Internet: March 2007 Archives
I have been using IE4Linux for a while in order to test some websites I'm responsible for and make sure that they are useful to people who still have to use Internet Explorer. To make it even handier, the IE View extension for Firefox works well under Ubuntu.
The only problem I've run into is that the "find" button in the IE View preferences doesn't like Linux file paths, so to use it you have to enter the path to IE manually. In my case this is /home/niall/bin/ie6. Once it's setup properly, I can rightclick on the link and select "Open Link Target In IE" and suffer for a few minutes in the name of testing!
One of the better reasons for using Firefox are it's extensions. Currently I am using the following:
- Web Developer Very handy toolbar that gives a lot of essential functions for anyone who does ANY work with html.
- HostIP.info Pointless really unless you are like useless info. Has already turned up some interesting facts :)
- User Agent Switcher Another good extension which is good at turning up interesting ways of getting into sites!
- Flashblock I tend to dislike useless flash ads, so anything that kills them while leaving the option of clicking on flash games for a bit of distraction is always going to be handy.
- ShowIp With the work I do on a day to day basis, it is very handy to know what IP address you're looking at when you view a site. This simple extension displays the IP of the site in the status bar and offers shortcuts to online DNS utilities if you click on the IP.
- Switch Proxy My laptop is thrown onto lots of different networks, often with different proxies. This extension gives me a nice drop down menu with a list of proxies and can be a nice time saver.
Have come across some strange captchas before including one where you had to select kittens. Hot Captcha has to be the strangest though. It takes three high scoring female (or male) pics from Hot Or Not and six not so hot pics and you have to select the three hottest. How long before this will be implemented on a production site?
One of my pet annonyances when browsing around on the net is sites where you have to register for no good reason. I have enough useless accounts as it is. What's even more annonying is when they return a different result to the search engine bots so that more than just the registration page is indexed.
A prime example of this is Unison.ie. When searching for current Irish news it usually ranks fairly high on Google, however all the pages require you register first before you view them. The registration gives no advantage to people like me who just want to a quick look at the latest news. I suspect that I'm not alone and that lots of people will just go back and look for another site.
Unison's simple user agent checking makes it very easy to get in unmolested though. The User Agent Switcher Plugin for Firefox allows you to easily set exactly what user agent you want your browser to appear as. The GoogleBot isn't in the list of Useragents available, but it is easily added. Switch to GoogleBot as your useragent, and magically you will have full access to the Unison site.
I know that Unison will probably close this hole within a few days now, but it's nice to be able to make a point. According to Google's Webmaster Help Center "crawler only" pages are a thing to avoid. I would class pages that react differently to GoogleBot as "crawler only" pages.
If Unison want to require people to register in order to get nice features such as customization, then grand, I have no problem with that. However, how much traffic are they missing out on by having the register page for everyone? And how many advertising impressions are they missing out on? I know that if I go to the BBC News site I will usually end up going to other stories which interest me, which means more page impressions on the BBC site. More impressions, more chance of clicking on ads, more money!
In this day and age it is senseless to have such stupid restrictions on a site like Unison that has enough content to be a massive earner on advertisments alone.
Update: I somehow managed to forget the user agent I'm using, it is:
Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)
Just in case this woman gets her way:
By using a RSS Aggregator to view this post, you are consenting to buy me a pint next time you meet me in the pub.
If her claim actually succeeds in court, and I hope the Judge has more sense than that, how long before stuff like this becomes common place?
Adam has pointed out that SEC are planning on planning on taking action to combat the pump and dump spams doing the rounds. So far trading in 35 companies has been suspended in the aptly named "Operation Spamalot".
It is a logical step to take in order to curb the amount of such spams going out, however you would have to wonder how long before spammers twist the situation to their advantage? Blackmail anyone?
Last January, I headed to the Godfather Pizza website to view their menu and order my uber-healthy supper. When I attempted to call the number for Godfathers Carlow on their website, I got nowhere. I checked a " Take-Away Express" booket that was in the house and got the right number. The number on the website is (059) 941 6666 while the actual number is (059) 914 6666. Being a nice lad :) once I ordered the Pizza, I emailed the only email contact I could see on the site (info@....).
I got a reply back saying that the information had been passed to Marketing Department, and I promptly forgot all about it. I'm just after going to the site to see the menu again, and the number is STILL wrong. I would have thought that something as simple as swapping 2 digits could be accomplished in 2 minutes, never mind 2 months.
I have no idea how much traffic Godfather Pizza get to their website, but seeing as Dominos have recently started taking orders online, I'm betting that the internet using public is a sizable percentage of their customer base. Godfather Pizza don't have the facility to order a pizza online, so the only contact you can have with them if you want a delivery is by phone. How much business have they lost by not having proper contact details on their site?
Update Mar 22th: Looks like the number has been changed. I'm not sure when, but the current last modified time for the page is: 03/20/2007 11:20:18 AM
After reading a response to a post I put up on the Irish Webmaster Forum, I headed to the Garda website. From what I can see of it, it is absolutely useless for any informative purposes under Linux.
To give an example, say I want to get the phone number for the Garda Station in Listowel, Kerry. First of all I will go to www.garda.ie. This will present me with a page with the option to click on "New Visitors" or "Previous Visitors". The only different between the two is that "New Visitor" forces me to read a message from Noel Conroy before having to click the "Enter" link in order to get to the same page as "Previous Visitors" would have originally sent me to.
Once I get to the home.html page I can try to get to the "Contact Us" link. This will do absolutely NOTHING in Firefox. When you click on the link it goes to "javascript:hili('cux','cu');" My Javascript isn't the best at the moment, so I can't figure out exactly what this is supposed to do, but I can tell you for fact that it doesn't work on Firefox 2.0.0.2 on Ubuntu.
I eventually clicked on the "FAQs" button in order to see if there is some reason for the lack of any standards support. I clicked on the "I want to email a Garda Station" link. This kindly informed me that the Gardai "do not have external e-mail facilities for the general public to contact Garda Stations", but gave me a "local stations" link to click. From here I was able to click on Kerry, and was able to find the number for the Listowel Garda Station in a couple of seconds.
What I would love to know, is why the link for "Contact Us" can't be changed from "javascript:hili('cux','cu');" to "stations.html". It takes less characters ( :) ), is compatible with every browser that I know, and is a LOT simplier to implement. It is the same with every other link in the blue box at the top left of the page, every one of them uses the hili javascript function. I don't really care what the hili function is supposed to be able to do, but it is unusable under Firefox.
The Garda website should be a public website which should be available to everyone. The unnecessary complication that has been added to the links on the website means that I cannot use the site. I don't even want to think about how bad it must appear to people who with disabilities who use.
To quote from the NDA website:
Irish public policy includes requirements for government departments and agencies to procure accessible ICT solutions where possible. In particular, all government departments are now expected to have their websites accessible to Priority 1 & 2 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0 from the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). The National Disability Authority have adopted WCAG for these guidelines.There is no way that the Garda website can pass any WCAG test. The lack of bog standed links means that even a simple search engine bot, such as GoogleBot, won't be able to index the site. What even more amazing is that a lot of Gardai email addresses are under the iol.ie domain. I have no problem with IOL, they provided me with Internet when I was on DialUp, but I would have hoped that the Garda would have their own infrastructure for email. I have every respect for the job that the Gardai do, however I would have hoped that the Garda Website would be usable be every Irish Citizen. With a little work the Garda Website could be a great resource, but as it stands it is unusable for a sizable minority of Irish Citizens, and not following EU Guidelines for IT. Surely the Gardai should be able to provide a usable website, there is plenty of people in Ireland who can do a lot better job than the current website.
I have a nice plugin for Firefox from HostIP which shows you the country the url you are going to resides in. I was more than a bit surprised when I went for clicking on a link to Gaa.ie and saw "Canberra, AU". As it turns out the main Gaa site is being hosted by Telstra Internet in Austrailia. Local GAA sites are being hosted in Ireland, for example kerry.gaa.ie is being hosted by Imagine.
On a purely technical basis, this is absurd. From my Magnet DSL, www.gaa.ie has to go over 20 routers in order to get to Telstra's server. It has to go through less than 10 to go to kerry.gaa.ie. I would presume that the biggest audience for the GAA's website would be in Ireland. Surely it would make sense to host the site close to it's intended audience?
Getting away from the technical, the GAA receives a lot of money from the Irish taxpayer. I believe that this means that GAA should support Irish business unless there is no local alternative. For web hosting, there is no shortage of competition, my own employer among them. Why aren't the GAA obliged to support local business?
I do believe that the GAA do great work in Ireland. I would prefer to watch hurling or football over a Soccer match anyday. This is why seeing "Canberra, AU" in that little popup was such a disappointment. If anyone from the GAA reads this, please bring your business local!
According to greatfirewallofchina.org, Chinese citizens are unable to get to my blog. Not that this bothers me all that much. What is strange, is that Akismet is catching plenty of spam comments coming from Chinese ip space. Chinese spammers are also having no problem sending lots of spam email.
Are the spammers in China just technically advanced enough to get past the Great Firewall? Or do the Chinese authorities not care about spam traffic? All this is making my decision to drop all email from China at MTA time seem a lot more reasonable.
Michele recently posted about using mod-rewrite to redirect domain.tld to www.domain.tld. Why redirect to www.domain.tld though?
Most websites today respond to www mainly because that's just how it's done. However when I'm sending email to someone, I don't send it to user@mail.domain.tld, so why do I have to type "www." to go to the website? The server should hopefully know that I want the website if I'm connecting to port 80 or port 443. Why should I need to type a whole FOUR extra characters :)
There is already a campaign underway to promote the deprecation of "www.", it can be found at http://no-www.org. I propose that Michele changes his rewrite rule to the following:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^domain.tld$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.tld/$1 [L,R=301]
