Web work

Annoying software

Slashdot is running the post about annoying software. The fact that Slashdot crowd mostly consists of computer geeks is sort of a guarantee for some interesting comments.

With my Fedora 9 saga I had to review and try a lot of new software. Needless to say, I found quite a few annoying bits. Here is a brief list, just to give you an idea:

Clock applet in Gnome. It shows calendar with Sunday being first day of the week. If you don’t like it, you’ll have to recompile your locale to change it. This one is cancelled out though by an excellent support of Google Calendar (or, for that matter, any other web published calendar).
Metacity window manager in Gnome. Window titles are displayed in the middle. This is really annoying for those of us who are used to seeing them on the left. There is no option to change this setting either in GUI or in GConf.
Pidgin new message notification. I once had it popping up nice looking bubbles, but I don’t remember how I managed to do it. I also don’t remember how I managed to break it. And I have no idea to bring them back. I really miss them though.
WordPress 2.5 post editing screen. It has been much reworked in the latest version and looks and feels so much better. However, the list of categories was moved from a really convenient location on the right of the screen to a really inconvenient location at the bottom of the screen.
FileZilla FTP manager. This one drives me nuts with server connections. It either disconnects every 40 seconds when being idle. Or it keeps multiple connections open forever and most FTP servers block me out temporary.
Request Tracker (RT3). Works perfectly with queues and tickets, but annoys the heck out of me when I need to do something with users. Users aren’t first level citizens, like tickets.
SugarCRM. Excellent business tool, with lots of small annoyances, like not being able to set default user role, disable theme selector everywhere, change logos to company ones, lock down the functionality, etc. Most of these are easily fixable. But some aren’t as trivial as they may sound or seem.
Google Reader. This one annoys me a bit (but often) when I want to leave a few items in the feed unread and go deeper into archives. Somehow it keeps marking everything I passed as read.

Now, what piece of software were you annoyed with recently?

StayPress – WordPress plugins for property management and booking

Clearskys.net has recently announced there new project – StayPress. Here is a quote from the introduction:

StayPress is a collection of plugins that will turn a standard vanilla installation of WordPress or WordPress MU into a property management and bookings system. Of course when I say Property, I actually mean any bookable resource of which there is a finite availability. So the StayPress system will be able to manage property rentals, hotel room rentals, conference rooms and centres, B and B’s, training rooms, bands, etc…

There is plenty of demand for something like that. In fact, I’ve been working on a similar project about 8 month ago. But, unfortunately, it could not have been open sourced, and it eventually collapsed under the historical baggage that it had to bring over. So, I’m glad that StayPress is coming up to fill the void.

The main web site of StayPress is not online yet, but ClearSkys blog entry had a screenshot (above).

Web site awards and trust certifications

Back in the 1990’s, when the Web just got popular, it seemed like every more or less large web site had to have a bunch of awards. Awards were the first web promotion tricks that I’ve learned of. Anyone could establish his own award. All you needed was a little image that looked like a medal or a star.

Awards were demanded by the “big guys” who wanted to show how “special” they were. And they were often taken advantage of by really small guys, who were making the awards, and used them to promote their own “award giving” web sites.

Then there were so many web awards that nobody cared about them anymore. And it was quite for some time.

The new wave started with trust certifications. Lots and lots of people on the web were followed by all sorts of scammers, spammers, crackers, hackers, and what not. Many got worried and afraid. So, the certification boom started. Trust of that, protection of this, guarantee of something, warranty of something else, etc.

Surprisingly, after all these years, so many web sites still use this non-sense. What is even more surprsing is that so many of them are prepared to pay money (and huge money in some cases) to get the award or certification. Why? That’s really beyond me.

4 Mbps with PrimeTel

Here is a quote from the latest PrimeTel newsletter:

PrimeTel upgrades for even faster Internet speeds and provides 4Mbps / 512Kbps as an upgrade option for the PrimeHome and PrimeADSL2+ subscribers. The additional monthly fee for the PrimeHome subscribers is EUR65,92 while for the PrimeADSL2+ subscribers is EUR53,33. Read more

Anybody tried that already?

Note to PrimeTel : By the way, I’d much prefer an RSS feed from your site to those Greek emails that you send me. Thank you.

PSD slicing service recommendation

This is a follow-up to my recent post “MostSliced.com summary – picking PSD slicing company“.

Once the choices for the PSD slicing service were established, I did the next step – actual order. I started from the top of my list, which happened to be xHTML Master. I sent them the order through the form on their web site and got a pretty fast response apologizing for the fact that they were too busy to undertake my order. No problem. Good that they notified me in a timely manner. So, I went to the next choice – PSD Slicing. Again, submitted the design and went into the waiting mode.

Pretty soon I received an email letting me know that the order is OK and that they can start on Monday (next working day) and finish it by Wednesday (two pages, with one of them being a rather complex design). The timing was well within my limits. I sent them 50% of the down-payment and started waiting again. Today, on Tuesday, around lunch time, I got my order back, fully done and finished.

First of all, of course, I was a bit surprised with the speed. I thought it would take them more. When I checked the results I was even more surprised. In short: outstanding job! The images were cut properly, some in PNG, some in GIF, some in JPG – properly chosen each time. The xHTML was small and clean, validated perfectly with XHTML 1.0 Strict (not even Transitional!). DIVs, proper CSS, nicely indented. CSS was also done nicely – small, simple, and straight-forward. Fully valid. Also, the whole codebase is pretty semantic and, as a bonus, validates with web accessibility standard (Section 508). To say that I was really impressed with the result was to say nothing at all. I was stunned for a few minutes. It’s been a really long time since I saw anything so beautiful.

It was so good that I couldn’t believe it. So I thought maybe it will break in one of the major browsers. Then my attention was caught by something else in that email message that they sent me. It was a link to BrowserShots.org , which is the web service that can show you how your web site looks in a whole lot of browsers. PSD Slicing provided me with the link to the screenshots of their results in all major browsers that I cared about!

After checking that code back and forth, the only suggestion I could come up with is … comments. They aren’t required or anything, since the whole CSS and xHTML files are very small (something around 6-10 KBytes), but still it would have been nice to have some comments, especially in CSS.

Am I satisfied with their service? You bet I am. Will I ever recommend it? Yes, of course. I’m doing it already. Is it worth the money (around $120/page)? Yes! [insert more questions here and answer them “yes”]