785 words
Bad UI I experienced a dangerously bad UI at the cash machine the other day. I inserted my card, entered my PIN, chose an amount and then... nothing happened. No progress display on the screen, no noises from within the machine, no money, no card. What was I to do? I wouldn't want to leave my card with the machine while trying to phone for help (let alone that I wouldn't have been able to enter the room with the cash machine again without my card). The problem resolved itself: After what felt like an eternity to me and probably about a few minutes to everybody else, an error message appeared on-screen and disappeared before I could read it. My card was returned and the machine displayed an 'out of order' message. There should always be information about (non-) progress of what a machine does as soon as something unusual happens. Particularly for appliances like cash machines.
Irresistible: Is there a way to not link to a post that both quotes Clerks and says Fear those who control the databases, for they can rewrite history
? Not for me. Those 2lmc people just have a great attitude It doesn't matter what the medium is, if you're full of shit, welcome to the world of being despised.
. I'll have to send their link to Paul whom I may have heard voicing their We hate you all. Yes, especially you. Sod off and die.
motto before.
Feedback: I merged the comment and trackback pages into one and changed their appearance to that of all the other pages. It's not 100% perfect, but it should do the job. One problem I had when doing this, was providing a link back to the associated post. I tried inserting <$MTLink entry_id="<$MTEntryID$>"$>
(and the same using <$MTCommentEntryID$>
but in either case, Movable Type would give me an error message Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.)
for the MTLink
tag. I don't know what that means and didn't manage to fix it. Any hints?
On a related topic, John Gruber points out the drawbacks of the trackback technique, his main point being that analysing referrers will give the same information about inter-site linking, while not needing any additional protocol. This cannot be denied. I still like trackback pings, because
If this behaviour were widespread (i.e. beyond weblogs), It'd probably render the whole trackback thing useless. Ideally, I'd be able to ping John with this post of mine, to tell him 'I commented on what you wrote, you may be interested in that'. If, on the other hand, I only want to attribute the quote
On the Mac, in any given software category, the best app usually wins. On Windows, in any given software category, Microsoft usually wins.to him, for sake of reference, there isn't much point in sending a trackback ping as John most likely won't care too much. That seems to be the idea about trackbacks – actual use does vary. Perhaps every web site allowing trackback pings, should also offer a form to be pinged with by people who do static web pages.
In short, I think trackback pings are sweet. There may be issues about them but I don't think they'll be terribly important. It's all just a big game.
I like the new combined feedback page. One suggestion, though (actually this gets back to the Trackback UI PITA factor John Gruber mentioned) — you should make sure that the Trackback ping URI appears somewhere on the feedback page, otherwhise people using the standalone Trackback CGI implementation have to view-source on this page to find the correct URI to which send their pings.
It’s so obvious, I wonder why I didn’t think of it. Done.
(I read John’s text after working on the page, obviously.)
At the top of the feedback pages, there’s now a “Feedback on ” line, where is a link (apparently to the entry). This link, however, leads to the feedback page (IOW, to itself!). It probably should link to the archived entry instead.
True. As I stated in the post, I didn’t manage to figure out how to make Movable Type generate that URL for me. So I left it out, not removing the anchor tag… Any hints welcome.