Jul
03
2008
at 12:41pm
One of the most popular posts on my blog is my guide to fixing the wordpress title tags. It’s enjoyed a great run so far, but as of today has become obsolete. Well, for myself anyway.
Via WordPress SEO I discovered the HeadSpace plugin. HeadSpace allows you to specify a custom title format for all wordpress page types. It does lots of other cool stuff with metadata, like:
- auto-suggesting tags
- mass-editing metadata, including title, description, slugs (urls), and tags/keywords
- adding a custom title or description per post
- adding custom css of javascript files depending on the page type or on a per-post basis
Read more…
Posted in Marketing/SEO/Monetization, Wordpress
Jun
20
2008
at 9:17am
I finally got around to trying out the local web server on my Mac today. At first I was quite impressed — it’s obvious from the default installation, everything is set up and ready to go, and they even include a handy quickstart index.html page*. How cool is that? Get newbies started with web page design. It even tells them how easy it is to create a web page.
Then I read this:
HTML is easy — so easy that even a first-time user can do it. That’s because you don’t have to learn HTML to use it.
Leading word processing applications, such as Microsoft Word and AppleWorks 6, actually generate HTML webpages for you with just a few clicks of a mouse.
Noooooooo….
* link only available while my work computer is on, which is only when I’m at work, or you can try this one.
Posted in Usability, Web Standards
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
Recent Comments