WordPress redeemed, a little; and, a rant about parallel blog universes

Well, not really… I’m just in less of a bad mood with it and have realised that TextPat­tern really isn’t that great unless you just want a blog and noth­ing more. And I’m loathed to use Mambo or the like… though I imag­ine that’s prob­a­bly largely poor brand per­cep­tion on my part (hav­ing seen the hor­ri­ble stuff peo­ple can cre­ate with it). I lump it into the same bas­ket as phpBB and other bloated/insecure/inaccessible crap like that.

It’s prob­a­bly not really, but I’ll per­sist in my delu­sions until forced to learn oth­er­wise (either by myself or others!)

Any­way, syn­di­ca­tion ser­vices (Atom, RSS) rock my world and should be more broadly used even inter­nally for things that you mightn’t think would require it. This is the con­clu­sion I’ve come to hav­ing started putting together a new site (the one based around Word­Press I was whin­ing about) for my church and won­der­ing how best to inte­grate an upcom­ing events cal­en­dar on the front page.

It remains to be seen whether or not I actu­ally do it that way, but it’d be nice if syn­di­ca­tion was already so heav­ily a part of Word­Press’ pro­cess­ing that it became a triv­ial thing to run a parser func­tion on any page. I’m still try­ing to decide whether to setup cus­tom queries in Word­Press to read future-dated posts for events + make them acces­si­ble (able to be accessed, that is; not espe­cially applied to broad audi­ences, assis­tive tech­nolo­gies, etc.) prior to when they’re sched­uled to appear… or whether to sim­ply build my own app on the side that either spits out an include I’ll grab with PHP in my tem­plates — bor­ing — or an Atom feed that Word­Press can parse, and lots of non-IE browsers (Well, prior to ver­sion 7! Can’t wait!) can do Use­ful­Stuff™ with, and that can inte­grate into a Dash­board wid­get for Mac users and a Kon­fab­u­la­tor wid­get for PC users, etc.

Yeah, peo­ple mightn’t use it lots but it’s a cool idea ;-) This is what doing one web­site for a TV net­work has done to me — it’s all about eye-candy and out-gimmicking the opposition!

Speak­ing of the Oppo­si­tion (NineMSN, I guess) and Gim­micks, Win­dows Mes­sen­ger 8 Beta looks like it’s shap­ing up into some­thing I could actu­ally use with­out com­plain­ing too loudly. They’ve pulled off the disposing-of-normal-UI-occasionally thing far bet­ter than Win­dows Media Player ever has, and every­thing feels as though it gels really nicely.

I’m a lit­tle con­cerned they’re try­ing to pull users into their own ‘por­tal’ thing with Spaces and var­i­ous other Live.com crap, but it’s hardly as if they’re the only ones doing that. It’s ironic that we’re get­ting into an era of allegedly-more-open citizen-powered media that’s becom­ing pro­gres­sively more iso­lated because of ser­vice providers. For exam­ple, what the heck do Yahoo! do? I don’t get it. I don’t know any­one that uses their Mes­sen­ger ser­vice, or their blog ser­vice (Yeah! They have one! What the heck?! Dis­cov­ered this last week and was suit­ably shocked), or their email ser­vice. Same goes for AOL (nearly… I know a hand­ful of peo­ple that have an AIM account and sup­pos­edly use it… but it’s lit­er­ally a hand­ful, as in I have enough fin­gers to count all of them, and I don’t know whether they actu­ally use it or not, not hav­ing an account myself!). And as for MSN Spaces… hmm. Well, my MSN Spaces page says “This isn’t my real blog, go else­where.” I flicked through a cou­ple of other peo­ples today (Mes­sen­ger Beta makes that pretty easy, though not sig­nif­i­cantly any bet­ter than the lat­est sta­ble release) and found more than a few who were uncer­tain as to whether they should keep their MSN space or just go with Blog­ger. Every non-geek I know who blogs uses Blog­ger. More power to Google.

But I’m sure these demo­graph­ics vary enor­mously depend­ing on who you know: the point is, I’m not see­ing any crossover, which is a lit­tle wor­ry­ing. Of course, I only ever search using Google, so go fire con­spir­acy the­o­ries around all you like… I reckon most blog con­tent on these ser­vices isn’t at all com­pelling, and doesn’t need to be. Blogs are, for the most part, mass-CC:-email sub­sti­tutes that really shouldn’t be archived… and these eas­ier to use ser­vices are prob­a­bly exac­er­bat­ing that problem.

I don’t excuse this blog from that entirely, of course, but there’s more than a lit­tle bit of con­tent here that draws search engine traf­fic and is “time­less” in a sense that “my dog ate crayons for break­fast this morn­ing and went to the vet and they said this hap­pens all the time” could never be. But I digress, hugely (a fail­ing of the medium, no doubt!)

So that’s all very inter­est­ing. Inter­ested to hear if oth­ers know peo­ple in mul­ti­ple “ser­vice provider uni­verses” or if everyone’s friends are, for the most part, con­fined to a par­tic­u­lar ser­vice (and what that ser­vice may be). If you’ve got a blog, this’d be a great time to play pingback/trackback tag instead of just com­ment­ing here… I’d love it if this could get a lit­tle viral and we could see what plat­forms peo­ple are using and “why”. For me, it’s mostly just that every­one I know is using a par­tic­u­lar ser­vice. What is it for you?

# by Josh on February 6th, 2006 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
| 2 Comments »

Sunrise Family website

A screen capture of the Sunrise Family website

The site

This is the vaguely alluded to web­site of a few days ago, for Seven Network’s break­fast show (I refuse to describe any such com­mer­cial net­work dri­vel as “cur­rent affairs”!), Sun­rise. The Sun­rise Fam­ily is essen­tially an incentive/loyalty scheme vaguely akin to Triple M’s (recently-abandoned… doubt­less to be re-released in nearly exactly the same form under a dif­fer­ent brand) Freq Club and Enter­tain­ment Book–style dis­counts. There might be more later on, but that seems to be about it so far as what’s there right now. And, truth be told, I’m not really sure what else is com­ing… I’d love to replace Sunrise’s bor­ing ROSwall form with some­thing akin to the infa­mous Flash Just Let­ters inter­ac­tive fridge thingo, though maybe in an add-only type way, which would link in to view­ers’ exist­ing Fam­ily login (i.e. so they don’t have to enter their name every time, etc.), but that’s just an idea of mine.

The tech­nol­ogy

So, the deals.

The inter­face is using AJAX, presently with inline onClick trig­gers — because, unfor­tu­nately, I’m not quite good enough to make it pull the data from the ID… though, if you view source, I’ve setup the ID’s to have two pieces of data in there. If any­one can tell me how to write an event han­dler that con­verts an ID into a string which I can then feed to an onClick han­dler (and, server-side, explode() using PHP) I’m still very keen to fix that “prop­erly”. The ID’s have two data ele­ments because the Deals inter­face is designed to add sup­port for mul­ti­ple states (i.e. localised offers, etc.) in the future. And they’re pre­fixed by d_ because, obvi­ously, valid iden­ti­fiers can’t start with a num­ber. D can stand for “deal” or “data”, whatever :-)

As for how the AJAX is pulling down data, I’m just using inner­HTML, because it works in pretty much every­thing and is lots faster and lots sim­pler than “real” DOM meth­ods, espe­cially here. Observe the “Details” pane on the right of that page, and how there are dif­fer­ent num­bers of para­graphs of text, dif­fer­ent types of data (lists, anchors, etc.), then con­sider how ridicu­lous it would be to use DOM script­ing there. Euu­u­uc­cch. So, I’m not-quite stan­dard but per­fectly com­fort­able about that. I am, how­ever, using HTML 4.01 as the doc­type. There is no rea­son to use XHTML, and I’m not happy to use XHTML and not serve it prop­erly. And, if I serve it prop­erly, it’s too likely to break (parsers spit the dummy when encoun­ter­ing bad XHTML, because tol­er­ance is zero) for a pro­duc­tion site. Fur­ther, obvi­ously, inner­HTML doesn’t work when doc­u­ments aren’t served/parsed as any­thing other than text/html.

I’d rather do absolutely awe­some HTML 4.01 than valid but mediocre (and ulti­mately point­less, see­ing as it’s not being parsed as XML even) XHTML.

In other nifty technology-related stuff, Yahoo!7’s part­ner­ship means (hope­fully) that Seven will up the ante in terms of what tech­nolo­gies they’re unfurl­ing. For us, this means tak­ing a step for­ward and pro­vid­ing syn­di­ca­tion ser­vices (both Atom and RSS for­mats) for the deals. For Seven as a whole? Well, maybe they’ll start to get rid of their once-ubiquitous table-based lay­outs, and (maybe) embrace more of an open broad­cast­ing par­a­digm in line with their web strat­egy — assum­ing Yahoo! are direct­ing that in any way, and/or that Seven’s online team have open minds — I don’t really know and haven’t per­son­ally dealt with any­one there, so I’ll just assume they must have a hand­ful of cluey peo­ple on board!

The RSS and Atom feeds won’t be avail­able if you’re check­ing it out on Mon­day, but it’ll likely be run­ning by the end of the week. For Yahoo! users, this means they can add Sun­rise Fam­ily Deals to their per­son­alised page (but, seri­ously, who uses por­tals? I never under­stood that whole thing). For every­one else, you should be able to down­load a feed reader and add the feeds. I’d love to have a page telling peo­ple how to do this on the site, but imag­ine Yahoo! would object. So I’m say­ing it here: the peo­ple that mat­ter know how to do it! (Though, I imag­ine, the “peo­ple that matter” — you, dear reader — aren’t par­tic­u­larly reg­u­lar Sun­rise view­ers. Or, like me, never Sun­rise view­ers. Heh.)

We’ve also imple­mented a spot of JavaScript to fix text-selection in Inter­net Explorer. My lay­out is pretty insane in terms of the sheer quan­tity of absolutely posi­tioned ele­ments, which broke that func­tion­al­ity in Inter­net Explorer. One quick ques­tion to the WSG mail­ing list later, some­one had pro­vided a JavaScript fix (which we had to edit a lit­tle bit to make work prop­erly, because we had prob­lems with flick­er­ing ele­ments even with cache enabled).

The eye-candy

I’ve imple­mented use­less (but rather cool) eye-candy on the Deals page in the Details pane when­ever a new deal is selected. A vari­a­tion of the Fade Any­thing Tech­nique, which is only meant to be pretty. No orig­i­nal­ity is claimed, we’ve had this tech­nol­ogy all millennium.

Acces­si­bil­ity

Dis­able JavaScript and you lose the fades, and use a lit­tle more band­width as the entire page reloads for every item you click. In terms of non-visual user agents with JavaScript dis­abled, I’ve put the “Details” above the list of offers in source-order, and on every reload they only hear “Sun­rise Fam­ily. Link: Skip to main con­tent” (pre­sum­ing they select the link) before get­ting to the actual details, so I’m fairly happy on that front.

Addi­tion­ally, I’ve got the “header” from Yahoo!7 last in source-order, so any­one with assis­tive tech­nolo­gies don’t have to skip over that EVERY TIME they change the page. It was a lit­tle painful to fig­ure out, not in the least because Yahoo’s sup­plied uni­ver­sal header isn’t at all nice for sites that are built prop­erly — i.e. with web stan­dards and acces­si­bil­ity in mind — but I much pre­fer it this way. This is also some­thing we had to achieve silently and with­out com­plain­ing, because, whilst any­one who has a clue about web acces­si­bil­ity will imme­di­ately see this is a good idea, mar­ket­ing peo­ple would con­ceiv­ably think: “But we want peo­ple to see our search bar more often!”. Er, no, you don’t achieve any­thing by piss­ing off users. No mat­ter, we pulled it off with­out mak­ing any noise about it!

We’re server-side sniff­ing for Fire­fox and hand­ing it an “Add Yahoo!7 to the Fire­fox Search Box” link (which, inci­den­tally, has par­tic­u­larly hor­rid inline JavaScript — but I don’t care because the only UA it’s being served to can do some­thing use­ful with it), whilst IE users get a “Make this my home­page” link in its place. Yahoo’s ver­sion (which you can see on Seven’s — pure Flash, *oblig­a­tory shud­der* — Aus­tralian Open web­site, though I think that ver­sion (of the header, not the web­site) might now be dep­re­cated) uses JavaScript for that, but it was fairly obtru­sive and, see­ing as we have the abil­ity to do that server-side, I’d much rather reduce page weight.

In terms of acces­si­bil­ity gen­er­ally speak­ing, I’ve bun­dled in all the usual good­ies such as a skip to main con­tent link, as well as skip to login on the front page, base font size of 100.01%, and rel­a­tive font siz­ing through­out… but exten­sive image replace­ment tech­niques mean that the head­ers are prob­a­bly sub-optimal in terms of vis­i­bil­ity. This one is out of my con­trol, and every­one else in the work­place seems to love small text (even Lyn, who seems to often put on glasses to read things on a screen… go fig­ure!) so I wasn’t going to fight too hard about it. All other text will scale pretty well, with the excep­tion of the deals — because the lay­out is so tight, it’s only really pos­si­ble to go up one, maybe two size steps in most browsers.

We’re lack­ing any explicit acces­si­bil­ity state­ment, and we’re also lack­ing access keys. Mostly because I’m con­vinced access keys are prac­ti­cally use­less, and rarely bother to imple­ment them. (On forms, there are never enough but­tons for access keys and/or there’s no log­i­cal com­bi­na­tion avail­able, and every­where else it sort of seems a bit point­less unless every­thing has an access key. Where do you draw the line?)

This site is inter­est­ing to me because, even though it’s a tele­vi­sion audi­ence, I still can’t make assump­tions about how peo­ple will be brows­ing. PDA devices, for exam­ple, would strug­gle with our built-for-1024 lay­out had we done it with tables. For this site, PDA/mobile users are real­is­tic: for exam­ple, if some­one inci­den­tally is near a Wendy’s store and remem­bers they might’ve seen some­thing on the Sun­rise web­site but can’t remem­ber the details, they can quickly and pain­lessly look it up.

Fur­ther, the site also has to cater for peo­ple with cog­ni­tive or motor dis­abil­i­ties. For cog­ni­tive dis­abil­i­ties, one thing in our favour is that we’ve pro­vided a short sum­mary of each deal before a more heavy-duty full­text item. For users with motor dis­abil­i­ties, the entire web­site should be acces­si­ble via tab­bing — includ­ing the JavaScript-enabled Deals page.

I lost an argu­ment regard­ing target=“_blank”, but will even­tu­ally win this point. A hand­ful of adver­tise­ments — includ­ing those for intra-network links, such as for the Seven Store — open in new win­dows, which I am most cer­tainly not a fan of. All exter­nal links, how­ever, should have the rel attribute set to exter­nal. There is unfor­tu­nately no visual cue asso­ci­ated with this. Links I count as my biggest area of defeat in this web­site, which is pretty good (as in, I’d rather it just be that than some­thing more sig­nif­i­cant such as iframe usage, enor­mous usabil­ity prob­lem though new win­dows may present).

Inline JavaScript is com­pletely unre­lated to acces­si­bil­ity in light of the way this has been imple­mented. Admit­tedly, it would be advan­ta­geous to use event han­dlers in place of inline JavaScript (and we will be think­ing that to our­selves as we look at the traf­fic sta­tis­tics), but from an acces­si­bil­ity per­spec­tive it has very lit­tle impact. Stan­dard HREF’s are defined, and caught with Javascript using return false; No func­tion­al­ity is lost. I much pre­fer this method to scat­ter­ing iframes through­out the site! At any rate, I’m still try­ing to resolve this one, acces­si­bil­ity related or not. It’s a mat­ter of per­sonal pride, I suppose.

The Styles and Bugs

The entire design (done in-house by Dacien) is awe­some (in my opin­ion — if I didn’t think it was, I just would have kept quiet about it), but very tight.

So tight, in fact, that I had to set outline:0; on some links to stop Fire­fox from break­ing the lay­out (1 pixel dif­fer­ence) when a link was active (as they are when you click a deal and it’s caught by JavaScript rather than actu­ally reload­ing the page — the link remains active), adding a 1 pixel dot­ted bor­der. Cross browser sup­port is pretty awe­some — it should be good in IE back to 5 — Opera, Safari, Kon­queror, and even (mostly) IE 5.2 Mac are happy. Fire­fox deserves spe­cial men­tion: it has so many lit­tle (big for this site) things wrong with it that it’s often rather painful to make work prop­erly. In fact, of all browsers men­tioned, Fire­fox 1.0.x (on non-Windows plat­forms) is the only one whose behav­iour I’m def­i­nitely not happy with (mostly because I expect bet­ter from it, but also because it gets some things hor­ri­bly wrong).

Such as, for exam­ple, the “Meet the Fam­ily” page. It works per­fectly or near-perfectly in every other browser, but cer­tain Fire­fox vari­ants on cer­tain plat­forms ren­der only the first two items in the “Sun­rise Team” list(/right col­umn, if you’ll excuse my presentational-speak) on first load… and then ren­ders per­fectly if you refresh the page. This is what I meant by my “pre­dictable inad­e­quacy” post of a few days ago. I’m fairly cer­tain it’s some­thing to do with floated list items, but pos­si­bly not.

Another bug is (also in Fire­fox — notic­ing a trend, any­one? No, I didn’t build for IE. I wrote about 90% of the stylesheet sit­ting in Fire­fox 1.5.x using Chris Pederick’s Web Dev exten­sion, and both that browser and Opera oper­ate near-perfectly) Fire­fox 1.0.x’s pen­chant for adding scroll­bars where they’re not required with overflow:auto (see front page on non-Windows plat­forms, and the Deals page — lots of style overlap/common classes there, so this is to be expected).

By far the most inter­est­ing ren­der­ing dif­fer­ence I encoun­tered build­ing a lay­out this tight was between Inter­net Explorer/Windows XP with and with­out Win­dows Themes enabled. Yes, it does make a dif­fer­ence. Inter­face wid­gets shouldn’t really inter­fere with styles at all, IMO, but they did here. The solu­tion basi­cally entailed shav­ing off a cou­ple of pix­els where required, so I didn’t come up with some­thing par­tic­u­larly inno­v­a­tive for it!

Sum­mary

In all, I’m pretty happy with the site. Seven’s inter­nal Online team appar­ently noticed/complimented our team on the absence of lay­out tables, which I (per­haps arro­gantly) take with some degree of indif­fer­ence: peo­ple shouldn’t be build­ing sites with tables for that pur­pose any­way. If we are to be com­ple­mented, then it should be on the design (and, as part of that, achiev­ing a design this ‘tight’ with CSS), or on the usabil­ity ben­e­fits realised by intel­li­gent inte­gra­tion of AJAX, or the devel­op­ment pace (again, par­tially because of the flex­i­bil­ity CSS gives us), or maybe on light­weight, seman­tic code as a cost-saving mechanism.

Truth be told, I now believe we may have even gone a lit­tle over­board with the tables elim­i­na­tion. If I could do it all again, the Deals page would fea­ture a table instead of a list, and I’d use DOM script­ing to insert/delete records rather than replace the “state” part with inner­HTML. The markup might gain a (very) lit­tle bit of weight, but it’d be worth it. It would, of course, remain seman­ti­cally sen­si­ble and com­pletely acces­si­ble. It’d prob­a­bly be more seman­ti­cally sen­si­ble, actu­ally. I realised a table would work great about two days after I’d fin­ished styling the list, and thought “I’ve put way too much effort into this to pull it now”, but felt like Dave Shea must have after build­ing a “pseudo table” with­out real­is­ing. At least it wasn’t that complex!

Any­way, I’m really inter­ested to hear what peo­ple have to say about the site. We’re being plugged every half hour on Sun­rise tomor­row morn­ing from 6am, and will be anx­iously watch­ing the server to see what, exactly, the effect of pro­mo­tion on a show with 4 mil­lion view­ers daily has on band­width, etc. I’ve also installed an AWstats tracker to col­lect aggre­gate data (as on this site) which we’ll parse later on (assum­ing the hor­ri­ble mon­ster that it’s run­ning on, Zeus, out­puts normal-ish log files for me! Oh, and it doesn’t sup­port mod_rewrite, but instead has some retarded alter­na­tive that seems like a cross between VBA and Apple­Script — and fails as much as the lat­ter did in terms of actual ease of use, despite try­ing to use human lan­guage. It’s very dumb.) to fig­ure out how Aus­tralia is doing in terms of browsers, oper­at­ing sys­tems, screen res­o­lu­tions, JavaScript sup­port, and the like. Should be incred­i­bly inter­est­ing stuff, and I can’t wait!

# by Josh on January 30th, 2006 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| 8 Comments »

GMail using SPF and another odd feature

I logged into my GMail account today and noticed that a mes­sage from a Yahoo! user account was authen­ti­cated using SPF, or Sender Pol­icy Frame­work, and was marked as such when you click “More options”. They’ve prob­a­bly been doing this for a while, but I only just realised.

Another thing they’ve got going is user alias­ing… for exam­ple, I signed up for “josh.street” and received an email to Josh­Street (and since email addresses are effec­tively low­er­case, that means josh­street). Obvi­ously I’m not post­ing my email address in parsable for­mat (because spam­mers have pro­grams to har­vest email addresses off web­sites), but the domain is gmail.com, so that’s not too hard to fig­ure out if you want to send me email now is it?

# by Josh on October 8th, 2005 Tags:
| No Comments »

Selling an audience short?

Or, What Josh Said About Ansearch That Was Irrel­e­vant to Most Users.

Dean Jones responded to my Ansearch Answers post with the following:

All in all I feel [the post is] a fair rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the so called facts, but I stand by my recent email… namely that sim­ply review­ing us on tech­ni­cal issues that most peo­ple either

  1. wouldn’t have dis­cov­ered, or;
  2. would not likely care about,

is sell­ing your audi­ence short.

I’m inclined to dis­agree, and just wanted to quickly post to say that. I like to think I under­stand the ‘audi­ence’ here fairly well. They’re either peo­ple with (web-)geek ten­den­cies, and are hence inter­ested in any analy­sis and crit­i­cism I can deliver on the tech­ni­cal aspects of prod­ucts, etc., or (and this cat­e­gory is com­pletely unre­lated to the for­mer) stu­dents and humanities-focussed peo­ple read­ing var­i­ous con­tent I’ve pub­lished here — rang­ing from stage plots to a short story to an essay on the nature and effects of the dig­i­tal divide.

Most guests in the lat­ter cat­e­gory are just that: guests. They gen­er­ally dis­cover this con­tent via a search engine, read what they want, and leave. Over 80% of my vis­i­tors stick around for one minute or less, pre­sum­ably because they find what they need quickly, or dis­cover that the con­tent isn’t what they were look­ing for.

The “reg­u­lar” audience/participants, how­ever, are not that. I don’t think you’re all geeks, but this blog leans towards that style of con­tent, and you match that accord­ingly. You don’t come here look­ing for prod­uct rec­om­men­da­tions (the one excep­tion to that being some­one who viewed my post on Asterisk/VoIP, and asked me what my expe­ri­ences with it had been some time later: to which I replied, we haven’t both­ered, as we moved into a house with a Com­man­der sys­tem pre­in­stalled!). You come here, I think, for the qual­ity of writ­ing, for rants, for occa­sion­ally insight­ful (I hope) com­ment on var­i­ous facets of things I deem interesting.

This is a blog. This is not a news­pa­per, though it is pos­si­ble that search engines, iron­i­cally, are chang­ing the clout of this medium to some­thing sim­i­lar. The dis­tinc­tion between news­pa­per and blog becomes blurred with posts like the one that inspired this, because of the form it was writ­ten in. It is impor­tant, how­ever, to remem­ber the audience.

Peo­ple don’t come here to shop for search engines. We might be inter­ested in how they work, what they do, what the poten­tial ben­e­fits and fail­ings of each one is, but ulti­mately it doesn’t affect anyone’s choice in the real world. Sim­i­larly, investors are unlikely to come here, scop­ing out Ansearch’s offer­ing before buy­ing into par­ent com­pany Optum. And, if they did, my con­clud­ing remarks were pos­i­tive — I gen­uinely believe the story bal­anced out in their favour more than any­thing else. If I over­played the sig­nif­i­cance of a small flaw that could poten­tially be abused, my apolo­gies. I don’t, how­ever, regret includ­ing it in there at all, because I think it’s some­thing my audi­ence is inter­ested in.

As you stated in an ear­lier email… “I’m not 100% sure as to how one should go about review­ing a search engine.” Here’s a tip. like Google, Yahoo, MSN… we are a busi­ness. For us to stay in busi­ness we need to gen­er­ate revenue.

To do this we need to get more peo­ple to our SE, to get them to come back more often, and to, through their usage (CPM, CPC etc…) gen­er­ate revenue.

To achieve this we need to pro­vide a search ser­vice that the user finds use­ful. Given our rapid growth over the past months in UV’s and rev­enue, I would say we are doing OK.

Unfor­tu­nately for Ansearch and any­one else who wants to use this as an adver­tis­ing space, we don’t par­tic­u­larly care if you’re mak­ing money. It’s good to hear they’ve grown: if their evolv­ing prod­uct is any­thing to go by, they deserve it. But met­rics such as rev­enue and Unique Vis­i­tors mean lit­tle to this audi­ence, even if it’s what investors want to find out all about.

I think this is a fair assess­ment of this site’s ‘audi­ence’ (the impor­tant ‘audi­ence’, for me, being the minor­ity that don’t come through search engines, sub­scribe by RSS, and come back regularly) — though, as always, your role is not restricted to that. You are par­tic­i­pants. In light of this, I’d invite com­ment and dis­cus­sion on this post as to your role as you under­stand it. It’s pos­si­ble I’ve got this all wrong… but I doubt it.

# by Josh on September 14th, 2005 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
| 2 Comments »

Ansearch answers

All had been quiet on the Ansearch front as I awaited a response from Ansearch CEO Dean Jones, promised a hair under two weeks ago when I alluded to an ear­lier analysis/criticism I’d writ­ten when talk­ing about the state of play with Aus­tralian search engines, specif­i­cally refer­ring to the then-newcomer Ansearch.

Dean picked up my post via Tech­no­rati, a blog search engine that uses RPC update ser­vices to track what peo­ple are talk­ing about in real-time. I was suit­ably impressed by this dili­gence and appar­ent desire to hear what the mar­ket has to say about their prod­uct: could this be the same com­pany whose birth was so marred by a spat of cyber-squatting, in what Dean Jones was reported to have described as a fit of “youth­ful exu­ber­ance”?

Appar­ently so. Ansearch’s begin­nings, though marred by dubi­ous prac­tices1, received praise from var­i­ous quar­ters of the main­stream press — or, at least, those quar­ters not con­trolled by News Corp, whose domains had come under threat. How­ever, the Inter­net com­mu­nity responded qui­etly, and those voices that were heard were mostly of dis­dain at Ansearch’s domain practices.

Strangely enough, my orig­i­nal post wasn’t about any of that. I hadn’t heard of Ansearch until I read an arti­cle on them in the SMH — an arti­cle which reads a lit­tle too much like a rehashed press release for my lik­ing: the tell­tale sign is in the clos­ing sen­tence “Ansearch is the search engine divi­sion of Optum Ltd.” — if it were filed in the Busi­ness sec­tion of their paper, I’d under­stand, but it wasn’t.

I wan­dered over to their site, played around for a bit, and decided their offer­ing was mediocre. In hind­sight, it prob­a­bly didn’t help that I wasn’t shop­ping for any­thing in par­tic­u­lar — accord­ing to a ZDNet arti­cle, “In the short term [Ansearch] is focus­ing very heav­ily on the com­mer­cial end of the market.” — but at that point in time, I also don’t think they’d tuned their list­ings par­tic­u­larly well, as a search for Dash­Lite turned up my Word­Press hack over com­mer­cial list­ings for the actual Dash­lite brand I inad­ver­tantly used.

I say “at that point in time”, because it appears to have sub­stan­tially improved since, as per Jones’ claim: “Much has changed since your first arti­cle on us some 6 months ago.”

Much improved, it seems, on sev­eral fronts. Their core offer­ing has shaped up nicely, and some facets of my ini­tial com­plaints regard­ing acces­si­bil­ity have been met. Their ancil­lary prod­uct offer­ings seem to have devel­oped nicely: Ansearch CEO Jones claims “Each of [our prop­er­ties] goes through up to 7 stages rang­ing from an ini­tial, sim­ple SERP/Directory style page through to a more involved ser­vice, mini por­tal, search tool, etcetera.” He went on to say that these ancil­lary prop­er­ties (such as http://www.picsearch.com.au/, http://www.videosearch.com.au/, http://www.thefreedictionary.com.au/ and http://www.messengers.com.au/ amongst sev­eral oth­ers) are cur­rently being actively sep­a­rated from the core Ansearch site (he described it as “quar­an­ti­ning”), and the exact direc­tion of a num­ber of these projects would become clear over the com­ing months, with the appoint­ment of a full time man­ager of these online properties.

I’m a tad con­cerned about his descrip­tion of their strat­egy with regard to these — he said this would become clear over the months to come, and I’m hang­ing off two words here: dis­trib­uted por­tal. Whilst I can see this as being of value to users (espe­cially for generic, non-brand-specific/legally dubi­ous domains such as jokes.com.au and the ones listed above), it doesn’t seem to fit Ansearch’s core strength as I per­ceive it: as a com­mer­cial por­tal, and not as another Google. “We are not aim­ing to be another Google… we don’t have their bud­get and, to be frank, there are enough peo­ple try­ing to clone them: why build another?”

In fact, Jones sug­gested that Ansearch’s strengths lie in that it is not the ubiq­ui­tous search behe­moth, and that its index is “some­thing unique… some­thing faster… [and] against the so called “arms race” of search (my SE has more links than yours etc…)”. I’d agree this is indeed a strength, and also a rea­son for them not to try and be a por­tal. Aus­tralia already has Yahoo! and NineMSN for domes­tic por­tals, and I’m strug­gling to see what Ansearch will do to dif­fer­en­ti­ate them­selves in this: but I’m happy to be surprised!

Ansearch appar­ently holds an index of only 500,000 web­sites con­sid­ered by its met­rics to be “most pop­u­lar”. I argued that this was poten­tially a bad thing as rel­e­vant con­tent might lie out­side this realm: for exam­ple, this web­site per­forms well when peo­ple search for reviews of the HP 2610 or infor­ma­tion about Apache on Ubuntu linux or ACT files from MP3 play­ers that record audio, but isn’t included in Ansearch’s core index.

Which is per­fectly valid, for a commercially-focussed site, I just think they could be miss­ing out a lit­tle bit. They can lever­age on my con­tent for their adver­tis­ing impres­sions and poten­tial click­throughs, because they have more valu­able con­tent show­ing up in their list­ing along­side adver­tised prod­ucts. If some­one reads my HP 2610 review after hav­ing found it in Ansearch, and decides they’d like to buy it and remem­bers hav­ing seen a “Buy HP print­ers!” ad on Ansearch, they’ll most likely click “back”. It’s abstract, behav­ioural stuff, but valu­able nonetheless.

Whether it’s valu­able enough for them to bother is another mat­ter. “We spi­der our own con­tent… some­thing that over time will be done daily,” says Jones. “Hav­ing only 500,000 web­sites will allow us to index sites more often, and as is the case with the ‘site info’ pages, pro­vide far more info on these pages.” Which is a value-add, and worth pre­serv­ing. If that’s all resources per­mit, I think they’re doing the right thing as is. Jones openly admits Ansearch’s index of pop­u­lar­ity “has a com­mer­cial flavour to it” — and rightly so. Given their much-touted gen­der and age demo­graphic based search fea­ture, this makes sense.

Their index of pop­u­lar­ity seems to be fairly slow-moving. “Monthly we add around 20,000 sites… and take out 20,000.” I’d guess this would be the low­est 20,000 that gets shuf­fled, and this seems to make sense. One has to won­der whether all the higher-ranking pages can have sub­stan­tially fresh con­tent month after month, but pre­sum­ably they do — it’s one of the things the SEO experts have always cried from rooftops.

It was inter­est­ing to hear Jones speak­ing about these peo­ple, too: amus­ing, even! Web devel­op­ers the world over often join in spec­u­la­tion as to what exactly makes search engines tick, such that we can boost our clients (or employ­ers) website’s per­for­mance. It seems the reverse is also true: search engines all over the world sim­i­larly spec­u­late as to what those hor­ri­ble devel­op­ers are doing to screw with their indexes day in and day out!

I don’t say this in jest, and I believe they’re right to com­plain: “The larger SE’s are hav­ing a very tough time com­ing up with clever ways to index con­tent to counter SEO… only to have SEO’rs quickly find ways around it. Cat and mouse…” I think “counter SEO” was a poor choice of words, given that rel­e­vant con­tent should hope­fully still be rewarded, but his point stands.

Just as inter­est­ing is Ansearch’s strat­egy to avoid falling prey to dodgy SEO tactics:

By only index­ing the root page, we remove almost all SEO trick­ery. This works in 2 ways. Firstly, peo­ple rarely put spam on their home page — that is, door­way pages, link farms, etc. usu­ally reside away from the main index… and, sec­ondly, it deletes mul­ti­ple results from the same web­site. It also stops the site owner/webmaster from say­ing they are rel­e­vant to 100 or 1000 key­words or phrases.

Kids, we just found a new argu­ment against clients who love their splash pages!

Con­tent rich front pages aren’t, how­ever, an absolute solu­tion (at least, not in Ansearch’s index). Accord­ing to Jones, Ansearch’s pol­icy of “rank­ing sites in true usage pop­u­lar­ity, both on and off­site” is “SEO proof… or at the very least, extremely resis­tant.” I’d agree it’s a pow­er­ful met­ric, but my reser­va­tions above still stand.

One caveat of Ansearch’s algo­rithm that appears poten­tially exploitable is its fail­ure to exclude con­tent in the from indexing. I don't just speak of standard meta author/keywords data, but of something else.

A screenshot highlighting the inclusion of information between style tags in Ansearch's index

As high­lighted in the screen­shot above (click for orig­i­nal page, link may expire), Ansearch’s list­ing is includ­ing con­tent between <style> tags. This presents poten­tial for SEO abuse2, as most browsers hap­pily over­look errors in CSS — and <style> tags can be placed towards the top of a doc­u­ment: if we are to believe the SEO myths, increas­ing their rel­e­vance in engines. Of course, it’s entirely pos­si­ble the con­tent bears no weight at all — but the ques­tion of why it is stored in their index at all remains unanswered.

This is another rea­son to reward web­sites that use seman­tic markup prop­erly, though at this stage that would exclude dis­pro­por­tion­ate amounts of the web, so I under­stand engines’ hes­i­tance to embark on any­thing like this. It’s not some­thing a lot of sites use”, says Jones, before con­tin­u­ing “but it will be used more and more in the future.” Well, so much of the web com­mu­nity hopes.

This formed part of Ansearch’s defense for not hav­ing embraced seman­tic markup from the out­set. Accord­ing to Jones, it’s built on a tech­nol­ogy devel­oped for a pre-April 2000 (dot com crash) search engine — so that par­tially excuses the markup at launch time. Jones’ first com­ment on their fail­ure to use seman­tic markup was sim­ply that “The majors [Google and Yahoo!] don’t use it” — something I’d dis­pute the valid­ity of, as Ansearch isn’t a “major” player, and, as has been estab­lished, is chas­ing a fairly dif­fer­ent mar­ket sec­tor. Their core busi­ness is search, but it’s a dif­fer­ent breed of search con­ducted in a dif­fer­ent way: and seman­tic markup and acces­si­bil­ity is a dif­fer­ent way. Encour­ag­ingly, Jones sees the poten­tial for embrac­ing seman­tic markup in the future on both tech­ni­cal and com­mer­cial grounds: “It makes sense to use it and as it does open us to a wider audi­ence with var­i­ous devices used to browse our site.”

He didn’t cite the “reduced band­width expen­di­ture as a result of light­weight code” rea­son, pre­sum­ably because their host, OzHosting/Destra charges only for the link, not for trans­fers over this, on their ded­i­cated server range.

Irre­spec­tive of their rea­sons, the future of Ansearch in terms of markup is promising:

Our long term goal is to have Ansearch web­site designed with­out any tables and heav­ily styled using the CSS, which even­tu­ally will gives us more con­trol on how we present our site to dif­fer­ent media types.

Ansearch has gone through sev­eral minor enhance­ments over the past 6 months with the releases of ver­sions 1 to 1.3. We are cur­rently plan­ning a major update for ver­sion 2.0 and the issues [of seman­tic markup and sep­a­ra­tion of pre­sen­ta­tion and con­tent] will be addressed.

But as we know, markup isn’t every­thing: con­tent is what ranks well in search engines erm… con­tent is what draws an audi­ence. Ansearch’s explo­ration into the devel­op­ment of por­tal envi­ron­ments is some­thing to be watched with inter­est over the com­ing months, as well as its other busi­ness aspects, includ­ing an adver­tis­ing net­work known as Soush that remains slightly enig­matic, and the mys­te­ri­ously named “Fac­tory” division.

An announce­ment is expected to be filed with the ASX later this week out­lin­ing some­thing of Ansearch’s future direc­tion: At this stage, I’m inclined to believe that the future is a pos­i­tive one, as Ansearch dis­tances itself from its much-criticised prac­tices at launch, to a diverse range of prod­uct offer­ings that uniquely ful­fil the needs of Aus­tralian Inter­net users.

Update: A fol­lowup to this has been posted, in response to a crit­i­cism that this review was overly tech­ni­cal in nature. Read on!

Notes

1 Jus­ti­fied with the catch-cry “MSN do it, so we can, too!” — to which the only sen­si­ble reply is, “yes, but MSN do it with Inter­net Explorer, and as soon as you go and write your own web browser, feel free to hijack as many unused pages as you want.“
2 I noti­fied Ansearch of this shortly prior to pub­li­ca­tion in the hope that, if this is indeed an issue, it will be resolved before this post is noticed and widely acted upon. One hopes this poten­tial prob­lem dis­ap­pears quickly.

# by Josh on September 13th, 2005 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| No Comments »

The Truth about William McCormack, from an anonymous Yahoo account.

The fol­low­ing is a reply to the mes­sage quoted inline below, posted on my con­tact form, with a return email address clearly not likely to be used for any­thing else but the pur­pose of ensur­ing anonymity in fur­ther cor­re­spon­dence. As stated, with some­thing this seri­ous I don’t think anonymity has its place, and I’m dis­re­gard­ing the mes­sage unless fur­ther con­tact is made.

I’m aware that he uses another name on occa­sion (he’s answered the phone using the other name — which I don’t recall — and I’ve also seen it on quotes and invoices, etc.), although whether that’s his “real” name and William is not I didn’t know. Hav­ing said that, is it of con­se­quence? Yes, he is still work­ing at the school. I’m not par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in fur­ther con­tact unless you come out from the shroud of anonymity you cur­rently hide behind, sim­ply for the rea­son that any infor­ma­tion you could pro­vide I sim­ply would not trust unless I knew who you were. When I pub­lished that let­ter, there was no degree of anonymity in its form, and it was hosted on a web­site where my name, address, and tele­phone num­ber are all dis­played promi­nently on the con­tact page. Unless you wish to meet sim­i­lar stan­dards of dis­clo­sure, please refrain from future cor­re­spon­dence on this matter.

This response, as well as your orig­i­nal mes­sage, will be posted on my web­site in the inter­ests of transparency.

Regards,
Joshua Street

On Mon, 2005-03-07 at 23:49 +1000, William McCor­mack wrote:

I am inter­ested to know if William McCor­mack still works at your school. If so please reply to the email address I have given and let me know. I have got some very inter­est­ing infor­ma­tion about ‘William’ McCor­mack that I would like to share with you. Did you know that William is in fact not his real name? It gets a lot bet­ter than this…

# by Josh on March 9th, 2005 Tags: ,
| No Comments »

Adobe turns evil

Okay, so I just tried to down­load Acro­bat Reader 7. I’ve got no rea­son to pay for the full prod­uct, as free alter­na­tives suf­fice for all my PDF cre­ation needs… maybe Abobe is get­ting upset and decid­ing to trash what was pre­vi­ously the best cross-platform doc­u­ment shar­ing for­mat ever.

Well, what­ever. I’m still using PDF doc­u­ments, and prob­a­bly will be for a while, but I’m going to rant about it any­way. So there’s an installer, right? Okay. Pre­ferred method of instal­la­tion: Evil Adobe Down­load man­ager. Option for nor­mal down­load? Yup. Why didn’t I use it? Call me stu­pid or some­thing… I’ll get to exactly why.

So last week some time I was at Steve’s office, and he said that Acro­bat Reader 7 is loads faster than 6. I’m not sure if I started danc­ing then and there, but it was good to hear. Today, I bother to do some­thing about it on this lap­top (which, inci­den­tally, has just had a long-overdue RAM upgrade, and still loads Acro­bat 6 like crap), which involved going to the Adobe web­site and fol­low­ing the links, then fill­ing out three drop­down menus to present me with more choices.

Lan­guage: Eng­lish.
Oper­at­ing Sys­tem: Win­dows ME
Con­nec­tion: Broadband

Won­der­ful, it’s offer­ing to let me down­load Adobe Reader 6. Again. I know I’m run­ning Win­dows ME and that’s a crime against human­ity. Right now, I’d argue that Adobe down­load soft­ware and inter­nal pol­icy is a crime against human­ity. Not only would it offer to let me down­load an old ver­sion of soft­ware, I also had my choice of spy­ware rid­den tool­bars and some crappy photo man­age­ment soft­ware which they’re pimp­ing like it’s actu­ally mak­ing them money. Scary, no? The first hit is always free… no, I’m not a cynic. Never.

Josh trots off to Download.com to try and grab the lat­est Reader “ille­gally”, just for the hell of it, to see if it’ll work on this com­puter. Download.com, searches, finds Acro­bat Reader, down­loads Acro­bat Reader, dis­cov­ers it’s actu­ally a crappy down­load stub (hey, I’m on snappy cable here, I don’t *do* check­ing file sizes!), which then pro­ceeds to down­load (unan­nounced) three dif­fer­ent pieces of soft­ware. “Ummmm.”

It fin­ishes down­load­ing these mys­te­ri­ous three com­po­nents. Installer one launches. Yahoo! Tool­bar? No thanks. Really, no thanks. No, really, take that tool­bar away from me before I do some­thing unto­ward with it. Crappy Adobe Photo man­age­ment dru… err… soft­ware? No thanks. Really, no thanks. If I cared that much for your crappy soft­ware, I’d ask for it. As it stands, I’m per­fectly happy with the most excel­lent Irfan­view on Win­dows, and mis­cel­la­neous web-based photo man­age­ment applications.

FINALLY. This is the part where I have the Acro­bat installer itself run. But no. “I don’t like your Oper­at­ing Sys­tem, you anti-consumerist pig. Go grov­el­ling to our bud­dies Microsoft and upgrade, quick smart. And buy some new hard­ware from some ven­dor that Microsoft approved so your new OS will run, okay? That’s right. In the mean­while, we’ll pun­ish you by mak­ing our reader soft­ware con­tinue to run just as slow on your crappy four-year-old OS.”

Rec­om­men­da­tion: Use plain text, or (if it’s absolutely nec­es­sary) valid (X)HTML, to send me doc­u­ments. I’ll receive them in a bet­ter mood. (This com­ment endures only until I move into the new house, get my Linux desk­top back, and can resume read­ing Adobe PDF files with­out even need­ing to see their prod­uct name. Ahh, Open Source.)

# by Josh on January 16th, 2005 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| No Comments »
Newer Entries »