blog.shrub

YA Google Maps hack: google maps pedometer.

here’s a quick readability bookmarklet. it makes the background white and the text black. tested in Safari 2.0.

looks like this:
<a href=”javascript:document.body.style.color=’#000′;
document.body.style.background=’#fff’;”>bw</a>

new site explaining microformats. rah.

Great explanation of Why “Click here” is bad linking practice.

Having been developing mostly in a bubble for a few year, I forgot that some people still use Internet Explorer for Windows. (Sheesh, get Firefox already.)

Turns out (thanks, Tantek!) that IE6 doesn’t support XHTML. That’s not usually too much of a problem, unless you try and make a previously non-empty tag, like <script> empty.

Well, IE6 sees that and dies. It stops parsing the page. So, people using IE6 saw a blank page instead of the RSVP page.

The fix is to go back to using <script>...</script> .

why, y’all should play at the South Muskoka Curling & Golf Club.

after i launched my house concerts site, i sent out emails with customized RSVP links to everyone.

the next day, i got a bug report that RSVPing “no” wasn’t working. well, it was — sort of. the problem was that even if you clicked “no,” you were still expected to enter the number of seats you wanted. the workaround, was, of course, to enter “1″ seat and click no. but only one person figured that out. everyone else just gave up, including otherwise technically savvy folks who work for a computer company.

it’s long been known that poor usability is bad for e-commerce — Nielsen’s 2001 study showed a success rate of around 56% for purchases.

what i didn’t realize was just how much this stuff matters.

anyway, the bug is fixed, i email the five people who ran in to it, and three of them have re-visited the web site.

so, once again, usability matters. a lot.

i spent a day and change putting together a web site for my house concert series. it’s pretty spiffy, if i do say so myself. among the reasons why:

• valid XHTML and CSS
• RSS and iCal feeds
• clean interface
• nice URLs (REST, perhaps?)
• creative commons-licensed

Flickr Related Tag Browser. go.