Rants Tagged with “Internet”
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When I teach Silverlight 2, I stress an important lesson that I thought that we (as developers) had learned the importance of linkability of the web. Early usage of Flash was the first time I noticed this. A number of those sites would create nested functionality that never changed the URL. If the URL doesn't change, i can't bookmark it. Most Flash guys learned their lessons pretty quick, but now I am inundated with AJAX driven sites that try hard to not to do post-backs. That's cool, but if the URL doesn't change I can't link to it.
I've noticed this happening a lot with support sites. The first time I saw with an AJAX site was using the Intersoft's Developer Portal (http://www.intersoftpt.com). They treat the developer to a desktop-like experience, but if I can't send a link to my other developers for the latest patch, why bother making it on the web?
The latest is the game Spore's forums. Trying to help a friend figure out why its crashing, I found some good posts on workarounds but the site's address is always http://www.spore.com/forum. What's the point?
This post is a request...a pleading...begging even. Think about the usability of your sites. If it lives on the Internet, it should be linkable. Now if your site doesn't have state, this doesn't apply to you, but for the other 99.999% of the sites out there, don't get too caught up in the frenzy of AJAX or RIA to make your sites usable. The reality is that you can do this with Silverlight, Flash, AJAX or any web page. It might be more work, but the level of frustration for users is well worth your time.
(NOTE: Microsoft is working on a new version of their AJAX toolkit to enable URL changes during partial page updates. This will help some of you, but the rest of you will still need to do some of the hard work yourselves.)
I am an avid user of Digg. I read it way more than I should. But a problem with it is really annoying me. It can't seem to remember that I am logged in. Take a look at this screenshot:
About 50% of the time when I try to digg an item or a post it says I am not logged in. But the site thinks I am logged in (see the "Log Out" hyperlink in the upper right hand corner). So I log in and it takes me back to my home page and I have to find the item to digg it...usually I give up and fail to digg it. Hrmph!
After making my readers crazy with duplicate RSS's several times, it looks like things have finally been fixed. I have my new Rant URL's in place. The old style viewrants.aspx?id=XXX still work fine. But in addition, each rant now has an URL that starts with the date of the URL and the title is now the name of the resulting page. For example:
Old:
http://www.wildermuth.com/viewrant.aspx?id=2183
New:
http://wildermuth.com/2007/01/17/Listen_to_my_GeekSpeak_MSDN_Webcast.aspx
They look better to me. I had initially wanted to remove the .aspx at the end of the URL, but since I don't run my own server, I opted for that solution instead of getting my ISP to change their IIS settings.
I was trolling the Microsoft's Live Search today to see how it was faring against Google. I had not seen the Image Search before and I am very impressed! There are neat features like picking image size (which I know Google does too), but also pick the size of the images that are shown on the page. But the real key feature to me is the feature of when you click on an image, it navigates to the page in a center frame and keeps your results on the left size of the page so you can quickly see the image in context. Here's a screenshot (click on it for a full size image):
I got into the beta today and I really like where it going. While I can't show you what it looks like, I can say that there is a lot to like about SoapBox (Microsoft Live's Answer to YouTube). The experience of viewing, commenting, and tagging of video is a better experience and looks really nice. If you want to go the link, you can sign up for the beta. I like a lot of how they are handling video that is better than Google and YouTube.
UPDATE: Fixed bad URL to SoapBox.
Here are a collection of some new web sites I've ran into that I think everyone should visit (don't worry, no religion or politics here):
MousePrint: A site that collects and reports on deceptive contract/advertisements (e.g. New Car Deals in Boston for $9,500 if you pay $7,500 down payments.)
RoadFood: For anyone who travels a lot, this site will give you non-chain restaurants that serve real food.
MetaCritic: Aggregator for critical reviews (and averages them) for TV, Video games, Movies, DVD, Music and more. I like this site a lot.
It used to be that getting /.'d was the key to both getting buzz and taking down your web server. But most of the news I've read there in the past few months appears on other sites way before SlashDot. I find that these sites usually have the news I find interesting way before it ends up on Slashdot:
Anyone else notice this or is it just me?
After Chris Sells' blog entry on joining MySpace and not knowing what to do next, I thought I'd check out what MySpace was about. I know most of my neighborhood are on it, but most are looking for dates. (No, I am not.)
After a week of using it, I am really amazed by how poorly it works. Not the networking or interconnectivity, but the performance of the site. I have to wonder if it has something to do with it's use of Cold Fusion, though I don't know enough about it to blame it.
Years ago when I worked with Delphi Forums (now Prospero), we were running as the #4th or 5th most popular site so I know a bit about helping to run a high-volume site. To be honest it was never the web technology but the database technology that held us up, so its probably not Cold Fusion's fault.
Also, I find that I get their error page really really often. When I refresh the same request usually works. I wonder if they are working on the perf issues or are sitting back waiting on the ad revenue to roll in until someone tries to buy them.
UPDATE:
A clever reader mentioned that Scott Guthrie mentions that MySpace uses ASP.NET 2.0. Here's a link to his blog entry about it:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/03/25/Handling-1.5-Billion-Page-Views-Per-Day-Using-ASP.NET-2.0.aspx
After my recent decision to drop ActiveWin.com, I sent them an e-mail complaining about advertising tactics and then blogged about it:
http://wildermuth.com/viewrant.aspx?id=2034
Today, I got a very good e-mail from them:
"Shawn:
Based in part on your feedback, we’ve removed the popups from the news and comments pages.
Best regards,
Bob Stein"
So I am back on the ActiveWin.com wagon. I like getting real results from an e-mail.
I was listening to the Braves game today over the Internet and noticed a boss button. I've seen these before, but I really liked this one because it looks like a "Best Boss Ever" nomination page:
What is your favorite?
