Monday, 21 January 2002

One Thing, One Really Big Thing. There are some things that keep nagging at me about Radio 8, despite how much I like all the rest of it, bearing in mind it is still in its early days. Why does it take so long for my pages to publish, hours if not days, and why have my Navigation Links not updated yet after modifying them days ago?       There are more apparent bugs than just those two, and they are what stops me from paying the shareware fee right now. That’s a pity, because I have a lot of respect for Dave Winer and what he has been trying to do at UserLand for all these years, and I really want a CMS that works just as I want. UserLand may be the ones who come up with it, but Radio is not quite there yet.       I’ll keep trying it, though. 9:40:53 PM    Add a comment.

Zeldman’s Cat Amongst The Pigeons. Jeffrey Zeldman wrote this recently: “Our stupid industry pitifully undervalues good web writing. If more web writers consulted in their creation, fewer sites would fail usability testing. With good web writers crafting their metadata, more sites could actually be found by searchers instead of rotting unvisited. You might even enjoy reading the web if most sites weren’t written by chimps, committees, and CEOs.…”       I won’t speak here about metadata, names and usability issues. They’re more complex subjects than I have time and space for here. But I have to agree wholeheartedly with Zeldman on the part about chimps, committees and CEOs, when it comes to corporate websites. When a website is being produced suddenly everyone and their dog fancies themselves writers and they all want to write the thing. The last thing they want to do is consider hiring a professional. Even when there are professionals within easy reach, as in ad agencies.       Or, you get the opposite response and that is to write off the importance of written content altogether. That’s when the talk of dumping starts. Scoop up the stuff out of the corporate brochures and just dump it on the web. Then scoop up the readers and dump them on the home page. Excuse me while I take a quick dump.       I am not entirely sure where these bad attitudes came from, but one thing I have noticed is how so many corporate websites are designed well before the designer receives the text, so they do it using a kind of meaningless fake Latin that looks like this: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.       I’m sure that dealing with this kind of text all day long conditions designers into disregarding real text, the stuff they are supposed to be supporting in their designs. The designers I admire are famous for reading the content before they even begin thinking about layout and graphics. The designers I mostly encounter rarely if ever read the stuff. 8:24:57 PM    Add a comment.

A Day To Forget. It has been a rather uneventful day, with the real work just about to begin. I’ll be glad when it is over, and the morning I could have done without, but at least the toothache problem has been semi-solved with the exit of the tooth.       I discovered that the Perth Dental Hospital, easily accessible in the middle of the city for decades, has been dissolved and its component parts have been scattered throughout various farflung suburbs. Successive governments have been carrying out a policy of decentralization to the point that there is very little left in the centre of the city of Perth worth visiting.       Amenities once travelled to by public transport can only be arrived at by motor car, or a combination of buses and long walks. There seems to be very few taxis on the streets. At the same time the current government purports to be making major improvements to the public transport system. The problem there is that where it goes you most likely will not want to.       So it took half the day to get a piece of paper to accompany another piece of paper so that I could establish my right to use one of the suburban dental clinics, then the other half day to get there, wait, and then get my tooth yanked out.       I have been spaced out and in pain for days, so it’s great to look forward to an end to that, but not yet. My head still feels like it has a railroad spike embedded in it. I’ve taken another big dose of painkillers so that I can get back to this article, that’s due tomorrow. 7:23:06 PM    Add a comment.