8 posts tagged “web”

I really hate online advertising. This is basically my Most Hated list.

- Pop-unders: modern browsers block pop-ups now because they were abused so heavily by malicious hax0rs and the user unaware alike. Circumventing these restrictions using pop-unders is even more annoying as they *always* invoke new windows, even when the user forces all other links to create new tabs.
- Expanding Flash ads: as someone who is currently developing expanding Flash creatives, I certainly feel like a hypocrite here, but ads that expand are severely annoying. In my company's defence, however, we ensure that...

a) The ad doesn't fly out if you just brush over it, you have to hover for a meaningful period of time
b) Buttons to close it are prominent, instead of being obscure 8px text
c) The thing does actually close if the user asks it to
- Floating Flash ads: worse than expanding ads, these horrible abuses of technology hover over a section of the page (usually the content you came to the page for) and move as you scroll in any direction.
- Ads that use audio: I dislike audio on the web anyway. Unless I'm watching an online video or listening to a song, my speakers are off and my headphones are out of my ears. Random blasts of noise are always unwelcome.

I get that advertising is a much more welcome alternative to subscription-based content, but if you can't get a user's attention by creating appealing, usable advertising, you don't belong in business.

If you're like me, you'll want to block annoying advertising, and regardless of which browser you use, you can do this very simply without using add-ons. If you know the web domain the advertising is coming from, all you have to do is open your hosts file (c:\Windows\System32\Drivers\Etc\hosts - you can open it with Notepad) and add a line like this:

127.0.0.1       a.tribalfusion.com www.tribalfusion.com

And yes, that is a line from mine, as Tribal Fusion are the single-most annoying advertising company I have come across so far.

UPDATE: I didn't think I was alone, and this article seems to prove it.

What do you love most about your job?

1. Problem solving. Although it's all in the field of nerdy computer things, I do like being given a problem then working out the best way to solve it. Or the best way with the time available, which are not always the same thing.
2. People. I work with several people who I love dearly and learn a lot from.
3. Learning. In the space of less than two years, I have learned a LOT and keep learning. It's great, and I attribute that to both the people I work with (especially my mentor, Eduardo, whose coding style is so easy to follow) and the fact that the company is too small for pre-defined roles to really stick on any given project. I was hired to do CSS and JavaScript, but spread out into SQL Server, ASP.Net, XML and other technologies just because I could and extra hands were needed.

Just over a week since we waited in line to order them, Jess and I finally got our iPhone 3Gs. Or rather, I went and got them while she got her hair cut as I was so impatient.

Within the space of half an hour, the sales assistant at the AT&T store had set up our account, transfered our numbers from T-Mobile and activated the phones, then I was out the door and shuffling home as fast as I could to play with mine.

I think I was playing for like five hours, before taking a nap.

For all the hype, for all the waiting, I am actually impressed. It effectively renders FOUR of my existing devices obsolete. It plays music every bit as well as my iPod (being, essentially, the latest generation). It can make calls, send text messages, take photos and do almost everything a phone can (MMS remains oddly absent). I can play games that look better than anything on my Nintendo DS, albeit with more limited control options. And, oddly, I feel it's going to reduce my time on my laptop, too - between the built-in apps and those you can already download from the new app store, I can surf, email, blog, manage photos, watch YouTube videos and generally piddle away time.

And in case you want to know, the applications downloaded so far...

- AIM
- Aqua Forest
- De Blob
- Facebook
- Last.fm
- MySpace Mobile
- NetNewsWire
- Remote
- Super Monkey Ball

... but I think I need a time out:

1. I saw a car with the license plate "WHT SPCE". I said to two co-workers "I can't see this car as I ignore white space." If you understand this joke... yeah.
2. I heard a co-worker laughing about hex values for colours. If you know what hex values are... yeah.

YEAH. Seriously.

Want to write copy for the internet? UNINSTALL MICROSOFT WORD IMMEDIATELY.

Throughout my tenure in the world of the internet, I have had to take copy from a variety of sources - writers, lawyers, marketing people, and plain old clients. Without fail, I have had to reformat that copy every single time. Multiply this by the number of times clients and lawyers change their mind about copy and it gets very irritating.

Microsoft Word, you see, is not designed for generating internet-friendly copy but they are all extremely fond of it. As well as littering text with junk spacing, Word converts punctuation into special characters to make your copy look nice when printed onto paper, but these characters are not easily recognised by HTML.

End result? Strange symbols dotted throughout your copy or, if any form of scripting code is used to render it, your page will die a big, ugly death.

Worst Offenders:

1. The mdash: often mistakenly refered to as a hyphen, this symbol gets its name from the fact it is the width of the letter M in your chosen typeface.
2. Curly quotes aka smart quotes: don't they look pretty and quotey? Well, they're the devil, and so are you for using them. And hey, you, Frenchy, the guillemet is just as bad, you strange-angled-quote-using weirdo.
3. Ellipsis: or "three full stops in a row" to the layman... ANNOYING.
4. Double-spacing: this isn't really Word's fault, nor does it cause any of the ugly issues the others do, but double spaces do not apply to web content. I don't care if you have a degree in Journalism.
5. Superscript: an absolute pain in the arse to render correctly in HTML, although certain specific characters are catered to (certain superscript numbers, the degree symbol, and so on).

Last night, Jess and I went to see Untraceable. I was skeptical about going to see it - I always am when there's a movie that talks about the internet - because hearing technical jargon mangled or bandied about a little too willy nilly gives me douche chills.

The film stars Diane Lane as FBI agent Jen Marsh. Jen works in the cyber crimes division, tracking down internet naughties. The opening scene sets up how well she knows her trojans and IP spoofing and all that by showing her catching a kid who steals people's credit card information to buy electronics.

She is then handed a Post-It with the URL www.killwithme.com on it - her office has been tipped off about this site that features a kitten being tortured to death. The more people that view the site, the quicker it dies (I couldn't see how - it was stuck to fly paper). In attempting to shut it down, they realise it is... dun dun dun... Untraceable. Cue explanations of how the creator's set the TTL to be low so the user's machine has to keep querying the DNS to get a new IP address for the site.

Jen is haunted by the site and keeps checking in until the kitten's death. They think that's the end of it until the site re-opens featuring a human victim.

You're shown who the killer is early on, and instead of asking you to work out who he is, you are supposed to try to figure out what connects his victims - all of whom are offed increasingly rapidly as the site gains buzz. The trouble is, you're not really given any leads until the scene in which Marsh blurts out the entire thing. She only worked it out because one of the victims managed to Morse code a clue with their eyelids while dying. Right.

When they're not rattling off nerd speak, Diane Lane and co-stars Billy Burke and Colin Hanks turn in good performances. The killer not so much - I get that he was supposed to be weird, given what he was doing and his motivations, but he was one of the limpest screen killers ever. There's only so far a good performance will get you in an average flick though, no wonder he phoned it in.

I came out of the film thinking several things:

- I wonder how much Microsoft paid for the Windows Vista product placement.
- No one is ever going to make a cat and mouse thriller like Silence Of The Lambs ever again.
- Colin Hanks is really older than me?!

To launch version 0.1a of my playlist tool, I present my favourite twenty songs from 2007:

http://www.transatlanticdrawl.com/Playlist.aspx?PlaylistID=1

It's a little ugly and feature-lacking, but you can listen to all twenty songs in full and buy the albums from Amazon.

I've not really had time to mess around with it lately... and then my hosting provider sold up, with my domain moving to the new owners. Somehow in this process, they wiped everything I had done in the database in the past two months and lost most of my pages.

I had backed up the latter and I've restored most of the former. Now I'm just re-adding some data and uploading the MP3 files before I roll it out.