Just downloaded Firefox 3.5 from Mozilla’s FTP site (yeah, you’re not really supposed to do that). It’s clear that JavaScript runs faster (which is a big deal to me), but I’ll give the latest browser a thumbs up just because of the New Tab button. For years the first thing I do when I install Firefox on a machine is add the New Tab button to the toolbar. Now it’s there in almost the exact same spot.
Hey, ESPN.com.
We’ve known each other a long time. We started spending a lot of time together in college. You’ve gone through several redesigns in that time. Heck, I even blogged about some of them. But lately, I’m not feeling it.
Here’s the thing. Your article layout sucks. Take a look at what I’m talking about:
Click to Embiggen
See the smallest column, over there on the left? That’s the text of the article. The second column is a sidebar. The third column is a statbox. The fourth column, which is empty, runs the length of the page but is only occupied near the top, with an advertisement.
Note that on several lines, only two words fit in the first column, and on one line, only a single word fits. And this is just one screen’s worth of one article. It’s so painful that it makes the article unreadable.
Here’s my suggestion: Change the article layout so that it has two columns of equal width. The first column contains the body of the article, and is untouchable. Nothing may encroach upon it. The second column can contain anything else — advertisements, sidebars, statboxes, whatever.
A second option might be to take inspiration from the iPhone version of ESPN.com. Let’s take a look:
We’ve got an ad, the section header, the score header, then hey — what’s this? It’s a pseudo-tabular nav header. We could apply this to the main site! Solve the layout problem by hiding elements (additional analysis, links, stats) until the reader wants to see them. If we were to scroll down on the iPhone site, we’d see that for the entire length of the article, it occupies the full width of the browser window. No element encroaches upon the article’s space. In this respect, the article is easier to read on my phone than it is on my computer. Not only that, but the layout of the article on my computer — at its narrowest point — is not as wide as the layout of the article on my iPhone. That’s measured in characters or inches, take your pick.
So, ESPN.com, I still really like you, but you’ve got to work on this stuff. Or what? Or else, that’s what.
Today I received an envelope in the mail from Comcast. It was addressed to “Comcast Customer” and through the window in the envelope I could see the words “Important update re: your programming.”
I expected it to be a procedural letter of minimal importance, but I opened it anyway. At the top of the letter there was some more text: “POSSIBLE NFL NETWORK CHANGES.” If you haven’t read about it in the news, Comcast (abd I believe all of the cable companies) are in disagreement with the NFL over whether NFL Network is a premium channel or a basic channel, how much the NFL should charge the cable operators, and how much the operators should charge customers for the channel.
Also from the letter: “The NFL Network may stop providing its programming to Comcast on May 1, 2009.”
Because of this, the letter offers me Starz free for 12 months, or an Internet speed upgrade free for 12 months. Starz isn’t bad, but it only offers one HD channel, so I went with the speed upgrade.
When the NFL Network started showing live NFL games, I added a package to my Comcast service so that I could see it. I wonder if this offer has been extended to all Comcast customers, or only those who currently pay to have the NFL Network as part of their service.
If you haven’t seen Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, you may not be familiar with the phrase “nuke the fridge.” In the film, Indy finds himself on a nuclear test site in Nevada and climbs into a lead-lined refrigerator to survive the blast. The phrase has been adopted by popular culture and has a meaning similar to “jump the shark.”
I recently read the Wikipedia article on Back to the Future. From the section on the film’s development:
Originally, Marty was a video pirate, the time machine was a refrigerator, and he needed to use the power of an atomic explosion at the Nevada Test Site to return home. Zemeckis was “concerned that kids would accidentally lock themselves in refrigerators”, and the original climax was deemed too expensive.
The footnotes seem to indicate that this information comes from Empire magazine, but I couldn’t find the article.
Steven Spielberg produced the three BTTF films. He also directed the four Indiana Jones movies. Did he pluck this (previously) impractical scene from an old project? Who knows.
Around the new year, I had some problems with my Netvibes page. For two days, I couldn’t access my bookmarks. As a result, I began to build my own bookmark manager. Then Netvibes answered my support email with a resolution to the problem, and I stopped working on my project.
On the same day Netvibes responded to my email, I was laid off from my job. After a few weeks of not writing any code, I got the itch, and decided to move forward with the bookmark manager. For two or three weeks I spent up to five hours a day, five or six days a week, getting the thing up and running. Once I got it to a feature-complete state, I stared at it for a few days, enabled user registration, and gave the URL to a couple friends.
I applied twice to Google AdSense, and got shot down both times. I was waiting to blog about it until I incorporated ads, but now I don’t know if that’ll happen.
The site is fully functional. Still, there may be bugs, and there may be some obvious features that I missed. If you register, you’ll get an email, and I set up feedback at fav dot premo dot biz for, well, feedback.
If you sign up, remember: each link can have more than one tag. For example, I might tag ajc.com with news and atlanta, I might tag espn.com with news and sports, and might tag atlantafalcons.com with sports and atlanta.
Oh — the URL: fav.premo.biz.
Wow, Safari 4 includes built-in functionality extremely similar to a Firefox extension I use almost daily — Firebug. It’s accessible through Safari’s Developer menu, which is hidden by default. I wonder if technology like this being built into browsers will become the norm. I seem to recall that Mozilla had decided to strip the console or DOM inspector out of future versions of Firefox, but a couple minutes on Google and Wikipedia leave me with no evidence of this.
The conclusion here is that competition is good for the consumer, and developers aren’t often thought of as consumers. It’s also interesting that Safari, which lacks Firefox’s robust extension architecture, now has built-in functionality similar to my favorite Firefox extension. This reminds me of the progression of Mac OS (and perhaps Windows) — imitate popular third party applications, and include them with the OS. Think of iTunes: MP3 player, CD ripper, podcast manager. Many popular (free) third party applications have faded into obscurity because people don’t need them anymore.
Well, I got laid off on Tuesday. January 6. It’s made it to the Internet at least twice. I worked at SpringWidgets, which was part of part of MySpace, or part of Fox Interactive Media. MySpace is part of FIM, but our place on the big corporate family tree varied at times. Our entire office of 13 people was shut down.
Additionally, sometime in the near future all of our servers are set to be shut down. So, the things I worked on over the last 22 months will either disappear completely or break. I suppose for my resume as much as anything else, I’ve decided to post some photos of my last big project at SpringWidgets: The SpringWidgets RSS Reader application is, at the time of this writing, still available on MySpace. Here are the screenshots I uploaded to Flickr.
So I’m in the process of moving everything back to 1&1. I just wasn’t impressed with BlueHost.
I suppose technically you might have peeked at the obscure URL I used to make sure everything was up and running before I changed the nameservers for danpremo.com.
I moved my hosting to BlueHost.com. I got a good deal — $4.95 per month. It’s not a hard deal to get. Just Google bluehost $4.95 promo — I found it on the first (non-ad) result. Why did I move my hosting? I needed more tools but I didn’t want to pay more. In the next few days I should get my hands dirty with PEAR and PECL. Once I have a grip on those, Image Magick should fall into place, and then maybe I’ll have no choice but to implement a real site redesign. Hell, at that point I might even change the blog’s URL.
World affairs expert and author Fareed Zakaria said he thinks it would be best for Republican presidential hopeful John McCain, if Gov. Sarah Palin bowed out as his vice presidential running mate. Zakaria says McCain did not put the country first in making his V.P. choice, and he says Palin is not qualified to lead the United States.
Update: Read the column on Fareed Zakaria’s website.
