Today I was trying to find out which of PayPal's services was the most suitable for a client's project. After go through the questions on their recommendation wizard I was still unsure based on some of the specific requirements for the project. Luckily beneath the resulting recommendation is the following text:

Have questions or need a different solution?
Contact a PayPal specialist

"Excellent", I thought, "just what I need". However after dutifully filling out the contact form I was unable to submit due the the validation insisting that I had not entered a question (see picture). Knowing the difficulties in building for multiple platforms, I tried the form again in a different browser - same result.

Does this failure mean that nobody has ever contacted a PayPal specialist? Are PayPal ignorant of this error and believe that the recommendation wizard is so good, that nobody needs any further information?

The Lesson

Test, Test, Test, especially if your online presence is responsible for generating sales or revenue.

Labels: Web

A List Apart are once again running a survey to find out how the web design industry hangs together. From the website:

Calling all designers, developers, information architects, project managers, writers, editors, marketers, and everyone else who makes websites. It is time once again to pool our information so as to begin sketching a true picture of the way our profession is practiced worldwide.

For data-addicts, they have promised to make publish an 'anonymised' version of the raw data as with last years results.

If you are a web professional, please take the survey to help us all get a better picture of our industry.

Labels: Web

I noticed the link to this on Jacob Morgan's blog recently, Sliderocket is a web-application for creating presentations. This in itself is nothing new Google docs has included a presentation application for a while now and Zoho Show is also well established but there are two main problems with each of them:

1. In general, you need to have an working internet connection in order to show the presentations unless you export to a different format.
2. For most of the time you spend working with them, you wish that you were using Powerpoint (or another off-line application) instead.

Sliderocket has obviously been working hard to create a web-app which is not only as simple to use as the offline apps, but also allows you to take a local cached copy of the presentation for when you have no internet connection.

In addition to being able to access your presentation from any internet connected computer; there are additional features which whilst not impossible to replicate in offline apps, are typical of the latest best-of-breed web applications. These include direct searching and import of images and videos from the likes of Flickr and YouTube, a quotes search for finding inspirational quotes based on a keyword search and even synchronised import of data from Google docs spreadsheets.

The presentation below gives a good idea of how slick the final results can look but I also recommend watching the demo videos to see the application in action.

Labels: Web

In a surprising fit of community management, the owners of Faceparty shut their site down for the day whilst they went to the zoo. In place of the site they posted the page reproduced here (click on the image for the full size version). Whilst probably not the most conventional method of dealing with criticism from an online community, you have to admire their honesty. A few points came to mind whilst mulling over the contents of this page.

• The site is not run as a business, the owners have no legal obligation to satisfy the demands of the people using the site
• From my own experience of managing an online community, this sort of criticism can be extremely frustrating and requires the thickest of skins to avoid a reaction like the one demonstrated here
• This probably seems a lot worse to those of us who have never seen Faceparty, the language and attitude of this page are fairly in-keeping with the normal style of the site.
• This response was not entirely a knee-jerk reaction, somebody took some time to put together the page, so there must have been some thought put into whether it was a good idea or not.

Overall I think it's a brave or possibly brash thing to do although I don't think it will earn them much Whuffie. As pointed out, the site is run as a hobby, the owners can do whatever they like with it. I couldn't imagine Facebook shutting down for the day because of complaints, or the Twitter fail whale getting a speech bubble containing a stream of expletives. Mind you, it could happen, only time will tell.

Labels: Web

A slow realisation has been dawning that I should be using PHP for development. Having spent a long time working in corporate IT services I worked through VB, ASP and onto ASP.Net. I my early impressions of PHP were that it was a beginners language which always seemed to be so tied into the HTML markup that it made manageable coding very difficult.

Over the past year, I've seen more and more interesting projects built in PHP and masses of code for integrating external APIs through PHP whilst the equivalent C# code or .Net libraries are much less abundant, often appearing much later and in incomplete or limited forms. It's been normal for me to spend considerable amounts of time writing code to implement functionality which is easily done using pre-built PHP modules.

My general working duty to provide software solutions, there was a time when I would used any platform which seemed appropriate but I became entrenched in Microsoft's platform. I think this is something which programmers can become quite prone to, I've seen the beardy, sandal-wearing guys who still churn out COBOL for ancient mainframe systems in large organisations and I don't want to become like that.

Having looked at some of the structured coding techniques now being implemented in PHP, I've realised that it's no longer a language for hobbyists, It's like meeting a distant cousin for the first time in years and realising that the child you remember is now married with kids of their own.

I'm going to bite the bullet and start learning PHP. I've already been pointed in the direction of some clever looking frameworks and my former colleague Paul Smith has been singing the praises of Expression Engine for quite some time.

I have a lot of catching up to do but I have a feeling it's going to be interesting.

Labels: Web

Here I go again with another Twitter post, I know it's getting a bit repetitive but it's an interesting phenomena.

Why are we so hooked on microblogging?

Elliot Jay Stocks, in his Blessay about Twitter points out five things that Twitter is (to him at least):

1. An ice-breaker
2. A purveyor of ‘ambient intimacy’
3. A broadcasting / marketing tool
4. A fount of knowledge
5. A social network

Read the rest of his post to get the full explanation.

What are the other options?

Twitter is currently suffering serious technical issues, where do we go to get our 140 character slices of life?

In no particular order we have:

• Friendfeed
• Jaiku
• Pownce
• Tumblr
• Hellotxt

There's also beemood which seems to be the microblogging equivalent of a sleazy singles bar, at least it did when I looked at it.

And for non-english speakers there is

• gozub - Spanish
• Meemi - Italian
• Numpa - Dutch
• FanFou - Chinese
• and the slightly scatological sounding Feecle - Japanese (puts a whole new spin on "What are you doing?")

Newly born is Plurk who's main innovation seems to be a timeline view, although in my opinion it runs in the wrong direction, I'd expect to see earlier posts to the left of the later ones.

We can now enjoy the hype around - ZobZee, like "Twitter and FriendFeed, but awesomer". This hoax site was created by Jim Kukral apparently to fill the time whilst waiting for Twitter to come back online.

It may be a hoax but the beta acceptance email is pretty funny featuring such gems as:

"The tech is so revolutionary that we had to get special government permits to test it. Initial testing was done on a few select, not to be named, a-list tech bloggers. The response? Total and complete mind melding with the most important geeks in the world."

and of course

"Our team has been quietly working in stealth mode for 6-months building the app that will kill both Twitter and FriendFeed overnight!"

I'm pretty sure that Twitter can't be killed overnight, Twitter themselves have been trying unsuccessfully for the past couple of weeks.

All of the above plus I've not really touched on the fact that we have another form of microblogging with our status updates on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn, Plaxo etc. We are truly spoilt for choice yet we keep going back to Twitter, the big friendly "What are you doing?" input is like digital heroin and many of us are severely hooked.

Information overload?

Many of the services I've mentioned can also aggregate activity feeds from each other and new conversations can begin around something which was originally posted elsewhere (in fact this is FriendFeed's primary goal). Are we spreading ourselves too thin, with too much information to process? Possibly, in his post; Comment fragmentation isn’t the blogger’s fault, Steven Hodson says:

"In the end though we have absolutely no control over where the conversation; if there even is one, will take place. No matter how we try to engage our readers - new and old - they will talk about our posts where ever they want to."

Perhaps it's not important where the conversation is taking place, only that there is a conversation.

Labels: Web

I decided to try out Scoutle after reading about it a while back. The concept is "automatic social networking" something that was appealing in principle and seemed worth a try.

The way it works is that you create a Scout - a virtual representation of your blog, website or social network profile. You then install a small stage somewhere on your website - this acts both as a tracker for website activity and somewhere on which other related scouts can appear - promoting other relevant websites.

Scoutle are trying to build a network of sites ranked by relevance and usefulness, it's a grand target to aim at and I can only guess at the the way they are ranking each scout. It appears to be some form of input/output analysis model similar to Google's pagerank in that your rank is affected by the rank of the scouts with which you have made a connection.

Where the system starts to fall down for me is that it's not very automatic, I need to login to the site periodically to check the meetings that my scout has had and manually choose to request connections with other scouts. It would be nice if Scoutle would automatically create these connections when a certain number of meetings were reached - like the way I can set MyBlogLog to add me to a site community if I visit the site a certain number of times.

Scoutle also has concepts of Guides and Networks, which are ways to categorise and group scouts. These both seem to serve the same purpose and could probably be replaced by a simple tag search - unless Scoutle have future plans to enhance them.

I'm going to persevere with Scoutle for the time being as I have found interesting new sites and blogs through it - alas not automatically but by browsing the guides and networks, but I can't help thinking that it needs some sort of killer feature or wow factor before it will really catch on.

Labels: Web

Robert Scoble has just interviewed the founders of Twitter, given the technical problems which Twitter has been experiencing they seem to be understandably stressed - although playing down the problems as much as possible.

The problems mostly seem to stem from the rapid growth of Twitter plus the traffic generated by having an easy to use plus fairly unrestricted API. It's understandable for a software house not to worry too much about massive scalability when starting out, that's time-consuming work for an application that may not take off, however I wish Scoble had asked more about whether they had made any plans to scale up in the early stages of building the application. It would be interesting from a sort of forensic development point of view to know what they had expected to do and what the realities were, once the scaling solution proved inadequate.

The technical problems with Twitter are magnified by the real-time nature of the application, when you expect updates every few minutes (or every second in Scoble's case) then you really notice service outages, even those which only last an hour or so. Like the guys say, making changes to the codebase in a real-time app is like changing the tire on a car travelling at 95 miles per hour.

No definite timescale has been given for improving the service so for now at least - something is still technically wrong.

Update: June 1 2008

If the details provided in this post by Michael Arrington are correct then Twitter is definitely the victim of poor planning, I know from experience that there is a big difference between application developer and system architect, Twitter seem to be lacking the latter. If the system really does depend on somebody watching the system and manually switching databases when one fails then they simultaneously need and don't deserve the latest round of funding.

Labels: Web

Despite the fact that not many of my actual friends use Twitter, I prefer it as a means of keeping up to date with what people are doing. I find that these days, I only check facebook once or twice a day whereas, thanks to third party apps such as Digsby, I get a constant stream of updates from Twitter throughout the day.

So far on Twitter, nobody has invited me to "start biting chumps" or compare myself to anybody else, or find out what car, rock star or cartoon character I'm most like. Nobody posts year-old viral videos onto my wall.

Granted, the majority of Twitter users(Twitterers, Tweeters?) are online professionals, so there is a fair amount of web-centric chatter. Not that this is a bad thing, for me it's like being at a constant web convention where I can overhear conversations going on about a number of subjects, occasionally hearing something that I absolutely need to find out more about.

Often the tweets are a nice condensed form of entertainment, whether industry related such as:

mollydotcom Silliness: If the Web Standards Project had been more semantically described as the Web Recommendations Project, we'd have WaRPs, not WaSPs.
09:59 AM March 28, 2008

Orkahm52 Let's face it: The major downfall of Opera is it's unattractive logo.
08:57 PM March 09, 2008

or personal goings on like Jeff Zeldman's blocked toilet fiasco:

zeldman Graceful homecoming continues with hearty plunging of backed-up toilet. It's like the toilet is a jilted lover.
08:44 AM March 13, 2008

zeldman "Think you can fly off to Texas for a week and then come back here and s--- all over me? F--- you. Here's your s--- back."
08:45 AM March 13, 2008

 

Now and then Twitter can become an essential lifeline such as for the guy who was arrested in Egypt for photographing a demonstration.

More recently Twitter was the first source for new on the China earthquake, Robert Scoble started reporting the news well before any of the major news services had picked up the story, Twitter was allowing people affected by the quake to report it whilst it was actually happening.

My advice, if you are interested in what the web design and development community are doing (and if you're reading this blog then there a good chance that you are) the signup for a Twitter account and "start following chumps".

Labels: Web

I flicked through this presentation by Jina Bolton recently and now I'm torn between the excitement of what CSS 3 could bring to the party and the certain knowledge that by the time there is enough browser support to really make use of it, the shine will have worn off.

The normal state of play would be years of buggy and incomplete CSS 3 implementations forcing us to use complex hacks and workarounds in order to use any of the new features commercially. Microsoft will probably have working CSS 3 support by IE12.

For now, enjoy the feeling that something exciting is coming along and try to ignore the inevitable pain and suffering it's going to cause.

Labels: Web

If you're a typography nut, you might be interested in adding your thoughts to the discussion around the CSS 3 specification. Jason Cranford Teague has put out a call for feedback on some of the draft CSS 3 modules, specifically the Fonts and Web Fonts modules.

So, what’s the difference between CSS Fonts and CSS Web Fonts except for the word “Web”? Let me tell you about them:

• The CSS Fonts module defines how type is displayed on the page; which font is used, it’s size, and how it is styled (bold, italics, small-caps, etc…). Font styles effect how the individual glyphs are displayed whereas text styles (such as underline) and applied evenly across all glyphs.
• The CSS Web Fonts module details how you download a font file for use in a Web page, just like you would download images. It also includes the ability to better match fonts for your design with those that are available to the end-user or even synthesize them on the fly.

Go and have your say now, otherwise I shall personally berate anybody who complains about CSS 3 once it becomes the de-facto standard.

Web Typography: Tell Me What You Want

Labels: Web

Yahoo's People of the Web News points out that 2007 has been huge for online video. It seems odd to think that not too long ago, embedding video in a website was technically challenging and expensive, now we only have to decide which video sharing platform we want to use and we can have a video online in a matter of minutes.

Here's a nice round-up of some of the most popular videos of the year.

Read the full article here.

Labels: Web

GrammarBlog is looking for contributors to a Christmas special editions of their recurring post "Grammar abuse in signage". Grammar pedants from all over the Internet are asked to get involved by submitting photographs of Christmas signs and banners that contain spelling, punctuation and grammar mistakes.

read more | digg story

Labels: Web

Daft Punk are promoting their new album "Alive" primarily via a widget rather than a full blown site. This is a smart move in my opinion, effectively they will have a small promotional website embedded all over the internet via their technologically savvy fans. This combined with the Facebook Group, Myspace Page and YouTube channel allows them to utilise all of the additional sharing and tools provided by these services. They are creating an extremely effective marketing campaign by concentrating on providing content and then letting the social networks and blogosphere spread the message.

Labels: Web

A blog chronicling the field of exploiting third party Facebook applications' security vulnerabilities.

Facebook Application Smashing

To quote the site:

"Why are we letting amateurs write code for a social networking site of this stature?"

This is indicative of the speed with which Facebook has grown in popularity and the goldrush mentality of those wanting to get in on the act. These sort of fundamental errors remind me of the problems faced by many companies during the e-commerce boom of the late nineties. Online shops were being built by developers straight out of school and college with little or no commercial experience behind them. The main aim was to get the thing working, security and scalability were concepts that hadn't really been invented yet as far as web development was concerned.

Some of the exploits listed in this blog show that - despite Facebook being more privacy aware than other networks, the API could be tighter and privacy is not completely assured. Personally I will be checking this blog for any Facebook applications that I have installed and blocking the ones that have known vulnerabilities.

Labels: Web

Having taken a summer break - I'm back at work and armed with some new ideas to start working on.

I've begun to play around with developing Facebook applications, there's a few tricky things to work out, such as the anatomy of the application - profile boxes, canvas pages etc. but there are ways to make shortcuts such as using an iFrame to host an external application page. So far it's going alright, my main worry is how to make the back-end scalable enough that it doesn't fall over too quickly.

Labels: Web

I'm enjoying the exchange of ideas going on at Cambrian House. I recall reading about this somewhere a while ago but since I saw it mentioned on the Web 2.0 (Entrepreneurs) Group on Facebook, I thought I'd sign up and give it a go.

First impressions are that there's a lot of creativity there and a mixture of experience levels. It will be interesting to see what sort of work comes out of this, I'm already offering opinions on a few ideas and have one of my own to promote:

Banking Microformat
Vote:
1 2 3 4 5

Labels: Web

Finally got to the closed beta launch of bcToolkit yesterday. It's been delayed several time due to work on other projects but I found the last week or so gave me enough time to tidy up the bits of interface that weren't finished or hide the ones that I couldn't get semi-working. I also built a nice system for inviting the beta applicants and then tracking who had signed up.

Now that we're underway, I'm already noticing things that don't work quite right but that's inevitable really. Thankfully I've already had some feedback from testers whic is just what I was hoping. bcToolkit was built for the way we use Basecamp at KMP. We need to learn about the other ways that people are using Basecamp in order to build value for them into our application.

I'm using the things that I've built for bcToolkit to create a Framework for future applications. It will be nice to be able to get on with developing an idea knowing that I'll have a ready-made framework for account registration, beta phase management and further down the line - integrated blog and discussion forums.

Labels: Web

We just finished and uploaded a new marketing video for KMP.

Enjoy.

Labels: Web

I've recently been working on a little piece of software for my own use which lets me get a fast & loose overview of my finances with a bit of forecasting thrown in. My system has a high tolerance to gaps in the data because sometimes I just want to type in the balance from my latest bank statement rather than enter each item individually. Obviously the more data you give the system, the more acurate the information returned is.

I had thought about spinning this into an online application, and then I found out about Mint and BudgetPulse. These both appear to be entering this online personal finance management arena so I've signed up to try out each of them and see if they will stand up to my slap-dash accounting practices.

As I can only judge by the design and functionality of the holding sites so-far, I have to give the lead to Mint, however BudgetPulse may have a less polished presence at the moment because they're piling all of their efforts into building the best application. Only time will tell.

Labels: Web

This is an interesting and entertaining slideshow from a talk given by Christian Heilmann at the Web Standards Group London's recent meetup.

Christian's presentation is focussed entirely on front-end (html,css,javascript) development. He highlights the lack of structure and control which is prevalent in this area and gives some good suggestions for curing common problems. He also has a good sense of humor.



Thanks to Paul for highlighting this one.

Labels: Web

Google have started adding in a new feature for their maps.
Street view adds a photo panorama view for various points along selected roads. When I say "various points" I mean every 10 meters or so, when I say "selected roads" I mean just about any road big enough to drive down.



As well as being able to spin around to get a feel for the location, you can zoom in or out and click on arrows to navigate along the streets.

At the moment the street view is only available in Silicon Valley, Las Vegas, Miami, Denver and New York as far as I know.

Labels: Web

Microsoft has been watching all the cool kids very carefully. Popfly is a tool to make it easy for people to start creating stuff with Silverlight - Redmond's latest attempt to usurp Flash*.

They've obviously learnt from Yahoo Pipes that people want to easily build stuff with the data that's publicly flying around the Internet.

They may be able to do a certain amount of catching up with Flash on the installed user base front - they will probably include the plugin with Windows automatic updates. In the meantime I'm happy to try stuff out for them. Here's a quick clone of TwitterVision which took me about 15 minutes using Popfly.

Link to Test - I took out the embedded Version due to some technical problems (It's still in Alpha so we can't expect everything).

It's not the greatest but considering how long I spent on it there's potential to build great things

*didn't they have a DHTML/SVG builder thing called liquid FX or something? This is going back a good few years and many web apps have passed under the bridge since then so my memory is a bit fuzzy on this one.

Labels: Web

This is a serious etymological look at the development of leet-speek, a good read and worth it just for this image:


A Special In-Depth Analysis by David McRaney - L337 Katz0rz

Labels: Web

I've been busy over the past week preparing a new web application.

bcToolkit is for companies who use Basecamp for managing projects but who want easy access to high level reports.

The application began as a solution to a simple problem. My Managing Director had exported a Basecamp time report and was having trouble sorting and filtering the data in Excel. I had been looking at the Basecamp API documentation and decided to build a web page to create a task/time report for any project in our account. This proved so useful that I started to get requests for other reports - such as a report of everybody's time recorded for each day of a month.

We've been using these reports for several months and I thought that there might be other Basecamp users who would appreciate them so I'm tarting up the UI and adding lovely big dollops of AJAX goodness.

We are planning to start a limited closed beta in a few weeks time so anybody interested in trying out my latest creation should head over to the site and sign up.

Labels: Web

This evening I'll be emptying the memory card in my camera in preparation for 24 hours of Flickr.

It's coming! 24 Hours of Flickr: A global Flickr community event

What happens around the world in one day? In a word – life. Here on Flickr, our members are sharing the world that they see: snapping daily moments, recording history, telling stories, capturing beauty.

To celebrate this global community, we invite you to join us in 24 Hours of Flickr, a day-long global photo project. On May 5 2007, grab your camera and whatever else you need, and chronicle your day in pictures.

Join the 24 Hours of Flickr group to get ready for the big day. After the big day, post your best photo to the group. We'd love to see the group photos on a map as well, so make sure you add your photos to the map using the Organizr.

Remember! We want the photos here to illustrate one day in the life of the Flickr community — May 5, 2007 — so, you can only submit a photo taken on May 5. (You'll have until May 21 to add your photo.)

The event will be commemorated by a companion 24 Hours of Flickr book, which will contain a selection of photographs chosen from the group. Additionally, the group's photos will be featured at Flickr events around the world this summer.

Books will be sold at cost (the amount will be available in the near future) with Flickr donating $1 for each book sold to Médecins Sans Frontières up to a total of $10,000 USD.

By adding your photo to this group, you understand that it may be selected for publication in the 24 Hours of Flickr commemorative book and/or displayed at a Flickr-sponsored event this summer.

Find out more about 24 Hours of Flickr here

Labels: Web

I found a link to this mashup of Google Maps and Twitter via Jonathan Coulton's blog.

Twittervision is strangely and powerfully hypnotic. Essentially it pops up new twitter posts on a map of the world one at a time.


Watching it gives the odd sensation of being able to see in real time, what the world is thinking about. Move over Black and White, this is the ultimate god-sim, where the world over which you have dominion is the one we all live in.

Excuse me while I go and pretend to crush puny mortals beneath my thumb, Bwahahahaha!

Labels: Web

I just thought I'd drop this pile of links in here. I've been researching the options for places to upload and share branded video content for a client. Here's the list that I've come up with in just over an hour:

Beedeo Blinkx Blogcheese Brightcove Broadbandsports BubblePly Clicktv Clipshack ClipSyndicate Coull.tv Currenttv Cuts Dabble Dailymotion eefoof Evideoshare ExpoTV FameWave Flikzor Flurl GlanceTV GoFish Googlevideo Gotuit Graffiti Guba I Watch This Jumpcut Keepvid LiveLeak LiveVideo Lycos Mix Magnify Metacafe Moblr Mobunga Motionbox Myfilmz Openvlog Pawky Podesk Pooxi PureVideo ROO ScreenBites Sharkle StumbleVideo TIOTI Truveo UberChannel Uvouch Veoh VidaVee Viddler Videobomb VideoEgg Videosift Vimeo Vmix VodPod Vringo Vsocial Vurbs WeWin Yashi YouTube Ziddio Zippyvideos

As you can see, there's a wealth of options for publicising your video content. Have I missed any good ones from here?

Update - I found some more here via Mashable:

Blip.tv Break.com Lulu TV Revver Flixya HungryFlix Vidmax

Labels: Web

Just a quick post to let you know that I've added a new design to the T-shirt store.

This one is limited to only a few garments and colors because the design only works on a coloured background.

Hurry and order your iBlog shirt before Apple decide to slap a cease and desist letter on me.

Labels: Web

For a long time now, I've been plagued with ideas for T-shirts that I'd love to own but inexplicably didn't exist. I know as well as anybody that this is a sorry state of affairs for anybody who's used the internet for any length of time due to the number of good print-on-demand merchandising companies that allow you to set up your own store.

Probably the most well-known and quite possibly biggest of these is CafePress, the only downside (from my point of view) is that they are based in the states. I've also checked out Spreadshirt, who also run a European site and Simply Icons who are UK based.

So getting back to the point, I decided to resurrect my old CafePress account and start putting some work into turning the designs in my head into real objects.

The early result is at www.cafepress.com/webdev2. I'm going to update the site design so that I have proper navigation between this blog and the store pages. I intend to regularly add new shirt designs to the store and I'll also link to designs that I like by other people. The first batch of my own designs are a set of Flickr parodies.

Please let me know if you have any requests or suggestions for shirts, I'll try and do any really good ones quickly but I have an evergrowing list of my own ideas to implement.

Labels: Web

I was going to write a detailed post about how to incorporate ajax functionality in a way that allows the page to degrade gracefully for downscale browsers. Then I saw
Peter Quinsey's article "User-Proofing Ajax" on A List Apart which not only covers the same ground but adds an excellent extra element.

The basic idea is to construct a page that works without any javascript requirements, using hyperlinks and forms to pass data between the client and the server. You then use JavaScript to intercept those links and form submissions and pass the information via your Ajax code instead. In this way the page will still work fine for users who, for whatever reason, do not have javascript enabled. Jeremy Keith of Clearleft appears to have coined a term for this: "Hijaxing" - essentially Hijacking the normal click events and replacing them with Ajax calls.

The final section of Quinsey's article addresses a major usability issue in Ajax functionality which is silent errors. This is when the Ajax call takes a long time to return data, possibly due to a failure at the back end of some type. In his final example, Quinsey displays a message to the user if the call is taking over a certain amount of time giving them the option to continue waiting or reload the page. This is great way of keeping the user informed as to what is happening rather than leaving them in "Refresh Limbo", that being the uncertainty of whether or not to refresh the page just in case the operation is about to complete.

Labels: Web

I'm surprised I missed it, but Last week Wikipedia updated all of it's external links to use the 'nofollow' microformat. This essentially means that any link from