No Prizes
Week of April 7, 2002

April 12, 2002 Quiet Night

Tonight is a quiet night at home. Given that I've been out two nights this week already, it'll be nice to have some time to tinker on the computer, then throw a CD onto the stereo and settle down with a book. But a there's a couple of items from the web before I sign off -

But is it real?

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's hair is its natural color and he's going to court to prove it. Just when I think local politics have gotten as bizarre as they can, a politician elsewhere tops Richmond - and a German Conservative as well. I heard the story this evening on NPR while driving home. Maybe Mr. Schroeder should reconsider his stance; there quite a sum of money to be made endorsing hair color products.

Follow-Up: Marilyn vos Savant

After my discovery of Parade online, I did some digging and found a site dedicated to showing when Marilyn vos Savant is wrong. According to some people, Marilyn is not as quick or as bright as she seems. I checked out Ms. vos Savant's site and didn't find any rebuttal. However, the picture there reminded me of someone – I just can't quite remember who.

April 11, 2002

The onslaught of spring weather continues unabated. I spent a great evening celebrating a friend's birthday at Legend Brewing Company. It was a good day to sit outside and drink beer.

April 10, 2002

Parade Magazine has a website! For those of you who don't get a Sunday paper, Parade is the ultimate "people" section. It's printed on the same coated paper as the advertising inserts in the Sunday paper and is the Jell-o of journalism – colorful, sweet and easy to digest. It reminds me of a cheerfully earnest American version of the UK's Sunday Papers. The site is worth a visit, though they ask to add a cookie to your system to indicate your local paper. I have no idea why they do it; the only change I saw to the site was the logo of the Richmond Times Dispatch. The cookie just had name of the gif they use and the URL for the Times Dispatch.

I almost never read Parade on Sundays unless it happens to flop open as I'm thumbing through the inserts. But the web site has all of your favorites Marilyn Vos Savant and James Brady. (Ms. Vos Savant has always puzzled me – since she has this reportedly high IQ, shouldn't she be doing something more gainful for mankind, like decoding the human genome or coding bug fixes for Mozilla? Maybe she'd make a hell of a Slashdot moderator.) They even had the special What People Earn section with what looks like all of the mug shots from the print version. Lastly, you may also be glad to know that April is Alcohol Awareness Month.

Sadly, the full gossip section from the inside of the front cover isn't there. I was also disappointed that I couldn't read any Howard Huge comics on the site. I was actually shocked to learn that the creator of Laugh Parade with Howard Huge is the same cartoonist who created the Lockhorns! Also, America's most popular Sunday insert also uses a fixed 640 pixel width design; you would think Marilyn would set them straight about that.

April 9, 2002 - The Pile

I am so glad that I canceled cable TV, so now I can start working on the Pile of Stuff. The Pile is mostly the Stuff, I've wanted to do but haven't. There's a stack of unread books and another stack of books of programming languages that I'd like to learn. Next to those stacks, my guitar case gathers dust, while on top of one of the stacks sits a digital camera. Right now, I should be writing a Python script based on an Italo Calvino short story and put it to music.

Web Annoyances Part 1 - Fixed Width Design

Since 1997, the majority of customers browsing the Internet have been doing so at resolutions greater than 640 x 480. One some sites, current measurements of web visitors indicate that as few as 2% of all visitors browse at 640 x 480. Yet I still see new sites designed every day with a fixed width- Not only with fixed widths, but designed to be used without scrolling. Ironically, while these sites must be usable by the VGA minority, they are nearly unreadable for most customers.

I trained people in the use of personal computers and I remember many novice users of Windows struggling with scrolling. However, once a student started using applications with scrollbars – such as e-mail or a word processor – and browsing the internet, she would quickly get the knack of it. The other issue that I saw just as frequently was difficulty reading small text – especially for students with bifocals. Students can learn to use a graphical interface. On the other hand, they can't learn to have better eyesight. And whether you wear glasses or have perfect vision, bigger text is easier to read than smaller text.

Unfortunately for web designers and their clients, this issue is just becoming more and more difficult. With the increasing diversity of computer devices such as laptops, LCD monitors and PDA's, a single ideal fixed resolution is becoming a thing of the past. So don't try to find the ideal resolution. Instead, use the tools that HTML gives you rather than jam everything into a JPEG or gif.

• Web Design is not Print Design. Jakob Neilsen spells this out very nicely in an article from 1999. Fixed width design seems to be the mortal sin committed by great print designers on the web. Usually these designs are full of graphics sliced out of Photoshop and put into an HTML table.

• Educate your customers. A customer who is buying a visually slick design is missing out on real strategic uses of the web. The web isn't just an electronic brochure with an e-mail address tied to it. It's a way to communicate with customers and show them your quality. Help customers understand how they can extend their business on the internet – and it doesn't mean they have to actually sell anything online.

• Be willing to trade off. If you focus on the functions that you provide your customer rather than a "look", you can make a better decision on when you have to degrade away certain visitors. If your client's customer base is business user, then visitors using MSN-TV or WebTV may not be as important. However, until you can determine who your customers are and what you want to provide them, you can't make wise trade-offs.

If you are a looking to hire a web design firm, watch out for designers who design these "post card" size sites. It may be a sign that they're great graphic designers,but not very experienced in web design. Look at any portfolio sites from your own computer and the computers of a couple of neighbors or friends.

April 8, 2002 - Too Drunk to Grump

I was going to skewer several vile web design peccadilloes this evening, but I am too full of wine, fish and cheesecake to commence the evisceration. So, I am feeling very pleasant on the evening of my third dozen years. It's a warm evening in Richmond; the canal by Bookbinders's had a warm dead fish smell. It's a perfect evening to spend on the front porch swing, drinking a cool glass of wine. Get me away from this computer.

April 7, 2002

I'm just a few hours away from my 36^th birthday, starting up this website. I've been tinkering on the web for years - doing it for pay now for the last two and a half years. However, the sites that you put up for your boss or your clients are never 100% your own. So this is a chance to build things the way I like them, tinker with things that interest me and say what I please.

There is a mess of blogs out there. If you have your own blog, you don't do it to be part of a crowd. You do it to have your say. It just happens that a lot of people feel that way. In some ways, blogging is filling a vacuum left by the disappearance of so many independent sites. Blogs also satisfy the urge to root around; something that's missing from some of the web today.

I first started using the Internet over a 2400 bps shell account on Delphi. They had their own front end of BBS's (and still do). You could also gopher and telnet out from their service into the world. I remember digging through the gopher menus and finding myself out at a FreeNet in New Zealand. There was no information there that I needed, but suddenly I was talking to a computer on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. While digging that far, I pulled up other documents along the way- all of which I read out of idle curiosity. All in all, the hour or so that I spent watching text scroll past on my terminal program was gainless. But I enjoyed it - it was like browsing through a used bookstore or a vintage clothing store and walking out empty-handed.

Now, I truly appreciate the ease of finding things on Google rather than using Yanoff's list. I especially appreciate how cheap it's become; I can remember paying $20 for 20 hours with a surcharge if I went over. But some parts of the Network are too much like a Wal-Mart - organized and designed for speedy retrieval of cheap merchandise. So I'm cluttering up my stretch of the information highway with a road side stand - offering up my own variety of peaches, ammo, bloodworms and fireworks - or at least it's equivalent in words, HTML and pictures.