Closer To The Ideal

I had to look this up and it was harder to find this image than I thought it would be, so I figured I might as well share. A real masterpiece of the power of graphic design to mediate personal or political disputes. In this concert poster from 1965, it was important that neither Joan Baez nor Bob Dylan appear as the featured artist, so Baez’s name appears on the left, but lower, and Dylan’s name appears on the right, but higher. For Western speakers/readers the left comes before the right, but higher comes before lower, so to have visual elements that mix these visual cues is a good way to give both elements equal visual weight.

Does anyone remember the name of the graphic artist who did this poster? I’ve a Joan Baez biography somewhere but it is buried in a box because I recently moved. I need to look the artist’s name at some point.

I’m not sure how many times I’ve looked at this page without seeing this typo:

I assume that:

“Create a signature that automatically added to your emails”

is suppose to read:

“Create a signature that is automatically added to your emails”

I always find it surprising to find typos on a major site like Yahoo.

Via Sam Ruby, we are pointed to this in the comments at Intertwingly:

Btw, if you want CSS rules to apply to unknown elements in IE, you just have to do document.createElement(elementName). This somehow lets the CSS engine know that elements with that name exist.

This could be a viable strategy for using HTML5 and styling the results in IE, even if IE does not support certain tags.

Yet another example of bad web programming. I was researching the subject of cancer and followed a link on a government site that gets me to this page:

I think its fine to print debugging information to the screen when a website is under development, but on a live site, I think the error messages should try to be more helpful. Perhaps the error message can suggest the average speed it takes the site’s sysadmins to fix problems of this time. Or the error message can suggest that the visitor go get the page out of the Google cache. Even the cutesy error message that Stikipad used was more reassuring than this.

Back on September 24th, I decided to put my Netflix account on hold. I knew I was facing a stretch of time when I was going to be too busy to watch movies. Apparently Netflix only allows you to put your account on hold for 90 days. Nevertheless, the form that I was presented with allowed me to choose any date in December, so I chose December 31st, as you can see here:

Upon submitting the form, I got the following error message:

This is, of course, an example of bad user interface design. They should not allow me to choose a date which they themselves forbid. It is confusing that their form should offer a date which is, in fact, not allowed.

Shelley Powers once wrote that she wouldn’t use an online service unless she was sure of the exit route:

I won’t use a hosted web service like Typepad or weblogs.com. It’s too easy for them to decide that you’re ‘violating’ terms of service, and next thing you know, all your weblog entries are gone. I saw this with wordpress.com in the recent events that caused so much discussion: in fact, I would strongly recommend against using wordpress.com because of this–the service is too easily influenced by public opinion.

I don’t use either my Yahoo or Gmail mail accounts. Regardless of whether I can get a copy of my email locally, if I decide to not use either account I have no way of ‘redirecting’ email addresses from either of these to the email address I want to use. (Or if there is a way, I’m not aware of it.) Getting a copy of my data is not an exit strategy–it’s an export strategy. An exit strategy is one where you can blow off the service and not suffer long-term consequences. A ‘bad’ email address is definitely a long-term consequence*.

A few months ago we started using Stikipad to get ourselves organized. We started using the site under conditions that were close to an emergency - we had a web site that was past its deadline, and we were trying to regain control over a situation that had become chaotic. We began to post bug reports and notes to ourselves. Stikipad was useful to us as an easy-to-use online notepad, which we could use informally. It helped that it also had certain wiki features - it kept track of who made each edit, and it allowed us to revert changes when we made mistakes in editing.

Since then, we’ve started listing all the hours that we work on there. This data is vital for when we send out invoices to our clients. Also, all of the long, complicated to-do lists, for each project we’ve been working on, are all on there. We did not realize how important the site had become to us - we’d set up a quick, free account as a simple way to organize one project, but our use of Stikipad has grown so that lately it has been central to the way we schedule our time.

For the last three days, when we go to the site, the only thing we get is this error page:

The whole entire site has been down. You could not start a new account, nor reach any of the pages on our account, nor even reach the “Support” page. We all kept trying, at different times during Friday, Saturday and Sunday. There was no way into the site.

The site just came back to life tonight. But we are planning on giving it up. We feel we can’t trust it anymore. There has been no word on the Stikipad blog about what just happened. Their silence does not inspire confidence in us.

Stikipad does have an export option, which we could use religiously to keep our data safe. I blame myself for not already automating a daily download of this data. I’m fixing this particular oversight tonight. All the same, Stikipad can’t value our most vital data to the same extent we can, so it is perhaps best if we keep that data on our own server, and make the multiple backups of that data which we feel is needed.