opinios

Happy Birthday to me!

Another day of getting up, eating brekkie, going to work, growing old.

Only on this day 29 years ago, I was carved out of me mum's tum - premature and jaundice - chilled in an oxygen chamber for a couple of weeks with some of me li'l homies, and then went home with mum and dad with the sole purpose of keeping them up every night with my crying. Or so they tell me. Apparently they became so sleep-deprived that they had to palm me off to Grandma so they could catch up on shut-eye.

Spice it up with relish!

My very talented graphic designer cousin Anna recently decided to go out on her own, and she and I have been secretly working on the web site for her new business over the past few weeks. Well, tonight we unveil the curtain! I am very proud to announce that the brand spankin' new site for relish design is now live.

Technical details: it uses a couple of excellent open source software packages to drive the whole thing - the words are powered by Textpattern and the pictures by Photostack. This means Anna can change the text herself without having to get her hands dirty with any code, and that she can upload images without worrying about how to position them or what directory they should live in. Oh yeah, and the whole site validates to XHTML 1.0 Strict (which is more than I can say for this site).

And of course the presentation code all lives in a separate stylesheet just like it should. It looks ok in Safari, IE/Mac, IE/Win and Opera, but if you notice anything wonky please let me know.

But you don't care about all that geek speak - you just wanna see the pictures! And rightly so, because it is her portfolio that really shines. Go have a browse through some of those funky logos and professional-looking brochures, and try not to be impressed.

So if you know of anyone whose company image needs spicing up, make sure you tell them to do it with relish!

Press '1' If You Would Like To Sit In The Back Row

I bought tickets to the Dave Matthews concert this morning. They went on sale at 9am, and at about 10 o'clock I had some spare time at work to make the call.

I figured the operators would have been swamped with callers, DMB being so popular and this being their first Australian concert and all, so I was happy to wait on hold for a little while, and was prepared to be nice to the flustered call centre staff.

It turns out computers don't feel "flustered".

That's right. In the 15 or so minutes it took for me to work my way through the purchasing process, I didn't speak to a human being once.

Not once.

I entered my credit card through the phone's numeric pad. I had to state my name (and spell it), and I had to state my full address (and spell that too). And when I was informed that my seat allocation was right up the back ("best available" my arse!) there was no "Press '0' to speak to an operator" option. I tried it.

You have dialled an invalid number. Press '1' to confirm your seat allocation, or '2' to cancel your purchase.

I can see why Ticketmaster have implemented this system. They can fire all of their call centre staff, set the automated system up and let it go. It probably saves them millions.

But here's the thing. Let the internet be the medium for automation. When I get stuck with tickets in the bleachers an hour after they go on sale, and I know that there are better seats available, let me talk to someone about it.

And don't make me spell my whole damn address out to a voice recorder over the phone. It feels incredibly patronising.

Crikey Sold For $1 Million

In other web news, independent political webzine crikey.com.au announced today that Crikey had been bought for $1 million.

From the official announcement:

After almost five years of operation, yesterday afternoon Stephen Mayne and Paula Piccinini signed binding contracts for the $1 million sale of Crikey. The buyers are Eric Beecher and Di Gribble from Private Media Partners (PMP), publisher of The Reader

I remember helping out founder Stephen Mayne several years ago, when he had crazy (but well meaning) ideas of starting a political party, by building a web site for the party to get its message across (Note: I had absolutely nothing to do with the current site!)

Stephen is a passionate, gifted individual who has sacrificed having a life in order to provide daily reports on corporate shiftiness and inequity to his subscribers. The man is a phenomenal inhaler of information and an articulate shitstirrer. When Media Watch went off air for a short time, Crikey was the only unbiased voice calling out the mistakes and the injustices.

After 5 years of running Crikey independently on a wage of hours of hard work that doesn't come close to supporting his lovely wife Paula and their three kids, I say congratulations on finally getting something back. I don't blame him for wanting his life back, and look forward to the new and improved Crikey.

MSN Adopts Web Standards

After years of an attitude of what seemed to everyone else to be "web standards like CSS and XHTML don't matter", Microsoft have finally given their MSN front page and their web search engine a new look. And they've done it with web standards.

Well, almost.

There is plenty to pick apart (the page looks terrible on IE for the Mac, the markup doesn't validate and is frightful to look at, the CSS also is all over the place - although it does appear dynamically generated - and the design itself looks like a rip-off of Yahoo's own search interface), and with all the other sub-sites that they pull in content from and link to, the road ahead is a long one.

But there is plenty of good in there as well. Aside from all the obvious benefits such as faster page load times, ease of maintenance, search engine optimisation and increased accessibility that come with a page that separates content and presentation, Microsoft are making a statement.

This statement is: The W3C and the standards they publish matter.

This is something that the rest of the web community have known for a long time, and Microsoft's stubborn ignorance and refusal to support such standards (many of which they themself invented) has given Linux/Mac-running anti-Gates zealots all the more ammunition to deride the Redmond-based giant. Finally, finally a sign that the software giant might start looking towards the future of the web (one that doesn't include a purely Windows/IE environment) is huge. A huge win for long-time standards campaigners like WaSP and MACCAWS and the people that drive them. And a win for the W3C.

So, well done Microsoft. You have a long way to go, but this is a step in the right direction. The next big step is to upgrade that dinosaur of a browser of yours, so that the pages you publish are easier to create. And then the rest of your network.

Doug Bowman has dissected the topic in detail at stopdesign.