazon may have adjusted these prices for the dollar value already). Buy a few books and you’ve covered the $5 + tax Canada Customs charges at the border (don’t get me started on that!). Oh, and I think the limit to qualify for free shipping is lower on the US site.
Another problem, which always applies to Amazon, is that the US site has a much broader product range than the Canadian version does, plus all those affiliated sellers. I can get a lot of stuff on Amazon.com that isn’t available in Canada at all. That’s why I want to shop there now.
For anyone running a US eCommerce site, now is the time to optimize your site for Canadian shoppers. Do you ship to Canada? Are the rates reasonable? You could even put up a little Canadian flag to welcome your neighbours from the North 
Posted in General, Web Culture | 7 Comments »
Aug
09
2007
at 9:44pm
Has anyone tried StumbleUpon yet? I decided to check it out last week partly because we were getting a bit of traffic to our sites from it and I wanted to see what it was like. What fun! I can’t say that I’ve actually surfed like this in years. Probably not since the 90′s. Seriously.
Who just surfs the web anymore anyway? There’s so much crap out there, I can’t be bothered to sort through it. But I still like the web. I want to look at websites. I see a lot of websites and subscribe to a lot of feeds, but it’s just boring somehow. What sets StumbleUpon apart from other aggregation sites is that it’s just more fun! The randomness makes it entertaining, and you can pick from a wide range of topics. I don’t have to look at just tech news and even on that topic I’ve come across a ton of neat stuff I never would have found elsehwere.
That’s my 2 thumbs up for StumbleUpon What about you? Have you tried it or are you more into a different bookmarking site?
Posted in General, Web Culture | 10 Comments »
Feb
26
2007
at 3:05am
Eric Meyer had a post last week about gender diversity in the Event Apart conference series. What he’s saying, basically, is that he doesn’t believe in recruiting female speakers just for the sake of gender diversity. They want to get the best people, and I totally agree with that. I certainly would not want to be part of any project or conference just because I’m a minority.
Midway through the article Eric asks: ”So is the gender imbalance in the eye of the organizers, or is it in the very fabric of the industry?”
Read more…
Posted in Design, General, Web Culture | 2 Comments »
Jan
22
2007
at 11:31am
Awhile back I needed to sign up for a hotmail account. Yes, hotmail. The last time I used that was around 1999. I had to sign up again so I could test some HTML emails. Most of our students use either hotmail or gmail, so the easiest thing to do is just to sign up for accounts and test them that way. Gmail is no problem – I already have an account.
So I went to sign up for a hotmail account, thinking it would be a relatively simple procedure. Was I ever wrong about that!
Read more…
Posted in Usability, Web Culture | 15 Comments »
