Podcasts should have release date announced at the beginning

Posted by Abdu in Web Usability

Just like blogs, podcasts should  have their release date announced at the beginning of the podcast so listeners can know a podcast’s age. Is it a day old, a week old , a year old …?

If I plan to save a podcast on a computer,  I could include the date in the file name and when I come back to it I know how old it is before I listen to it.

Always have a Contact Us link accessible from every page in your web site

Posted by Abdu in Web Usability

[This is the first post in the web usability category. This blog's main category.]

There are times when visiting a web site I have the need to contact the people behind the site for whatever reason. I noticed some sites try hard to obscure every means of contacting them. As if they don’t want to be bothered by anyone. If you are providing a service and expect some kind interaction, you MUST provide something like a contact us page accessible from every page. Whether in the main navigation or in the footer or at least no more than two clicks away in the main navigation hierarchy.

What if you have an issue on your website or I have a question? There needs to be a way for me to contact you with the least amount of effort. I like to see a Contact Us link at the top. This way I know customer service is important to you. You value your customers and their feedback.

Example of a site with no contact links of any kind:

http://twit.tv

I am a regular listener to some of their podcasts and I know Leo laPorte (the host) since the TechTV channel (no more) from the late 90’s. One day I wanted to contact them about something so I headed to the site looking for a contact page or an email address. I spent about 10 minutes clicking on links here and there until I got frustrated. I thought these people purposely did not include any contact links or forms. What to do? See the last section below. I sent emails to several known boxes and it eventually reached a person and received a reply.

I know people do not include contact information because for fear of getting more spam. There are several ways to limit the spam. I will post about some anti spam techniques in a future post.

What do to do when a site has no contact information?

• I know every mail server has some default mailboxes. I would send the email message to each of them. The mail boxes include ‘postmaster’ & ‘catchall’. Then include some popular ones like ‘webmaster, ‘support’, ‘service’, ‘custservice’ and anyone you can think of. What I do also is add a note in the email mentioning the fact there was no contact info on the website, which makes it hard to contact them
• Do a whois on the domain name and look for an email address. If the information is private, you're out of luck here.
• Depending on the type of site, like if it’s a personal site, do a search on the domain name and you might be able to find a post with a signature which includes a link to the domain name. This could be a forum and you could send them a private message through the forum.
• Do a search and get hits to social networks where a person from the site could be reachable.
• Use some other creative methods. If you any, please post a comment.

How I modified a WordPress theme to work with BlogEngine

Posted by Abdu in ASP.NET

The title I was going to use for this post was “How to convert a Word Press theme to a BlogEngine theme”. This blog uses BlogEngine (BE) as the blogging engine. Due to the lack of quality themes for BE, I decided to use a WordPress (WP) theme. I thought I would just be able to convert the theme to a BlogEngine theme and be done.

WordPress is written in PHP which resembles classic ASP where the code is interlaced with the HTML. I expected a WP theme would just be a bunch of HTML, CSS & Javascript files like most web site templates. It turns out that a WP theme could include a lot of PHP code. The strength of a WordPress theme lies in its ability to extend WordPress’s default functionality by adding extra options and workflow. When I looked at the theme I wanted to use with BlogEngine, I noticed all the PHP code which define what and how things display in the web page.

My first expression was that the task wasn’t going to be a straightforward conversion. My first attempt was trying to understand what the PHP was doing. Although I didn’t have experience in PHP, the code is pretty easy to read and understand. At least it’s not Perl whose syntax I hate! The problem was the code wasn’t easy to follow. The code is in many files and functions are calling other functions which are scattered in several files. I needed to trace and step through code and have breakpoints. What do PHP developers use as an IDE? First thing I did was check JetBrains.com and examine their PHP offerings. I know they develop good IDE’s and I LOVE their Resharper tool. I found an IDE called PhpStorm.

I set up a php develpment environment on my Windows box. Installed PHP under IIS. Installed WordPress and unzipped the theme in it and activated the theme. Installed phpStorm and the first thing I did was look for the debugger. PhpStorm doesn’t come with a debugger of its own! Not like Visual Studio. You have to download and install a third party debugger extension. I used xdebug. I had to do some configuration tweaks and finally got it working with breakpoints and single stepping. Cool! I actually thought that there’s no PHP IDE which works like Visual Studio. After trying to follow the PHP code I came to the conclusion that this is going to be a ton of work. Converting the theme and code into .NET, user controls and trying to also understand how BlogEngine theming and code works. Getting dissapointed now. So I scrapped this method.

I decided to use a completely different approach. I am actually only interested in the layout produced by the theme. Just the HTML and CSS. So I decided to let PHP do its work and just grab the page’s html & CSS source. However I also need to understand how BlogEngine theming method works. I read the theme documentation and got a good idea of the different user controls. So I grabed the html source and converted it into a master page minus the main content. The different sections on the right side are made by different BE widgets. I modified them a bit to use the WP theme. WP has a similar concept of widgets but I just grabbed their html as well and plugged into The BE widgets. BlogEngine’s posts and comments reside in user controls. I modified these controls to use the WP theme html and css classes as well. What I did is completely ignored all the PHP code and just get the actual layout. I used Firebug to find which CSS classes where used and copied them over to BE. I noticed a lot of the CSS attributes where not used in the HTML tags. The theme needs to be cleaned.

While BlogEngine does support themes, the themes are not isolated and do not work without supporting code. There’s code in BlogEngine which spit out css and html. I didn’t like this about BE where they have things hard coded like that. There was no way to fit the WP theme without modifying BE’s code or at least not for the theme I am using. I am guessing the reason why all BE themes resemble each other is because of the theme bounderies and limitations BE imposes on the theme developer.

I managed to get the theme and BE working together. The result, and probable issue, is that I won’t be able to do an inline BE upgrade because of all the custom code. This might not be a big issue because blogging software do not change often. If the next upgrade does have a functionality I need, I will take it apart and plug manually into my system. The most challengin part was the threaded comments. A reply to a reply will actually display under the reply with some indentation. I added an anti comment spam technique and eliminitated the use of a captcha. I will explain what I did in a future post.

I did encounter a bug in BE where it breaks all the CSS conditional comments. I reported the bug and a BE developer released a newer version.

Why I chose BlogEngine as the blog platform?

Posted by Abdu in ASP.NET | Web Usability

When deciding on a blog platform, I had two clear options. It either be on WordPress (WP) or one which is based on ASP.NET. WordPress because it's the widely popular blogging platform, with the most support and the largest collection themes & widgets. (Just learned that Microsoft is shutting down Live Spaces, one of its online blog platforms and migrating the users to WordPress). WP’s drawback is it's developed in PHP, a language I don't program in and which I am not interested in learning & using.

OR

An ASP.NET based blogging platform because I know ASP.NET very well, in case I need to do any custom work, which I did for this blog. I decided to go with an ASP.NET based blog engine and chose BlogEngine (BE). The other candidates where dasBlog & Subtext.

My blog platform requirements are:

• widely used and has good active support
• supports themes
• supports threaded comments
• has measures against spam comments (comment moderation, Akismet, .. etc)
• being actively developed. Meaning last build is not more than a year ago.
• supports protocols for publishing using clients like Windows Live Writer

BlogEngine seems to best fit these requirements. One issue I found with BlogEngine is the lack of cool themes. All the themes I found were simple, look pretty much the same and quite boring. A lot of the BlogEngine based blogs use the default theme which comes with BE.

In my next blog, I will talk about the WordPress theme I used for this blog and how I modified it to work in BlogEngine.

What is this blog about?

Posted by Abdu in Web Usability

I have visited thousands of web sites and have looked at, probably, tens of thousands  of web pages since I started looking at them around 1994. It surprises me the number of issues many pages suffer from. From spelling mistakes, poor grammar, links to pages which do not exist including ones on the same site, inaccessible pages, usability problems, hard to read text, colors which bleed your corneas, hard to find information, walls of text  plus many other issues.

In an effort to help web authors, designers and users make a place better out of the web, this blog will showcase examples of real-world web pages which exhibit some form of bad behavior which can be improved with littleor no cost (time or money). My hope is you, as a web page creator, do not repeat the same mistakes or at least be aware of the pitfalls.

For web usability issues, I will be following similar methodologies as explained in books like Defensive Design for the Web and Don’t Make Me Think.

The blog will also include other categories in topics of  interest to me in general.

Blog topics will include:

• Web page usability issues. This includes anything inhibiting frictionless use of a site
• Web standards and technologies. HTML, CSS, browsers, JavaScript, jQuery.. etc
• .NET technology and related technologies. That’s what I use in my day job.
• Productivity tips. In life and work
• Rants about current tech trends
• Software & hardware
• Industrial design. Anything which I have encountered which make me go "This is good design”.

Blog will be:

• 2-3 pages long. I dislike long blogs and I respect your time
• easy to read and follow. No ‘academic’ walls of text
• Web usability posts will most likely have a screen capture of the issue I am discussing plus the better method(s) in refining it to make it more user friendly

I am still tweaking the template and code. Please report any issues.

Enjoy!