I’ve just cancelled my myspace account. They asked for a reason. “WTF”, I thought “why not”. Here it is:
“Worst. Site. Ever.
That would sum it up for me. I’ve been trying to customize a profile for a friend. What a f*** up. Your FAQs seem to bear no resemblance to the website.
I’ll knock him up a WordPress theme in an hour and it won’t be full of spam and sh*t animated adverts. Myspace is the only place on teh internets where animated gifs are not punishable by death^W^W^W frowned upon. It’s even inspired me to cancel my own account and to write a little feedback. Not that I’ve ever really used the account since I find the site insufferable.
No wonder myspace is heading down the tubes:
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/myspace.com
(select the dropdown menu and select ‘max’ for the big picture – scan eyes from left to right and make a long high to low whistling noise like an anvil falling in a cartoon for the best effect)
You want to compare and contrast with something?
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/facebook.com
Hmm, they must be doing something right. Can you spell ‘usability’?
Anyway, it’s not your problem, you’re just an employee. But if I was you I’d start looking for another job ASAP before myspace tanks.
Oh, look your CEO has already jumped ship:
http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/10/myspace-ceo-owen-van-natta-steps-down/
Rats.
Man the lifeboats! Abandon company! Women and children first!
Cheers! And good luck with your CV.”
Following up from yesterday’s post on adding Digg/Facebook/email share links in your wordpress theme, I added information on adding Twitter links to your blog.
Credit where credit is due though: this is mostly the work of Jamie Huskisson and Herself’s Webtools. I just made a slight improvement so that the resulting code valids as correct HTML.
I’ve been getting back into coding recently. I’ve added some code to my website on
how to add email/Digg/share on facebook links to your WordPress posts.
You can easily neaten this up by putting an image in instead of text links.
This is a wonderful tool. Find a photo containing roughly the mix of colours you want for your site and run it through this Color Palette Generator to give you a bunch of RGB colours to use in your page.
I’ve been working recently on the Peasant Evolution Producer’s Co-Operative website. It’s a co-operative for local producers in Devon, Dorset and Somerset based at Fivepenny Farm, near Charmouth in West Dorset. Members of the co-operative produce apple juice, cider, jam, chutney, meat, veg, herbal skin care and beauty products, sheepskins and more. And all with sound environmental principles.
The aptly titled 5 second films should need no explaining.
My personal favourite is live fast.
I’ve read a couple of interesting articles on how the old media (books, TV, films, record companies) are struggling to adapt in a world where anyone can publish and gain an audience via (for example) myspace or youtube.
Gizmodo wrote on Record Labels: change or die about how bands are finding ways to gain a following and earn a living without the big, established record companies getting a look in. How can this not be a bad thing? I’m a huge music fan but I’d be willing to bet that all the music I heard while growing up was owned by someone (or more likely a huge corporation). How come they came to own our culture and control our access to it? Why should the music available be limited to the albums that record companies think are commercially viable?
And the story is the same across the other media. Newspapers struggling in a world where anyone can blog and I can read opinions far more informed than their writers could ever manage. TV companies are trying to keep up in a world where users on youtube upload content equivalent to 280 24-hour channels of new content (if I’ve got my maths right, based on figures from a study by an American anthropolgist and one of the best one hour documentaries I’ve ever seen)
I’ll happily hand over money to see a band play and pay for a CD afterwards when I know that money is going to the band themselves and not snorted up the nose of odious record company executives.
If you still own a TV then might I suggest some other sources of entertainment for you. Sites like StumbleUpon, digg and delicious recommend content to you based on other users’ recommendations and you can participate in selecting recommendations. Then you can ditch that TV and maybe one day even be making your own blogs and videos?
Google announced in January that they would no longer be supporting Infernal Exploder, sorry, Internet Explorer 6 for their web applications.
This seems to have led the way for other web developers to wave goodbye (or good riddance for most developers) to the quirky, annoying, rendering challenged, standards non-compliant pain-in-the-butt that was IE6. Some even went as far as to hold a funeral.
For those of you still in mourning (and for those of you still struggling through using IE6′s relatives) I suggest that this would help to dull the pain.
I’ve been working on the latest version of my web design tutorial. It takes you in very simple small steps from creating a web page and introducing HTML structures such as tags and entities, through using tables for layout to making it all look beautiful with CSS.
