Category: Aggregate This

Eye Witness News (ewn.co.za) has a few issues.

First let me say that I like the idea of a new, fresh news site… EWN could quickly become a serious player in the news arena, but before they do so they’re going to need to fix a few issues.

I sent an email listing some of these issues to the Primedia team. I know it got there because people who know people said there was some flapping and urgent updating that happened as a result of the email… However, I’m yet to get any form of reply whatsoever… which I think is just rude.

(update: A few things (like the comments about Mandela) have been fixed, but the overwhelming majority is still as it was when I wrote this list a few days ago. The site however seems to be suffering from lots and lots of timeouts now.)

This list is by no means exhaustive…

1. You need to add a DNS record for ewn.co.za (so that http://ewn.co.za actually works)

2. You need to add RSS, preferably ATOM, with a number of sub feeds, geographic locality etc.

3. You need to remove your stupid comments from your html source… not only is it dumb, but people WILL take offence.

<!–<li><a href=”#”>Mandela Gives Birth to a Gorilla </a><span class=”timeadded”>2&nbsp;days&nbsp;ago </span> </li><li><a href=”#”>Prengant Child attacks Mandela</a><span class=”timeadded”>3&nbsp;days&nbsp;ago </span></li><li><a href=”#”>Tourists Can’t Give Enough Birth </a><span class=”timeadded”>1&nbsp;day&nbsp;ago&nbsp;</span></li>–>

etc

4. You need to make sure all your templates actually work… for instance this one is a little too concise —
http://www.ewn.co.za/story.aspx?id=4013

5. You need to protect yourself from SQL injection and handle any attempts gracefully.
ie. http://www.ewn.co.za/articleprog.aspx?id=40%2709

6. You should probably consider looking into better urls for your articles, specifically for SEO purposes.

7. You should also probably add meta descriptions (and possibly tags) to your article pages. This will help display relevant content in search engine results.

8. Your pages do not even come close to validating XHTML transitional.

9. You need a mobile version! This is easy to implement!

10. That logo… It’s very 90’s.

11. Bonus Tip: One of my biggest gripes with the other news sites is how they never allow you to view larger versions of their images. Implementing Lightbox2 over you existing site will be easy and help
differentiate yourselves from the other players.

12. Your site search is broken in Firefox and Safari and is unstable in IE6 and 7.

13. Your server errors (timeouts etc) need to be handled more gracefully. At the moment your site displays the default .NET error pages, which is something that only the developers should be seeing.

14. Your comment form gives no indication that it hasn’t submitted due to invalid data. This will confuse users.

15. Besides the SQL Injection issues, users who search for any string that contains an apostrophe will be greeted by a rather ugly error page. Try search for o’grady.

16. You need to remove all your test data from your database. http://www.ewn.co.z/articleprog.aspx?id=183 etc

17. You should add a clearfix after your pull-out-quote on your article pages. This will ensure that articles that start with single character words like “A” don’t end up displaying the first character to the right of the pull-out with the rest of the article below the pull-out. See http://www.ewn.co.za/articleprog.aspx?id=4021

18. Your logo should be a link to your landing page. This has become a web standard and a lot of users will expect it to do so.

19. You should sanitise your article source before your editors submit it so that you don’t end up with styling imported from MS Word which can break your layout. ie. 

<p class=”MsoNormal” style=”MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt; LINE-HEIGHT: 12pt; tab-stops: 18.0pt 91.6pt 137.4pt 183.2pt 229.0pt 274.8pt 320.6pt 366.4pt 412.2pt 458.0pt 503.8pt 549.6pt 595.4pt 641.2pt 687.0pt 732.8pt”>

Not only is it ugly but it will repeatedly break your validation.

eg. on http://www.ewn.co.za/articleprog.aspx?id=4033

20. While it’s debatable whether this is a true bug, there is a fair amount of functionality on your site that is broken when the user disables javascript.

21. As I’m browsing the site I am hitting a lot of timeouts. This indicates that your server is probably struggling. Most likely due to bad coding and/or a database that isn’t tuned properly.

22. Your cache control is not good. You should probably add far future expire headers to all your static resources. This will speed up the site for regular users. Also, combine and gzip your js. This will also decrease load on your site and help with all the timeouts.

Girls and XHTML Validation

If you’re ever debating whether or not something is sexist, change the gender statement into a racial one and see how it fares…

ie. (taken from the intertubes)

Lucy
We don’t know a whole lot about Lucy, except that she’s one of the few females on the planet who can hold a conversation about search engine algorithm changes and validating XHTML pages.

Changes to:

Sipho
We don’t know a whole lot about Sipho, except that he’s one of the few black people on the planet who can hold a conversation about search engine algorithm changes and validating XHTML pages.

2008 in review.

2008 was a good year; incredible things happened and they all happened so fast!

  • The girl and I started dating.
  • I started writing about politics again.
  • I started drinking beer.
  • I finally read the entire “Cathedral and the Bazaar”.
  • I reaffirmed my love of this country.
  • I started cooking more, bought proper knives, learnt how to bake bread.
  • Something I wrote got featured on Stumbleupon
  • I sailed to knysna on a tiny yacht.
  • I moved my stuff to a server in Germany.
  • I got featured on GraphJam
  • Started learning about buying property, prices, bonds etc.
  • Started reading up on analyst predictions for the interest rate and its drivers.
  • I stopped using my credit card.
  • We bought a house!
  • We started hiking.
  • I moved to woodstock, temporarily.
  • I stopped being allergic to one, very lovable, cat.
  • We moved to our house in Observatory and started working… 🙂
  • Obama won!
  • We started cycling, although much to Lynnae’s disapproval I am not doing the Argus.
  • We grow, and eat, our own veggies and herbs.
  • I hurt my foot.
  • I learnt how to plaster, work with expandable foam, grout, paint quickly and generally fix things that needed fixing.

2009 looks to be an interesting year… I believe that the political landscape will be shifted drastically, and 2009 might turn out to be the second most important year in South Africa’s history.

I was productive in 2008… not as productive as I would have liked, but still, a huge step up from previous years. My goal for 2009 is to be even more productive and self disciplined.

Make 2009 fulfull all your deepest desires.

The coming revolution…

The internet, for all it’s vices, has made the world an incredibly small place. I buy books from Seattle, business cards from London and storage space from San Diego. I chat with friends in New Zealand, India, Finland and Joburg on a daily basis. At ground level the online economy seems pretty stable. Online businesses are lean, mean, fighting machines forged in the dot-bomb furnace. Compared to the sumo wrestling auto industry we’re Ethiopian long distance runners. (Enough with the analogies now)

The offline world however is in a crisis, big corporations are falling over on a weekly basis… most of them failing due to fat cat, short sighted management, while others are just innocent victims of the carpet bombing that is this economic train wreck.

Then I read things like this. George Oates, one of the key people and designer at Flickr, got let go by Yahoo, who bought flickr a few years ago. It’s not so much the fact that they let George go, but rather they way they did it… Basically getting her manager to call her while she was overseas and read a message to her from a scripted “cheers” letter. Her blog post about the ordeal is brutal. Within 14 hours of the call she had lost all her privileged access to all that was flickr; something that had been the centre of her life for many many years.

George’s story is the logical conclusion of the ‘corporatised’ world that we’ve all bought into… and I think the world is starting to see the folly in supporting a system that can turn around and kick you out when you least expect or deserve it.

I have this sense that people are starting to dislike, and distrust, big corporations. In the 50’s and 60’s corporations were the saviours of the failing economy, hell, if you could work for a corporation you were sitting pretty… Working for a corporation meant you had a stable job and even though all you got for 50 years of service was a hundred dollar watch (who needs a watch when you’re retired anyway?), you were happy to have had the job.

But the world is different now, for whatever reasons people expect more from life than just ‘having a job’. We want to have fun, be challenged, enjoy working, laugh, be successful and get home on time to have make supper for our smiling kids and watch 30 Rock on Tivo.

So where does this leave the workforce? Well, the internet is making *not* working for a corporation easier and easier. Now days your small print shop in a side street of London can turn into an international brand with customers from Tibet to Texas, but, most importantly, that small print shop doesn’t need to become a overweight corporation in order to carry on being successful. It’s the long tail global customer effect. Hell, you could sell clothing for conjoined twins on the internet and still swing a profit.

Perhaps more interestingly though, the internet has made running your own company a lot easier. Re-read that last sentence. The internet has been around for almost a gabillion years now, but it seems like only in the last 5 years has the promise of “running an online business from your garage” come true.

Perhaps the supreme irony of the situation is that Yahoo itself was once a small company that got big, and in turn bought up flickr, the blood, sweat and tears of a small team, most of whom have subsequently left Yahoo or been fired. How different life would have been for all those people who gave birth to flickr, if they’d just stayed a small team who focused on being the best and staying happy while doing it…

Corporations have been holding the workforce hostage… but the distributed client base and self organisation of the internet is starting to make it harder and harder to not start your own thing, or join a small company with big vision.

Similarly customers are more and more looking for micro providers, buying local produce, supporting up and coming manufacturers and looking to identify themselves as unique by buying products that weren’t made in batches of a million. Perhaps it’s the inherent knowledge that the companies that are producing t-shirts in batches of a million are run by the same kind of people that will fire you from the very company you helped start and feel nothing while doing it.

You’re a person… let the machines be the robots. The revolution is coming, and it won’t be televised, it’ll be broadcast.

5 Reasons to Vote

1. Every vote counts.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has” – Margaret Mead.

2. It is irresponsible not to vote.

While you might feel that your life is okay, your vote could be the difference for someone else between clean drinking water and disease ridden rivers, between having a job or living a life of crime, between life and death.

3. Vote for the best candidate, don’t expect a perfect candidate.

I’ve heard people say that they don’t believe that any party deserves their vote. The reality is that no political party will ever be perfect. If you don’t like it, either join the party that’s closest to your ideology or, if you really want to excercise democracy, start your own party and vote for yourself.

4. You don’t have to win to make a difference.

It might not be possible for the party you support to win the election but having a strong opposition in government keeps the ruling party in check.

5. Fifteen years.

Only Fifteen years…  That’s how long ago black South Africans could not vote. That’s a blink of an eye in terms of the history of this country. Thousands of innocent South Africans died in the struggle… a struggle for freedom that manifested itself in the form of a piece of paper with a cross on it. Whether you’re black, white, or any shade in between, not making your mark on that piece of paper now, only 15 years later, would be disrespectful to those people who sacrificed their lives for your freedom.

My Foot!

Jou Ma Se Seun Se Voet!A week ago I had an interesting and surprisingly funny, even at the time, incident with an abandoned building and a floorboard that didn’t want to be a floorboard any more.

The wound has healed nicely but the pain in my ankle is still plaguing me so I finally decided to get an X-Ray just in case something was actually wrong. The Radiologist says that I haven’t broken anything but that I should “keep off it for a few days to give it a chance to heal”… I assume he’s a big fan of levitation then.

Anyway, I’ve organised parking in my building and crutches. Now I just need to figure out how to levitate.

Mostly pictures of our cat (and a few of the house)

I finally got around to downloading the pictures off my camera and discovered that most of them are pictures of the cat. I think this means I am officially a cat blogger.

More pictures

In other news, I was exploring an abandoned/demolished building and fell through the floor into the crawlspace (about 1.5m). Yes, laugh it up. I’m okay. My ankle is bit busted up and I have a nice cut on my leg that is starting to get emo.

This weekend was another relatively productive one. I ran cables RF+CAT6 through the walls so we no longer have cabling running down the passage and then fitted a cupboard thing in the bathroom. We were supposed to go for another bike ride but then I did the floor falling thing. We did have tea (well, chocolate milkshakes and scones and milktart) at Rhodes Memorial too.

We also finished watching the end of Season 1 of Californication. Excellent series… Probably the best television series I’ve ever watched. Can’t wait for Season 2.

Over and out.