Trackback Blogger and Spam

I'm a big fan of trackbacks, at least in theory. A trackback, for those who may not be familiar with them, is a widget which automatically lets one reference a blog or webpage and automatically let the owner of the other website know that you have referenced their page.

Trackbacks, as with links, help readers find blogs and websites of like mind and interests. Trackbacks help authors know which of their posts have generated the most interest.

My one fear is that trackbacks will soon be under attack from spamsters and that this wonderful widget will be rendered useless.

How to Create a Safe Password

It's easy to come up with hack proof passwords that are easy to remember. The one thing you must keep in mind is that sometimes companies limit the characters that you can use for a password. This is very silly on their part as the longer the password and the more options you have(upper and lower case, numbers, special characters) the more secure your password is.

Too often I've come across sites which limit my password to 8 or less characters, which don't distinguish between upper and lower case and don't allow for special characters. I recommend coming up with a simple alternative password algorithm for these sites.

The following is an example for an 8 characters password. I would recommend having longer passwords - at least 12 characters for those sites you are most concerned about.

1.Select a phrase — "It was the best of times"
3.Take the first letter of each word or number — IWTBOT
3.Change some letters to numbers — 1WTBOT
4.Add special characters — 1WTB@T

And now it is best to make each site's password unique. You can customize it by adding the first two letters of the site in lower case.

5.Customize by adding a prefix or suffix for each site you register with. For example your Blogger account would become 1WTB@Tbl. It makes remembering very simple: "It Was the best of times blogger"

Why Smart Executives Fail

I just finished Why Smart Executives Fail by Sydney Finkelstein. I think it is as important a read as The E Myth. I loved the section on Webvan. (I remember reading about it as it was gearing up and thinking it was a great idea.) Webvan was to take on the supermarkets and drive those dinosaurs out of business. Customers would order their items on line and have it delivered the same or next day, and instead of a 4 or 6 hour delivery window there would be a 30 minute window. Billions were spent; Bechtel was hired to build distribution centers; competent, experienced directors were hired and yet Webvan was out of business barely 2 years after opening shop.

Finkelstein, in this example, as in many others, showed the difference between "great expectations" and outcome.

"Even today, writing about Webvan, it's easy to get excited by the vision. But the business model was fatally flawed from the start.

The supermarket business is notoriously low-margin to start with, so where was the money goint to come from. ... Throw in free home delivery, and you've got to become the Superman of productivity to make a profit. ... When you add up the costs of building the Webvan infrastructure - easily $1 billion plus -- it's hard to see how the numbers can add up. Now imagine that there are literally tens of thousands of competitors - call them supermarkets - that can easily add home delivery, that do not need to spend millions (let alone billions) to do so, that already have customers and market presence, that offer products of essentailly equal quality to your own, and are - surprise! - not really dinosaurs after all, and you have an idea that is getting less good with each passing minute.

Information Architecture Models Information - Not Relationships

The problem is that IA models information, not relationships. Many of the artifacts that IAs create: site maps, navigation systems, taxonomies, are information models built on the assumption that a single way to organize things can suit all users…one IA to rule them all, so to speak.

Thoughts on the Impending Death of Information Architecture

I could not agree more with the first sentence. Not enough thought is placed on the user's wants. We understand why this is so. We, the Information Architects, are surrounded by the business users, they are the ones that provide us with work; they are the ones that provide the goals and we, for better or worse, work off their understanding of what the customer needs.

Too often the business users have distinct wants that clash with IA goals. Ultimately the business users, who are writing the checks, make the final decision. An example would be users who want to go to your site for a quick piece of information and then leave. The business users on the other hand want to make their site "sticky"; or they want more page views so an unnecessary landing page is put in. These impediments help the business user meet his goals but often time hinders the user.

I have to disagree sharply with the following sentence that "information models [are] built on the assumption that a single way to organize things can suit all users." No Information Architect that I have ever met thinks this way.

The problem stems, not from IA in the abstract, but that IA is part-and-parcel of the business world. It's not that business is opposed to IA goals, only that IA is part of a whole and therefore, there are times, for good reasons or not, that other rationals trump usability.

When Do You Use a Table versus Divs?

When do you use a table versus divs? Some developers hate tables so much that they waste their time and effort creating divs when tables would do. It's simple - if you need to match up cells in a row across the columns then you need a table. If not, then divs would probably do.

Browser - Backward Compatibility

In designing a site - which browsers should one design for? At what point does a website owner stop sinking funds developing and testing for out-of-date browsers? I don't have a clear cut answer for this. Is it solely market share? No. A browser may have a tiny market share but be web standards compliant. This means that it takes relatively little effort (read money) to make certain that nothing is broken and the site renders well.

It used to be that browsers ignored standards trying to create proprietary standards. Those days are gone forever but the browsers remain and some, such as IE6, are still running strong. This allows us to rephrase the question. At what point should site owners and developers stop validating non-web standard compliant browsers?

It is simply a matter of math. How much are you willing to spend validating a browser for 0.1%, 1%, 10% of your market? I would say that when the browser has declined to under 10% of your site usage that it would make sense to ignore minor visual inconsistencies and focus resources only on issues that prevent visitors from using your site.

EDIT 9/7/2010:

Sources for Web Statistics

www.w3schools.com/browsers/ www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/

Increase Page Rendering Time by Reducing HTTP Requests

Yahoo has shown the results of research, using packet sniffers, showing that download and rendering time is due almost entirely to HTTP Requests.

No less than 60-95% of the response "time is spent making HTTP requests to fetch all the components in that HTML document (i.e. images, scripts, and stylesheets)."

The impact of having many components in the page is exacerbated by the fact that browsers download only two or four components in parallel per hostname, depending on the HTTP version of the response and the user’s browser. Our experience shows that reducing the number of HTTP requests has the biggest impact on reducing response time and is often the easiest performance improvement to make.

EDIT: 4/17/2007

If a web page evenly distributed its components across two hostnames, the overall response time would be about twice as fast.

Performance Research, Part 4: Maximizing Parallel Downloads in the Carpool Lane