Category: Diary

You have to love my pay department. Apparently I only worked 7.6 hours this last fortnight and after my salary sacrificing arrangements I owe them several hundred dollars for the honour of being employed.

What havoc an errant decimal point can wreak.

Anti-Microsoft zealots generally annoy the you-know-what’s out of me so it surprised the-other-you-know-what’s out of me when I joined them briefly.

When I updated my PC it came with Windows XP Home. Fair enough, I think. It was only when I delved a little deeper that I found out you couldn’t run Personal Web Server on it – a functionality I needed to develop web sites using databases. Oh crap, I think, and then hit Google looking for answers. Apparently Microsoft have made sure that if you want PWS then you need to fork over an additional $400 for the ‘Professional’ version. Bugger that, I think, I’m not paying four hundred bucks for one tiny piece of software.

Well it took me a day and a half of searching and fiddling but my spanky new machine is now running Apache web server and ChilliSoft ASP – Apache is free and the ASP server was free for developers.

Sorry Microsoft, that’s $400 of mine I am keeping.

I love living in Melbourne – no where else on earth do they do what we do here the first Tuesday in November. We declare a public holiday for a horse race. Yep, tomorrow is the 142nd Melbourne Cup and at 3.20pm you could fire the largest cannon you could find down any street in Melbourne and you will hit nothing and no one.

If you’ve never been in this fair city for Cup Day then you must try – over 100,000 people will be at Flemington tomorrow (ten minutes drive from here) and everyone else will be having a barbie and crowding around the telly. It’s the one day of the year everyone places a bet, and best of all tomorrow will be Phee’s first punt. Cup Day makes up 100% of my annual gambling expenditure. $15 will never make me rich, but you’ve got to bet on the Cup.

A BBQ, a bet and introducing my gal to the evils of gambling. Who could ask for more?

Well, this is not fair. There’s a game on at 1.30 and I have to go and drink beer and eat pizza because it’s the boss’s birthday.

Oh the injustice of it all.

Oh, it was lovely. The first night since moving in five or so months ago that we’ve slept with the windows open. It was Rae who noticed them – the frogs from the lake gently sounding through the window – the same window that eight hours later decided enough of the frogs, I’m going to let through the toxic fumes of the burning Brooklyn tip.

Yep – first lovely night and the local land fill catches fire – and it was still burning eight hours later, filling most of the inner west with a delightfully aromatic mix of burning car tires and smouldering plastic bags.

Life’s tough when you live on the other side of the world from your second favourite sport, and it’s just got tougher. Last weekend was the end of daylight savings in Canada and the start of it here. So games that once started at 11.30 am my time now begin at 2.30. No longer the luxury of listening to a whole game at work.

Now I have to time my departure from work to coincide with the end of the 2nd period. If I can do this and get a good run home then I can just catch the end of the final period. Maybe I could convince some local community station to broadcast the game for me…

The Age reports that Melbourne Water has just triggered Stage 1 water restrictions. Six years of drought (in which time I can’t remember it raining for more than two days in a row – this year we were even in t-shirts in June) has taken the cities water reserves down to 54% (What that means in actual water) so now it’s conserve, conserve, conserve.

It’s the little things that make life at work tolerable. Like figuring out how to bypass the firewall so you can listen to streaming audio once more. Hello CKNW – now I can listen to the pre-game show live from Vancouver every time the Canucks play.

As I say, it’s the little things….

Nigel, after reading my rant about the Coke web site, asked me what I thought characterised a good web site.

So, here’s my long and rambling answer with reference to why I found Coke’s effort so objectionable. I reserve the right to revise this when get some time to actually think about what I’m saying.

It’s all very boring and of no interest so feel free to avert your eyes now.

To me a web site is characterised by presenting timely, accurate information to the site visitor in an easily navigable manner. I assume web site visitors come to a site to find information they wish to use and anything that confuses the visitor or places unnecessary obstacles in the way of finding this information should be removed. I also assume most visitors are using a dial up (slow) modem.

Now let’s look at the Coke (www.cocacola.com.au) site. I went there looking for information on the new Vanilla Coke product. What was my experience like?

I type in the url and instantly I presented with my first obstacle – it looks like Coke but tells me I need something called ‘Flash 4’ and a version 4 or above browser. Stop your average person in the street and ask them what Flash is – 9 out of 10 will have it installed (according to Macromedia but I am willing to guess that less than 2 in 10 will know what it is. And off the top of your head what version browser are you running? It’s never a good idea to exclude viewers before they even get in to the site.

So I check the plug-ins (what’s a plug-in? I hear 90% of users ask). If I don’t have the plug-ins do you think I will go through the bother of getting them? Probably not. There go a heap of visitors already.

Let’s assume I have the plug-ins and I press enter.

I then have to wait while this huge flash file downloads – waiting is the enemy when it comes to web sites, people will more often than not try another site if they have to wait. Finally the file downloads – what now?

Where’s their product list? Hmmmm. I don’t think it’s any of the four strange looking things over to the right hand side. (What’s ‘Coke Buddy’ mean? And ‘Mobile Coke’? Is that a special sort of Coke for your phone? Weird choice of words – they may appeal to the hip young crowd, bit I ain’t one of them and I want to know stuff too). That moving text that says ‘Join Now’ – join what? And why have that picture of the bottle with the url? I know where I am, I’ve had to jump through enough hoops to get this far. I point my mouse on it and nothing happens unlike everything else on the page. Non consistent navigation confuses people.

Let’s try the ‘About Coca Cola’ link. Ah Ha – nothing happens. Why? It’s a pop up window and certain browsers don’t allow them. I only know this because I work with the net all day everyday – imagine how confusing it would be to someone who had no idea. The site doesn’t even let you know that it will open a pop up window so you don’t even get the chance to change your browser settings (assuming you know how to).

So now I’ve switched to a browser that will allow pop up windows and what do I get – a good old fashioned web page that doesn’t require any of the technology I was told I had to have to view the site. But can this page help me? Nope – the closest I can get is information on current advertising, and that’s 12 months out of date. Finally I shut my browser, go to the fridge and get a Pepsi.

So what lessons have we’ve learnt about what characterises a good web site just from the Coke site? :

A good site :

• Should not exclude viewers based on their technology before they even get in to the site.
• Should not make viewers wait for pages to download.
• Should cater to a broad audience by using inclusive language.
• Provide information that is current and accurate

This site smacks of being made for the people at Coca Cola, not for the public.

How would I approach the site differently?

Change the index page – make it plain HTML so every browser can read it.

I’d then provide the viewer with options by splitting the site into sub sections. The hip young groovsters can have their flash enabled, bandwidth intensive bit, we oldies can find out the information how we want. I’d use colour and sparse graphics, provide a consistent navigation bar at the top of each page, tell people where they are on the site and let them see how to get to other parts of the site they may want to visit.

I?d expand the content beyond the mere promotional. They should at the very least offer easily accessible corporate and product information. Imagine if you had an allergy or some such condition (not too much of a stretch for you Nigel) and wanted to know if Vanilla Coke was safe to drink? Or even where you can buy Coke products, or how long will it be available for?

I won’t get started on the Bostik or Pepsi sites, I can go on for hours.