Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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Non-Science Miscellanea

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

  1. it is very comfortable to exchange them with sites using a compatible system and you may (or may not) get to see the context, as John points out as well,
  2. at least for people with a low number of readers, getting the occasional message from Movable Type notifying you that someone has sent a trackback ping, is a nice thing,
  3. I don't take this blogging and trackback thing seriously enough to be in need of a truely sound and democratic way of analysing the incoming links,
  4. Having trackback doesn't keep you from getting a more thorough analysis from either your webserver's logs or Technorati. John says the latter is quite good at this. I'll have to trust him on that as I never really got the hang of it. There seem to be many similar tools as well.
  5. The 'simple' solution suggested by John requires a database and scripts, so it's not quite as low-tech and suitable for people running static websites as I thought it would be.
Apart from those points, analysing referrer headers is in a different spirit than trackback pings are: For a trackback ping, you can decide for yourself whether you want to send it or not. In theory at least – using Movable Type's auto-pinging feature, the program will ping every ping-able page you linked to rather than requiring you to select the pages to be pinged.

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.

John Gruber

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.

June 12, 2003, 21:33

Trackback

Trackback “2003/06/12 20:55” from 2lmc spool:

John Gruber on trackback

June 13, 2003, 10:39

Comments

Comment by d.w.: User icon

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.

June 12, 2003, 21:53

Comment by ssp: User icon

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.)

June 12, 2003, 22:01

Comment by Sören Kuklau: User icon

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.

June 15, 2003, 13:18

Comment by ssp: User icon

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.

June 16, 2003, 1:08

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