It seems that every single time I use a webpage with forms in it, something goes wrong. Okay, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration but not a huge one. This screenshot is from the Verizon site where I was setting up new service. I selected an option for Internet and TV, which was supposed to be $50 a month after the “bundle discount.”

When I clicked Next, I got to the screen that expected me to add in a phone service. I selected no and was promptly warned that not having the phone service disqualifies me for the bundle discount. Oh, the ol’ bait and switch, I get it. Fine, next. What’s this? I have to select an international calling plan option despite that I have selected not to add a phone service and there are no other options on the screen (not even an “I changed my mind, give me phone service” option)? Clicking Next just keeps me on the page with the warning.

Congratulations, Verizon, you’ve made it into my Ridiculing Stupidity category!

Unfortunately, it's a Navy job that you can't apply for directly through the USA Jobs site, so I went to the Navy site to create an account there and apply. I submit my details to create an account and...

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server error '80040e31'

Timeout expired

/includes/clsAccount.asp, line 871

Awesome. I waited a while and got the same thing. I waited even longer and eventually successfully made an account. Next step: actually applying. I put in the job number and click the result. Then I come to a screen with two chunks of checkboxes. The first is titled "IA0132" and has choices for "02" and "03." The second makes more sense and is a ten-mile-long listing of potential job locations. So I find some that don't start with "IRAQ" and click them. I go back up to the cryptic "IA0132" and determine that the two boxes are referring to pay grade, so I select both. I click submit.

Please select a pay grade.

It's a JavaScript notification. I disable JavaScript and click submit. Nothing. Great, it's a submit button that uses JavaScript (for those who don't know what that means, just groan and say, "Man, who the hell did that?"). I check the source and see a simple chunk of code for the submit button. Basically, I believe the JS is written for either Internet Explorer or an imaginary browser. It looks like this:

I believe it should be this (though it's been a while and is rather late, so I might make mistakes too!):

No worries though, right? I mean, they threw it in a try... catch statement, so that any errors would be caught and properly handled. Check out how the errors are dealt with:

Yeah, the errors are ignored. And this particular error means the form can't be submitted (at least, not in Firefox). No problem, I'll just manually trigger the script that should be run on success and... it's undefined, yay.

At this point, I am frustrated, so I get a bowl of ice cream to reinforce my determination. I added a standard submit button. Success! Except that I was logged out at this point due to inactivity. Well, that's what I assume happened. There was no warning, no notice; I just found myself on the login screen instead of the next page of the application. I log back in, fill that page out again, add a proper submit button, and submit. Oh, I don't have a resume on file, so I can't start a job application. Why didn't they tell me that before I filled out that page? If I can't fill out a job application without a resume completed, why let me start an application? It makes no sense!

Not quite at the point of committing seppuku, I start working on a resume. Don't worry, I won't go into detail about all the problems I encountered there. I have to end this blog post while my keyboard still works. I will mention one interesting thing... one of the three required fields for the employment section is the end date. What do you do if you are still working there? Leave it blank according to the directions, but it's a required field. You can't write "present" or anything like that, because it has to be a date in a specific format (I think their server sends some robot assassins at you if you use hyphens instead of slashes).

After all this, I decide I need to get to bed before I start showing signs of my irritation in the way I am filling things out. I decide to just leave the employment section blank, so I click Save and Exit.

No Information provided. If you want to continue working on your resume without completing this section at this time, then click the Skip Step 4 link to skip this section.

But I don't want to continue working on my resume. I clicked the exit button for a reason!.

And what was at the end of the journey when I clicked "skip step" a few times? A bad URL with 294 commas in it. Sadly, I am not kidding.

I saw this on the CNN homepage early last week and took a screenshot. Life has been too busy for me to keep up with everything, but I finally got around to posting it. The article on the right says "Would separating gay students from straight ones help reduce harassment and violence?" On the left side is a bold heading that says, "Learning from the past." Segregation worked so well in the past...

First, blogging software needs to effectively combat spam. There are two issues here: 1) users don't want that crap on their blogs, 2) when blogs are easy to spam, it encourages more spamming. The whole nofollow issue saddens me. Spammers aren't going to avoid spamming just because it doesn't directly help them with Google PageRank and similar systems. If spamming is easy, they'll do it regardless and net a few suckers. Maybe a few of those suckers will even buy whatever it is or even link to it.

A blog's approach to stopping spam doesn't have to be as complex as what I've previous talked about, but it should do something. At the very least, generate IDs that require spammers to at least LOAD the page they are going to spam. I am amazed that so many blogging systems have little or no spam protection built in.

It should be extremely easy to upload media, especially images. There's no excuse for making the user pre-size his/her image when the GD library, ImageMagick, and so many other tools out there. At the very least, a user should be able to set a default thumbnail size, whether full-size images should be resized (and to what size), easily upload a large number of images, and override any of the defaults ("This thumbnail would be so much better at 200x200 instead of 100x100..."). A blogging system that goes beyond the minimum would allow custom cropping and maybe even basic touch ups.

All blogging systems should be "self advertising" in the sense that they generate RSS feeds, create sitemaps, ping appropriate services and other blog posts, show post relationships (i.e., X post is related to Y post or the "If you like X, you might also like..."), and give the ability to subscribe to the comments on a post. It's frustrating to find an interesting new blog, make a comment, and then forget to ever go back. One of the cool things about blogs is that they are more community-focused than a magazine article, so let's work on that communication!

One has to be able to preview posts and comments, show code snippets, create excerpts, tag posts (I hate categories), customize links, search, cache, etc. Some of these absolutely basic features are still missing from major blogging software. Sure, they can be plugins, but in that case there need to be "official" plugins for these features pre-installed (with the ability to easy replace them with community-contributed alternatives).

What features do you find missing from blogging software?

Often these terms are excessively verbose. Check out the Trumba Terms and Conditions of Use. At just shy of 5,000 words, you'll be cruising their site in no time!

You are granted a limited, non-exclusive right to create a text hyperlink to the Site, provided such link does not portray Trumba or any of its products and services in a false, misleading, derogatory or otherwise defamatory manner and provided further that the linking site does not contain any adult or illegal material or any material that is offensive, harassing or otherwise objectionable. This limited right may be revoked at any time.

Ah crap, I hope they don't revoke my right to link to their site!

Trumba makes no claim or representation regarding, and accepts no responsibility for, the quality, content, nature or reliability of third-party Web sites accessible by hyperlink from the Site... TRUMBA DOES NOT REPRESENT OR WARRANT THAT THE SITE, THE SERVICES, THE SOFTWARE, THE USER CONTENT, OR THE MATERIALS ARE ACCURATE, COMPLETE, RELIABLE, CURRENT OR ERROR-FREE.

In other words, the sites they link to may or may not be "good" and the Trumba site itself might be full of errors, but all sites that link to Trumba must be good or they'll lose their right to link!

Some day people will catch up with technology and maybe the laws will too... I just don't think that day will be any time in 2008.

Still, I do wonder about a "dummy test." Normally you take a test to prove what you are. You take a driver's ed. test to show that you are educated about driving. You take a reading proficiency test to show that you can read proficiently. Do you take a dummy test to show that you are dumb? Unfortunately, I didn't click on the advertisement, because I think it was trying to get someone else's attention.

My only other thought was that maybe their site sucked so much that I didn't find where to cancel the subscription last time. At the bottom of the email was the obligatory message:

At MySpace we care about your privacy. If you don't want to receive future MySpace newsletters, change your Account Settings to "Do not send me MySpace newsletters." Click here to change your Account Settings.

I clicked on "Account Settings," thinking it would take me to the page where I could uncheck the newsletter option. It went to the main page where I logged in and was directed to the "Home" page that you always are directed to upon logging in. "Okay, so MySpace has yet another missing feature, because forwarding the user to the correct location after logging in would take 5 minutes of coding," I thought. My assumption was that now that I was logged in, I could just reopen the original link, skipping the login prompt, and going straight to the "Quit sending me your POS newsletter" option screen. Of course I'm an idiot for thinking MySpace could do anything right. The link just went to the "Home" page again.

I knew I wanted something to the effect of "Change Account Settings," but that option wasn't immediately obvious, so I went with "Edit Profile." From there I saw the "Account Settings" option off to the right and continued my wonderful journey. After trying a couple of the sections, I found the option I was looking for under "Notifications."

Imagine that; I had already selected to not receive the newsletter but they sent it anyway. At least this time the email header didn't contain From: "=?iso-8859-1?Q?MySpace Birthday Reminder?="
<04.65.0.69636C6966746F6E40676F726461656E2E636F6D@message.myspace.com> unlike last month's spam—err, email. I'll be sending them a message to complain; we'll see if they respond.

One source was Google Images. For example, doing a search for "Four Presidents" and selecting "Large image size" shows an image that I took of Mt. Rushmore as the first thumbnail (Google modifies your results based on history, so your results may vary). Trying to go directly to that image does not work, but the "Below is the image in its original context on the page" portion works correctly, because the page forwards to the new location.

The other source accounted for nearly all offsite image use. What was that source? The worst site on the Internet, of course. MySpace! This situation is something I hadn't previously considered in my hatred of MySpace. 1) It's illegal to use other people's photos as backgrounds on your site without permission. 2) It's absurd to steal people's photos and do it with their bandwidth. I don't blame MySpace in this situation (it's more the fault of all those generic MySpace styling sites), but would it be really hard for them to have a section under "edit profile" that is called "styling" where users can paste CSS styling and where MySpace can have a quick reminder that you should not use photos you do not have the rights for? That way they could put the styling in the head of the document where it should go anyway, and they can actually pretend to care about copyright violations.

I looked at the profiles of some of the people who did this and was reminded of why I try to avoid logging into MySpace (but times like this make it useful to have a dusty account). One person was actually from around here but most weren't. I decided to be nice and not post links to these people's profiles (though they are easy to find anyway). For now they can instead have blank backgrounds, which are probably easier on the eyes anyway... Some people might play with ".htaccess" to serve up a porn photo for them... I'll keep that option in reserve.

I did get the chance to see some semi-feedback for one of my images left on the profile/wall of one of the content borrowers:

Dudeeee is your background lake Diablo? cuz it really looks like it...

I can either assume that "Dudeeee" means this person is really excited and the photo is good (yay, me), or I can assume that "Dudeeee" should really pronounced like "doodee." Since it isn't preceded by "howdy," it's probably a reference to excrement and means that the picture looks terrible. Fortunately, I'm an optimist (though an extremely sarcastic and cynical one), so I'll just imagine that stealing my photo and bandwidth is a sign of respect.

Old Design

This screenshot shows the old, horrendous look of the site. The black background might be stylish, but it tended to cause more eye strain when reading text. The site was originally called "Gordaen's Knowledge," because "Gordaen" had become my online nickname of sorts and the "Knowledge" was from my intent to share what I knew about a lot of different things. Unfortunately, I never really got around to adding much of what I had hoped to (such as (X)HTML tutorials), so the name was not very good. Though I did get a few hits here and there for "poems about knowledge."

First Redesign Attempt

Early in the summer, I had come up with this design. It was entirely em-based, even the photos, so increasing and decreasing the font size in any browser (that didn't terribly suck) would maintain the exact same layout as if zooming. My goal was simple, accessible, and minimal images (the text-shadows are a CSS feature, supported by Safari; they are not images). Unfortunately, I ran into a lot of quirks with the em-based alignments and I started to see that browsers aren't truly ready for this sort of layout. I also had some frustration with determining where to put the information about each image.

Current Design

I did like a few of the features of the previous redesign attempt, such as the menu, so I tried to incorporate those into the latest design. I finally decided on a new name, Gordaen's Aberration, and created a banner to go along with it. I spent a fair bit of time designing a print stylesheet that removes the menu and header (replacing the header with simple "Gordaen's Aberration" text instead) and focuses on printing the content. I doubt if many (if any) people actually print from my site, but I know that when I print webpages, I hate having to deal with the "print selection" feature because they didn't bother to remove all their ads and other crap for me. Speaking of which, I removed all advertising from the site and used the additional space for content. That gave me enough room to wrap info text around photos.

I don't consider this design perfect by any means, but it's a huge improvement and actually has a splash of color. One of the nice things that no one else will really see/appreciate is that I completely separated the site into an MVC architecture, which makes the pages so much cleaner and easier to work with. Theoretically, this will make it very easy for me to update the site, so I will be able to share my artwork without having to do a lot (if any) coding.