I realize the reason I’m putting people on a CMS specifically because not everyone reads PHP-code like english, so naturally they can’t be blamed for this mistake!  All other Visual Editor disablers will either disable TinyMCE site-wide or not at all, but this always conflicts with the lay-user that naturally wants to still edit their posts without doing it in HTML code.  So… how to keep them from breaking their site while allowing them the ease to still create blog posts??

My response was to create a nifty little plugin to disable the editor for the Page Editor, but not for the Post Editor.  It was simpler than I thought, and you can download it, of course, for free!

The iPod Shuffle. So simple, you can’t use it.A call from a winmatrix.com forum member to “Improve Chrome’s UI” suggests that we should do away with the omnibar in its current form in favor of moving it to the actual tab text.  When one clicks on the title text, it instead shows the URL and an omnibar-looking edit box where new URLs or URL edits can take place.  My background has always been in both IT and design–while this may or may not be common, it has proven invaluable in solving design problems by actually observing user behavior–and to me this is a useless suggestion for both the computer savvy and non-savvy crowds for the following reasons:

For the computer-savvy crowd, we often go the URL bar to see precisely where we are in a site’s hierarchy.  It is easy to ascertain spatially, and thus informationally, where we are within a site by the contents of the URL bar.  Additionally, the GET variables in an address bar are often invaluable to getting a particular result with a particular page on a website. The author could have used POST variables to do the same thing, but opted not to in favor of minor customizations offered by people who understand how to use it.

For the non-computer-savvy, I will go out on a pretty sturdy limb by saying that MOST computer users aren’t rocket scientists or Computer Science majors.  I generally install Chrome on everyone’s computer that I work on who still has Internet Exploder as a default.  MOST of them are confused with its significantly overhauled way of doing almost everything, but overwhelmingly, people love it once they learn to use it.  Simply going a step further and dropping off 98% of your UI components is going to make this crowd want to kill you.

Finally, for both technical- and non-technical users, most of us identify with site URLs more quickly than we do with title text.  We’ve all been around the internet long enough to know that site authors/designers have HORRIBLE practices in choosing relevent or dynamic title text.  How many times have we seen a site with a title that has cute text art that effectively pushes the relevant title out of sight (and kills SEO in the process)?  We need the URL as assistance to overcome designer wrongdoing.

At the end of the day, the user experience of the internet needs to cater to the needs of the user, not vice-versa.  Sure, we need to avoid unnecessary clutter (See: HavenWorks.com), but there’s a happy medium that we can achieve without designing a browser that gets rid of the UI entirely.

This seems to me like a very strange hypothesis–as the human brain itself doesn’t (at least normally) necessitate its own obsolescence and replacement.  The article states that computers exist today that perform many more calculations than the human brain can, but this is an apples-and-oranges claim for two obvious reasons:

1. The human brain is no better at processing huge mathematical calculations than a computer is at processing emotion
2. The time-honored tradition of equating an organic human brain to a computer’s microprocessor simply because both have the ability to use logic is [still] absolutely incorrect

Organic intelligence–at least in human society–has been mainly based on the ability to use existing information in new scientific developments; the human brain itself has changed very little in our history.  It doesn’t seem common for scientists to identify a lack of brainpower as much as a failure to exploring enough alternatives to find a solution for a particular problem.

It seems that we have always enjoyed using technology as an aid and supplement to our lives rather than a replacement for them.  Proof of this lies in the development of devices that are increasingly easy for humans to interact with.  Touch screen systems, multi-touch systems, speech-enabled systems–even devices that are capable of using human thoughts as input are being developed to improve human-computer interaction.  This seems that it would result in a very close relationship between man and machine, but never a symbiosis.  Computers will never develop lives or personality unless we program in them an ability to reason, give them enough external control to make changes, and enough time to evolve.

Should a robot race ever be born, however, how would we know that it would have any mission or directive?  Would it find a purpose in life?  How would it manifest that purpose?  How would it choose to interact with humans?  Probably the biggest question I have to pose is this:  Why do we feel that if we created artificial intelligence with greater-than-human potential that it would EVER emulate human life?

In my [admittedly] enraged state after speaking to an unsympathetic SSL provider’s customer service agent, it prompted me to write the following message to Yahoo! Small Business’ support department.

I bought an SSL certificate today, and while getting it implemented after generating and posting the CSR to the provider, they sent an email to the contact information on my whois record.

The domain in question is www.xxxxxxxxxx.com

Since I used your private registration, they’re sending confirmation to contact@myprivateregistration.com. Since www.myprivateregistration.com doesn’t go to a valid website and the phone number on the whois record goes to an overloaded/full voicemail box, I have ZERO reason to believe that the confirmation email (or any other email for that matter) will EVER make it to me as was promised when I registered for your private domain service.

I feel that you have the responsibility to do two things:

#1 – Get me a contact on my whois that is capable of at least FORWARDING email to me should anything come up that requires my attention. After all, that is the service that I PAID for.

#2 – Get me the confirmation email sent to contact@myprivateregistration.com or some other solution to my problem.

I am getting increasingly agitated with Yahoo! Small Business, as your website sucks and doesn’t work properly, your absurd domain costs (which I have opted to buy elsewhere from now on, but I don’t really have a choice for renewals which I know is precisely why you hike the rates so much), your 45-minute (thus far, as I am still on hold) phone service wait times, and now your apparent inability to effectively utilize private registration without obliterating all usefulness of WHOIS lookups and ICANN records.

Please address all problems I have mentioned promptly, as I both need my certificate up immediately and I need a really good excuse to leave the 13 domains I have registered with you on your service. Pricing/service elsewhere is looking VERY attractive.

Best Regards,

Adam Robertson

Now I’m not opposed to safety, but all Yahoo’s doing here is circumventing the system by posting whois info that doesn’t contact anyone. This isn’t only a disservice to me, but also people who are trying to contact me for legitimate reasons. Arg.

ON ANOTHER NOTE:

While I was writing this email AND this post, I was on hold the whole time waiting for a customer service representative. When my call got to 1 hour and 51 seconds (51 seconds being precisely the amount of time it took me to GET myself on hold), Yahoo up and killed the call. OBVIOUS: My frustration when at this point I was looking at my phone sitting on my desk with my jaw firmly locked in the open position. LESS OBVIOUS: My simultaneous efforts to subconsciously look for the nearest gun to shoot myself in the face.

Now apparently waiting on hold for AN ENTIRE HOUR was not enough to convince Yahoo that I thought my issue was important enough to require their attention, nor was it enough time for them to decide to employ more customer service representatives. I can’t imagine that they aren’t aware of their call volumes [though such a thing would make sense after they lost the majority of the search engine market to Google after being #1 since the inception of the internet], so what the f&%$ is going to have to happen for them to make some changes around there?

I must say that for years I have been avoiding the use of any blogging application or activity. For one, I’ve always felt that blogs were mainly reserved for the vast majority of people who had absolutely NOTHING to say! I used to spend countless hours poring through all the useless garbage posts that people felt were pertinent to some unknown quantity of viewers out on the internet. Time and time again I would turn away from my computer in disgust having found either nothing or largely unsubstantiated claims and/or opinions that were not useful for much of anything.

The other observation I noticed is that the lack of face-to-face communication made people more prone to inventing an alter-ego to make themselves more credible. YouTube is a perfect example of this. More often than not you will find a livid commenter damn near posting a fake resume in an effort to sway livid commenter #2/bait-taker into thinking he/she is a seasoned mechanical engineer/rocket scientist or merely the executive director of the Pentagon (whatever that means in terms of credibility). While this tendency is more rampant and pervasive on YouTube, it unfortunately is not exclusive to that site alone.

It was about five years ago that I vowed NEVER to create such a site of my own unless I had something that I felt was of value either to my clients or a considerable portion of the internet masses.

So here you have it–the first post and introduction to what is hopefully a plethora of useful, substantiated, and unadulterated information! I promise to mark opinion pieces as such from this point forward.

While I focus mainly on design and information services (PHP [and thus HTML/XHTML], JS, AJAX, SQL, Flash, Actionscrip, etc.), you will also find posts regarding some of my more business-oriented hobbies. This includes (and is not limited to) photography/cameras, various technological hardware, gaming, and media production. This is still very much up in the air, as it depends largely on the feedback of the readers. As of this post, this blog is merely an hour old; hopefully you will see many positive developments in the near future.

I thank you for your support in advance, and happy reading!