Tuesday was somewhat of a disappointment to me as a consumer.
1. Claro Argentina (my mobile phone operator)
I tried to send a text message to a friend on tuesday, only to get an error message. This happened several times. I had checked my account balance a few days before so I was positive I had credit. I had more than enough credit. Yet, when I checked my account again it said “credit expired”. Outrage! I plugged my phone to the charger, put the hands-free heasdet on and dialed customer service. About 25 minutes later I managed to get someone to talk to me.
“– I’m sorry, sir, your credit expired a week ago”
“– Um… what? It’s not been 90 days since I added credit. It’s not even been 60 days.”
“– Our policy changed last May. Credit now lasts 45 days for a refill card of that value.”
“– wtf… Ok, fine. I’m not happy with this but I guess it’s my fault for not checking the expiration date.”
(I still can’t bring myself to yell at a CSR, even though I’m always pissed off when I call)
So I got a new card and redeemed it. I noticed two things. Unlike previous experiences, my older credit was completely lost. And my new card expires in 30 days (since it’s a $30 card instead of the $50 I got last time). This pissed me off even more than losing my credit. This company is trying to scrap as much money from me as they possibly can! No, I’m not surprised by it. But I’m still pissed. And I even more pissed about the fact that I have no choice. Their competitors are excactly the same.
I don’t mind paying more for a good product or good service. That’s why I buy my phones unlocked and I have a pre-paid line. It costs more but I can spare myself from a lot of the bullshit involving having a cell phone. Anyone wants to join me into starting a no-bullshit mobile operator? “We’ll charge you more, but you won’t feel like we are raping you from behind”. Sigh, one can dream…
2. Apple
I’m in the market for a new laptop. I’m a Mac user, which means I don’t have much to choose from. And that’s ok, because even though Apple thinks that consumers only want small screens and professionals only want big screens, I still get the choice of a good pro-spec machine. It costs more, but I was considering going for a Macbook Pro with it’s larger, matte screen.
Well, till last tuesday.
There are new Macbooks. And I most likely won’t be buying one. Not because they’re a bit ugly in my opinion (that’s not gonna affect my decision, positively or negatively), but because Apple removed the matte screen option from its professional line. This in itself doesn’t affect me much; I don’t need *that* much color acuracy for my work (my desktop monitor is VGA, for pete’s sake). What affects me is that Apple seems to be abandoning the professional market and focusing on the consumer market.
WTF? They show a computer editing video with a huge reflection on the screen? Wouldn’t that make color and contrast correcting a pain in the ass? Apple used to believe that:
MacBook Pro offers an antiglare widescreen display that’s perfect for color-minded professionals. For a more immersive viewing experience, you can configure the MacBook Pro display with a glossy finish. This gives everything you see a richer, more saturated feel.
— archived version of the Macbook Pro page on Apple.com
while the copy on the new page seems aimed to the consumer market:
The moment you open your MacBook Pro you’re greeted by glorious, full screen brightness. But that’s only one gleaming quality of the glossy LED-backlit widescreen display. The picture is brilliant and sharp from corner to corner. And anything you view — including the ultrathin display itself — is a spectacular experience.
“No matte = no buy. I’m looking at Windows laptops now. I can’t trust my business to a company that clearly abandoned the professional market for the consumer market.”. That’s the feedback I gave to the company that makes a tool I like about why they may lose me as a customer. I don’t like Windows as much as OS X, but I’m starting to look at Dell Precisions and Lenovo Thinkpads.
I just uploaded a new version of my online portfolio. About friggin time, I had a “coming soon” page for almost a year already.
Go take a look! SnowyDayDesign.com
The home page of this website shows most of my online activity, but the RSS feed was lagging behind; it only showed the blog posts. Both Flickr and Del.icio.us provide RSS feeds, so how hard could it be to mix the three in one big feed? Turns out not at all, thanks to Yahoo Pipes
I had heard of the service but never tried it. I never really had a use for it. I have to say the interface is extremely cool. Being a visual guy I was very impressed with how you can manage your feeds easily as a diagram, pipes included!. What I did was the following:
- Grabbed the Wordpress blog feed with the “Fetch feed” module.
- Run that through the “Regex” module, to add “Blog post:” before the title. The syntax I used (I got it from somewhere else, I have no idea about regex!) is In title replace (.*) with Blog post: $1.
- Repeated the process for both the Flickr feed and the Del.icio.us feed.
- Merged all 3 feeds with the “Union” module.
- Run that main feed through the “Sort” module, to sort all items by published date. The string I used was Sort by y:published in descending order.
- Sent that to the Pipe Output, save the pipe and run it through Feedburner, replacing my old feed.
I wanted to do an extra step, adding the link URL to the description on the del.icio.us feed, but I couldn’t find a way to do that from within Pipes. I probably could with an extra step (maybe run it through Feedburner first?) but I don’t want it to get too complicated.
So if you notice some glitches on this feed it’s because I did all this. It should be pretty seamless though.
Edit: the only problem is that the feed title links to my Yahoo Pipes page instead of my website. I think you can change that on feedburner, but I can’t find it (anyone?). If I can’t fix this I think I’ll have to drop Pipes and use only Feedburner to merge my feeds. For now it’ll be pretty much the same, but I’m planning to add another feed in the future and it would be tricky withouth Pipes.
Technorati Tags: Yahoo Pipes, Feedburner, RSS feed, RSS, RSS merge
One of the best Recent Posts plugins for Wordpress out there is the Coffe2Code Customizable Post Listings. In fact, it does much more. “Display Recent Posts, Recently Commented Posts, Recently Modified Posts, Random Posts, and other post listings…”. Neat.
But, since Wordpress 2.1, there’s a slight problem with it. You see, WP 2.1 changed the way Pages work, so this nifty plugin now fails to tell the difference between posts and Pages. It may not be too much of a problem in some cases, but in this particular site I’m currently working on it gets in the way. Fortunately, there’s an easy fix.
All that needs to be added is this little snippet of code that tells the plugin to only process the posts and not the Pages: post_type=’post’. One doesn’t need to know PHP to do this (I don’t…). Copy and paste will do.
Look for this:
$sql .= “WHERE $tableposts.post_date <= '$now' AND ( $tableposts.post_status = 'publish' ";
if ($include_sticky_posts) $sql .= "OR $tableposts.post_status = 'sticky' ";
$sql .= ")";
and add the bit of code mentioned before, like this:
$sql .= “WHERE $tableposts.post_date <= '$now' AND ( $tableposts.post_status = 'publish' ";
if ($include_sticky_posts) $sql .= "OR $tableposts.post_status = 'sticky' ";
$sql .= ") AND $tableposts.post_type=’post’ “;
Now it works like a charm :).
Unfortunately this pluging hasn’t been updated in a few years, and even the last comment about it on the website is from 2005. At least this will leave them a pingback.
Technorati Tags: Wordpress, Coffee2Code, Customizable Post Listings, Wordpress plugin, Wordpress recent posts
I found this post on Bittbox.com about the 25 Reasons You Might Be A Hardcore Graphic/Web Designer, and while I haven’t named the OS X beach ball (yet), I think the fact that I closed Photoshop to go to bed only to open it again 30 seconds later because I-have-to-try-this-thing-and-then-I-will-go-to-bed-for-real makes me hardcore.
Or maybe It makes me a freak. Who knows…
Technorati Tags: Bittbox.com, hardcore designer, web design, graphic design
Turns out that the standalone IE6 i had installed doesn’t work so well after all. The AlphaImageLoader filter, used to correct png transparencies, doesn’t work on it, and some other sites i tried weren’t rendered correctly (well, as correctly as IE6 can do it…).
I considered unistalling IE6 and getting an IE7 standalone, then read some horror stories about screwing up Windows after uninstalling IE7, then freaked out for a while, then cursed Microsoft and wondered how hard would it be to sue them for mental anguish, then looked around a bit, then freaked some more, and finally found this multiple IE installer. It even fixes the registry thingies for you, and the AlphaImageLoader filter works on it.
Now, i’m wondering… if several people found a way to run multiple IEs at the same time, how come Microsoft can’t provide an official solution?. Hopefully Windows Vista will be a big flop and Linux will take over. As for me, i’m getting a Mac.
Technorati Tags: IE6, IE7, multiple IE, standalone IE6, browser, AlphaImageLoader
I did. A client complained that his site was broken on IE7, so i had to install it to test it. I was putting this off (even though i shouldn’t have), but now i had no choice. So how did it go? Let’s see…
Instalation took a while. A long while. At least none of the horror stories i have been reading about happened to me. After it finished everything was working perfectly.
Whew.
I then proceeded to fix my client’s site. I had used conditional comments to call an IE6 specific stylesheet. IE7 was not getting that stylesheet, as i intended – after all, IE7 is standards compliant, right, Microsoft?.
My first guess was to make IE7 get the IE6 stylesheet. Lo and behold, it worked flawlessly! So i went and tested another of my sites. Broken on IE7, fixed after making it use the IE6 stylesheet. I’m sorry Microsoft, you fixed what?. Ha, i shouldn’t be complaining, it’s less work for me after all! (riiiight, i’m wishing all sites render in IE7 just like they do on IE6, but i know it won’t be like that)
Now i had IE7 installed and i had fixed the site i had to fix. But i didn’t have IE6 anymore. IE is bundled into windows, so installing a new version will replace the old one. That’s no good. No good at all. I need IE6, it’s still the most used browser. As much as i hate it, i need my sites to render properly on it.
What was Microsoft’s solution?
Use Virtual PC.
No, no, no, i want a standalone version of IE7 or IE6 so i can test my sites on both browsers easily, like i do with Opera and Firefox. If i was on a Mac i’d use it, but i’m not.
Sorry, no can do. You’ll have to get Virtual PC. Or maybe a second computer.
Ha, right. A second computer, that’s easier.
But all wasn’t lost yet. In my aid came evolt.org and their browser archive. Among the endless list of browsers they have there’s a set of standalone IE’s, including IE6.
Perfect.
Well, almost.
You see, those conditional comments i use don’t work on these standalone installs of IE. That makes them very inconvenient, if not useless. But again, someone was smart enough to find a workaround for it. The people at positioniseverything.net provide us with an easy way to fix that. It’s a very small change that’s completely reversible. So far it works fine here.
Oh, another problem with these standalone installs is that they’ll all show the version as the one you have installed -e.g. my IE6 claims to be IE7. No problem by me so i didn’t bother to fix that, but again that’s a really easy fix. Also, some features won’t work, making these browser non usable for other than testing. But that’s not a problem either. Who wants to use IE for real anyway… ;)
Sumarizing, get the standalone IE6 and then fix the conditional comments problem. It’s easy and it works.
Update: Ok, it doesn’t work that well.
Technorati Tags: IE7, IE6, IE standalone, IE6 standalone, IE conditional comments, evolt.org, positioniseverything.net
Earlier this year, around march, i took a job doing some maintenence for a website. I will not link to the site, but i will tell you this: it was the damn most awful site in the whole internet. Last time i checked, the home page alone was 1.6 Mb of just text and the ocasional image (and that’s because i got tired of waiting and stopped it – i’m sure it’s larger). Don’t get me wrong, the job was pretty cool; good work enviroment, very flexible hours and great people. The pay, on the other hand, was ridiculously low. Think of a low number… ready?…
No, it was lower than that, seriously. Try again.
No, lower than that too.
And than that too.
Ok, we can be at this all day, so i’ll just keep going. So, the site was awful, built on FrontPage (the boss wasn’t stupd though, he once told me “ugly sites sell more. Have you ever googled ‘Ugly Websites’?”). Part of my job was to move this site to a new one, using this program called XSitePro. When i first interviewed for this job, the boss asked me “have you ever used XSitePro?”, in a sort of gloaty voice, like this program was the best thing since sliced bread (i think i also heard some fanfare too…). I didn’t know about it, but he assured it was easy to use. Needless to say, i hated the program every single day i worked there.
Last night i checked the website again out of curiosity. It reminded me of this XSitePro software, so i went and googled it. Here, look for yourself. Nothing but review after review, all with affiliate links at the bottom (pretty similar to the site i was working on to tell the truth – so there really is a market for these kind of things or, wouldn’t surprise me at all, the boss was also behind XSitePro…) . Even one titled Xsitepro – is this the only Honest Review on the Internet? has an affiliate link at the bottom, and it’s posted on several articles sites. I looked at 15 pages of a google search for “XSitePro review” and couldn’t find a review that looked… well… honest.
So, here it goes, an XSitePro unbiased review, for real.
Should you buy XSitePro?
No.
Why? Because if you’re thinking of buying this program, you’re on Windows (it’s not available for any other OS), and if you’re on Windows, you already have FrontPage, wich is pretty much as good at building websites as XSitePro (i.e. not good at all). It may have all those easy publishing tools, but the WYSIWYG interfase is awful. Good luck trying to stylize a link. And the code it writes is terrible. Three words: table based layout.
“But!”, you may say, “XSitePro has all those useful tools like SEO optimizing!” Ha, i laugh at that. It’s pretty much useless. There’s a reason why SEO specialists charge so much.
If you’re serious about your online business, either get a real WYSIWYG program (you can get some even for free) and spend some time learning how to use it, or pay someone who knows what they’re doing to do it for you.
I left that job after a few months, to start SnowyDay. Now i do my web design with the best HTML editor available, the Notepad.
Technorati Tags: XSitePro, notepad, html editor, build websites, ugly websites
Yes, yet another IE rant. Everytime that, like today, i have to spend 4 hours fixing the mess IE does, i feel like writing a big fat rant about it.
This website doesn’t work properly on IE. It’s just details, but they’re there. I will not bother fixing them; not because i can’t do it (i do it for client’s sites), but as a personal statement. Why should i fix something that isn’t broken on the first place?
The only reason IE has an usage share of almost 90% is because it comes bundled with Windows. IE6 is a bad product. It’s not just me saying; PC Magazine named it the 8th worst tech product of all times (and AOL is nº1, of course). But worry not! IE7 is right around the corner! is out… okay, worry, and worry lots. Who knows what whole new set of bugs will IE7 have. At the IE Development Blog (i’m too lazy to look for the specific post) they’re already asking web designers to fix their codes because the hacks used for IE6 might do a real mess on IE7. They’re asking me to fix the way i fixed their old mistakes, so thier new mistakes will be fixed too? What-ever. You should be less lazy than me and look for that post. The readers comments are hilarious.
Do yourself a favor. Download a standards compliant browser. I strongly recommend Opera. Or you can use Firefox, or many others.
And if you’re not on windows you’re already safe. Because come on, who on it’s right mind would use something like IE for Mac…
Edit: I just went to the official Microsoft IE7 site and look what happened (click on it to see it full size):
Nice.
Technorati Tags: browser, IE, IE6, IE7, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, virus
A client asked me for a navigation bar using a custom font for his WordPress theme. I couldn’t just hand code it and use images since he wanted the final user to be able to add pages from the WP control panel. I figured there had to be a way to do that; there is a plugin to replace the post titles with images (gee, can you tell?), so why couldn’t you use it for any other text? It took me a while, but i finally figured it out. This is what i did:
I made a menu on the header with the wp_list_pages tag.
<div id="menu">
<ul>
<?php wp_list_pages('title_li='); ?>
</ul>
</div>
title_li= makes the tag not display a title.
The menu is done, next is converting it to images. I started by getting this Image Replacement WordPress plugin. I had to fix it to get it to work properly. On that page look for a comment by Serge Lafont. I tried that and it worked like a charm.
The plugin lets you specify wich html tag you want to replace (h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, div, span and p), and even set a class. The problem is that the wp_list_cats tag outputs something like this:
<li class="page_item"><a href="...url..." title="Links">Links</a></li>
No good. I needed a tag around the page title. I had to change the output of the wp_list_pages tag, wich is found in the the template-function-posts.php file (on the wp-includes folder).
I had to look around a bit, as php is not really my thing, but i found the part that had to be changed. To locate it, do a search for “function _page_level_out” and scroll down a few lines. The part is this:
$output .= $indent . '
<li class="' . $css_class . '"><a href="' . get_page_link($page_id) . '" title="' . wp_specialchars($title) . '">' . $title . '</a>';
I added a span there, like this:
$output .= $indent . '
<li class="' . $css_class . '"><a href="' . get_page_link($page_id) . '" title="' . wp_specialchars($title) . '"><span class="' . $css_class . '">' . $title . '</span></a>';
I copied the class from the li element, so they’ll both have the same class. Any other one class could be used too though.
Now the wp_list_pages tag outputs this:
<li class="page_item"><a href="...url..." title="Links"><span class="page_item">Links</span></a></li>
Perfect. And there is no problem if you want to use another theme in the future. All you have is an extra span tag that won’t bug.
All left to do is go to the plugin settings and choose a span class “page_item”, and voila, an image menu, fully editable. So far it works fine, at least in IE6, Opera 9 and Firefox 1.5 (all for WinXP).
The only drawback is that you can’t have mouseover effects. Oh well.
Technorati Tags: Wordpress, Wordpress hack
