Thursday, September 27, 2007

Learn from your users: make feedback EASY

If you're website is so great, then you've just admitted that you think your website is so great. Often times those who use your website, the users, could have something very useful for you, their idea of how the page could be better. They're like a team of developers ready to work for you for free. And yet many company's websites make the feedback form damn-near-impossible to find.

Therefor my Gold Star of the day goes to Adobe! For although Dreamweaver mysteriously leaves this xyiznwsk temp directory on my servers and is causing horrible network latency problems and hosing up my machine, they can blame that on Macromedia, and learn if I needed to provide them useful feedback, like "Frontpage is better". I did however, not leave any feedback.

Thursday, September 20, 2007

HOWTO: OSU Forward CSE email

I thought I would start the quarter off right and let anyone know how to forward their unix emails away with one short command. This is not tricky, its not complex, and it was very easy to do.

Simply create a file called .forward in your home directory, and the only thing contained in that file is the email address for all your emails to be forwarded to.

echo emailaddress@gmail.com > .forward should do it...

the picture is for those who can't read so well

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

People who speel excessively bad

I don't mean to poke fun at those who need to visit sites like definitely.com because they definately have some typos in forums. But when I get a forwarded email about something that is a hoax/urban legend (http://www.intuh.net/barnfinds/afa70.htm) and after checking the TO: to see how many victims were made. I see my name is spelled wrong. The email address is correct i before e except after c, but the last name. mmm..

I guess we are just more sensitive when its personal.


FYI, I was told by a teknolog that if a company deliberately gave consistent results, i.e. search result response times, that were even inflatedly consistant, customers did not complain. The claim was that people don't want better, faster, more, they really just want predictable.

I challenge that.

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Lotus Designer Tip: Attach Documents to Forms

Users have been entering information into a database running in Lotus Notes for some time, and now they would like to attach documents to it. All this time, I've been mostly clueless as to how to do it, reading somewhere that it only works when viewed through the web browser, and then giving up for a while.

But to allow users to upload/attach files to your form, just create a rich text field... thats it.


I was pretty amazed at the simplicity of that. Nothing tricky. Just to not keep secrets, I additionally changed a setting on the control tab of field properties, under storage, I set it to "Store contents as HTML and MIME", just for possible future compatibility.

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

The Fratellis: New Album?

The Fratellis New Album Drops November 6, 2007
One of the lines from The Fratellis, "I knew you best a a blagger", kinda in my head runs like I knew you best as a blogger. Ask me your name, is it tweet, my name is dagger...

Anyways, The Fratellis are super fun, I've seen them at Virgin Festival in Baltimore, and can't wait to see them again.

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

Open Letter to the Post Office: Go away

I'm not a fan of collecting stamps, finding envelopes, licking glue, and going to the post office to send something that has every other reason to be done online. If I were one with the political clout to affect change, I would begin by charging a tax on mailbox fees. Very analogous to the way people already pay for water or electricity. Some people have costs in generating the service, why not pay to use the service. I haven't quite figured out if it should be per parcel or per quantity, but those who choose to do business by snail mail need to cut it out.

I'm sure Google/MSN/Yahoo/other email providers are great employers who give their employees off for holidays, it doesn't mean they shut down and their services are unavailable for an entire long weekend. My beef is that to send a mail, one must go through such a hassle, that its just a pain.

Not to mention, its slow.