May 09 2008 at 8:23am

The importance of validation, revisited

Note: This post was written about 2 months ago but never published. My apoligies for being out of date but I thought it was interesting enough to post.

I brought this up over a year ago and this time, others are talking about it. Jeff Croft says that “Your markup validator, whether it’s the one on the W3C site or one built into your favorite coding tool, is not a measuring stick for greatness.”
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Posted in Web Standards 4 Comments

Apr 03 2008 at 9:44am

If a cool feature is never used, is it still cool?

At work I take care of a couple of web apps that were developed by the guy who had my job before me. Most were built to address particular needs raised by others in the office. The thing is that they got bit creative with the functionality in some areas. For example, we have this events calendar that includes personal profiles that can pull in events from Facebook and Upcoming.org profiles. It’s a cool feature – users can use this system to consolidate their University and personal events. Seems like a neat idea.

The problem is that nobody uses it. I took a look in the database the other day and there are only about 11 facebook keys and none for upcoming.org (not counting the devs). Granted, the functionality isn’t particularly obvious and is not explained to the user all that well either. There’s also a feature that can send reminders to you by email or sms. That’s only been used about 12 times so far this year.

That brings me to the question raised in the title: If a cool feature is never used, is it still cool?

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Posted in Usability 2 Comments

Mar 13 2008 at 9:08am

When you can’t just start over, revisited

A few months ago I wrote about the frustrations involved with working with someone else’s outdated code. 37 Signals has a similar post today: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