Usability

"...or, press the star key to the left of the zero"

Out of the blue, that struck me as odd. ...to the left of the...., I puzzled.

I guess that you could say the pound/hash/number sign looks like a star pattern. Might be cultural differences: I don't know for certain. A bilingual government sometimes does strange things.

For you trivia buffs: it has many different names, including Octothorpe

One of 2010's tech flops was the Gawker breakin. While their first mistake was actively taunting the 4chan-ers, the breakin has had many repercussions. Most of the database is available as a torrent. A great majority of the weak passwords are compromised.

LinkedIn took it upon itself to have everyone change their passwords. Whether or not this is limited to users who have email addresses in the published torrent I'm not sure.

What does this mean?

This is part two of a series in Creating the Modern Website: You can find part zero ("Introduction") here and part 1 ("Fundamentals") here. This part covers Software, Open vs Closed-Source software, and Security.

Source: open, closed and free software

Dalhousie University launches a new website tomorrow. They've got a preview on the linked article. For the first time in half a decade, it looks good. But what made this blog-worthy was a quote:

This post is the first part in a series about building a modern website. I'd appreciate feedback on what other topics people would have me cover. If you have any ideas or any other feedback, please leave a comment at the end of the article. I also recommend that you subscribe to my RSS feed, which will inform you when future posts are made.

Reasons for this Series

There are many old website still on the web. Many but not all are bad: some are just old and tired.. Perhaps you're reading this because....

A while ago -- at approximately the same time -- Facebook and Digg both started using a 'Navigation Bar' plopped at the top of all their outgoing links. Anyone who will remember the late 90's on the web will find this tactic familiar. Why is it annoying? Because it steals traffic, that's why.

twitter_badui.png

I noticed this after viewing a link about twitter clones. If I want to sign up for a twitter account, this is the homepage. The question I have is: "How do I sign up?". Not in a figurative sense, but a real one... there's no 'Create an Account' right next to the login form, which has been a UI convention for some time now.

Stared at it long enough yet? I'll give you a clue: it's the big green box that says 'Join the Conversation'.

This morning I received notice of two security update releases in my inbox: one about Drupal core being upgraded, another about the OpenID module containing a security vulnerability before 1.2.

Since upgrading Drupal core is such a pain, I've generated a patch (it's attached to this post: click on '1 attachment' to retrieve it) for upgrading your existing sites from 5.7. If you're not running a 5.7 site, please don't try to use it.

Velký_javor_u_Věstoňovic.jpg

Recently, my computer's power supply showed signs of going bad. It also had a bad fan, so that was further incentive to replace it. I decided on a replacement Antec 'EarthWatts' high-efficiency power supply. Furthering its 'eco' motif, the packaging was fairly minimal... egg crate spacers and a paper wrapper. The only plastic to be found in the packaging was the shrinkwrap on the outside of the box.

In my experience, there are three different categories of site slowdown and delay:

• Imperceptible
• Perceptible
• Unusable

Other distinctions really don't matter so much. The user doesn't care whether the page load latency is 10 seconds or 15 seconds. They're just going to leave.

The progression of a delay is:

Imperceptible -> Perceptible -> Unusable