As a for instance; I write on Twitter (and, subsequently Facebook) things that I would talk about with my friends at the pub. I am probably in a minority here, but everyone freaking out about privacy online is jumping off the deep end for a substandard reason. If you restrict what you say online to things that you don’t mind people knowing about (does this seem obvious to anyone else?) then your privacy isn’t really at stake. I don’t mind people knowing how old I am or what city I live in or who I’m married to. I understand that this is valuable information to some people, but it’s also information that I’m comfortable to have in the public domain. Similarly, I quite like my music and film taste to be public, because there’s a chance that I could be on the receiving end of targeted ads that could broaden my horizons.

The important thing to bear in mind is that privacy is a huge word and it covers everything about you. If you drew a set diagram of privacy and security in this context, security would be a relatively small subset of privacy, and it’s the only thing that’s really worth concerning yourself with. If I say on Twitter that I just ate an enchilada, that’s me shrinking the size of my privacy set, but it doesn’t decrease my security set, so I’m not worried. It’s not really surprising to me that Facebook are trying to make money out of the information that people give to them, but I trust that they’re not in the business of dangerously impinging on people’s privacy – that sort of thing would easily earn them a reputation and that’s not good for business. Similarly, if 5% of their user base ruins their lives because they got tagged in a drunken photo and lost their job/spouse/medical licence/whatever, that earns Facebook a bad reputation and that’s not good for business.

The key isn’t to just abandon ship and become a Facebook martyr – it doesn’t solve anything. If you really care, educate your friends. If someone shares something inappropriate that you think isn’t going to do them any favours, tell them and tell them why you’re telling them. If you’re uploading photos and is unflattering/incriminating, think before you upload it and, if you must be a jerkoff, don’t tag the culprit.

Finally, most reputable social networks have privacy settings. Study them. Understand them. Check that they work. Go to some of your stuff, copy links and sign out. Can you still access this stuff? Create a control account and check if that can access your links. If not, you’re safer to trust. Most importantly, read terms and conditions. No-one reads terms and conditions, but you absolutely should. They’re often written in pretty archaic legalese, but persevere and understand. If there’s something you don’t like, you’re justified in leaving (do remember, though, that granting a website a licence to publish the things you upload is not the same as relinquishing copyrights and IP rights).

Disclaimer: I’m not expert on this, but I can exercise some common sense, and I urge everyone to do the same. I am also an idealist. Life’s too short to run around worrying about everything all the time, so I conduct myself with caution and common sense so that, in the event I do get bitten, it won’t be too devastating.

After this interchange, I figure they don’t have the title, I can’t rent it and that’s why. It was really just a throwaway comment, because it’s the first film I’ve searched for that I haven’t been able to queue for reasons other than its release date not having passed. I have since received an email from a customer service representative:

Dear Jasper,

Further to our conversation on Twitter, unfortunately, “9″ is not currently available to rent from LOVEFiLM due to very recent problems with the supplier of rental copies. I‚m sorry for any inconvenience or disappointment this may cause you. If this situation changes we will of course let you know. To make it up to you we are crediting your account with a free rental.

Now, this is how you treat customers. I am on an unlimited plan, so an extra rental isn’t really going to affect me that much, but the gesture is the point. This shows me that, even though this isn’t a fault of theirs, they’re trying to show that they care about my experience with them, and (I hope you’re listening Panelfly and Sony Playstation – I know my updates are protected now, but they had weeks to respond before I did that!) ensure that every experience I have with their company ends with me being happy. You certainly nailed it again, LOVEFiLM.

Go me, and hypocrisy.

Computers are scarcely clever enough to infer the format or context of input (or, at least, I’m not clever enough to write something to do that!) so we have to hand-hold users through the process. We write beautiful copy (that never gets read), we tailor error messages as well as we can based on the nature of their input and how it fails the test (that never get read) and we sit by the support email account and wait for people who can’t be bothered to read, but can be bothered to email, to let us know how we’re failing. Even if you believed that forms worked 2 minutes ago, you’d be naive to believe that they do now. I am the authority, do not question.

So. Forms suck. Sadly, as a web developer (if you are one), it’s your job to make them as accommodating as you possibly can. This is a relatively easy thing to do, and I hate to use badly-written forms when there’s really no excuse for it. The catalyst for this post is equal parts simple and irritating, but I’ll get to that in a minute. Think about how the data entered in your form is going to be used. If your validation method could ever be broken with valid data, you NEED to rethink it. If I can’t enter my email address in your shop’s signup form, you can bet I’m buying elsewhere (you’d be surprised how easily some forms get fooled by two-letter TLDs). If you require a phone number, but I’m entering my number right and your form isn’t accepting it, it’s YOUR FORM that’s broken (you can circumvent this by giving clear directions, that way, if they don’t get read and you get a complaint, you can walk users through and sarcastically encourage them to read guidelines you’ve put in place).

The handiest of handy techniques I ever employed in form validation is to teach myself how users enter data in forms. You can do this so easily by having your validation class or method or whatever, send you an email, or log to a file the thing that tripped it up, the contents of post, get, session, time, IP, server variables, debug backtrace, everything you can get, then study it when you’re doing improvements. Learning about how users use something is nowhere near as valuable as learning how your users use something. It also gives a great point of reference when walking a user through your app to determine where they’re going wrong, and it can even help you to improve your copy.

That being said, the next person who develops something that encourages every user to actually read the great instructions you write will be the first!

Which kinda brings me onto why I’m even ranting in the first place. As a user, I hate using forms. As a developer, I hate creating them (unless they’re doing something really cool and interesting). What I hate even more is when they’re not fit for purpose. Upon filling in a particular form yesterday, I was asked to enter my country. Country can be pretty contentious in itself – it’s normally a bit of a pain, do I choose United Kingdom, Britain, Great Britain? Has my country been prioritised as it’s a major customer of this website? Is the list in alphabetical order otherwise? Do I scroll to U, B or G? Whilst these are small issues, when you fill in as many forms as I do, the fluctuation in input method can start to grate!

My favourite kind of way to enter country is by free text field. It’s a little risky if you’re joining users with a table of countries as you can never be sure that you’ve joined user input with the correct country, but it does make life easier. So, I entered my country as “United Kingdom” and was met with the following error:

This is, by far, one of the most stupid, avoidable messages that I have ever come across in a form. Number one, if they don’t want punctuation in my input, it can be stripped programmatically, even in the javascript that passes the form to the server:

string.replace(/[^A-Za-z]*/,'');


If they need it in upper case, that can also be done by the javascript:

string.toUpperCase();


So, that’s the first 2 of their issues, both of which become entirely moot when you come across their final issue; Choose a country from this list! Seriously?! Have you ever heard of a select list?! I know you have, because I already used one on your website! Justification for this sort of shortsightedness evades me, but I am open to enlightenment.

Short and short, users have the attention span of a gnat, and the temper of a recently-woken bear. Irritating either one of those is an easy way to lose a customer, so please try to make your forms minimally irritating. If I end up using one, I may just have to hunt you down and moan at you.

You’ll obviously need Greasemonkey or Creammonkey or Fluid.app or something that accepts GM scripts to use this.

But are these products really free? I mean, sure, you don’t put your credit card details into these things and there’s not a person sat monitoring everything you do and laughing when you put on some goat porn, but if you’re using Google DNS or Chrome then you can bet they have a record of someone at an IP you used doing it. And if you’re logged in to a Google product as well, you know all it takes is matching those IPs together and we’ve got a name and a face. So now, every time you turn on your Googleputer, there’s no reason NOT to show you a Google Ad for the latest installment of unmissable goat porn on your Google Desktop – you WATCHED it, so you must want to watch more! It stands to reason that when I have an email about Viagara in my inbox, I want to see ads for it too.

To me, that doesn’t make these products free. Sure, I use GMail, but only because I can hook it up to my mail client and forego the ads, I use the search because it’s fast and integrated with almost everything and I use GCal for work, but think about the type of data you’re giving companies access to before you actually use these “free” services. If you don’t know what DNS is, but you know Google’s is pretty fast – find out what DNS is before you tell a company EVERY SINGLE WEBSITE YOU VISIT, NO EXCEPTIONS. If you like the sound of a free operating system, think about what it means to give a company access to ANYTHING you do on your computer. I’m not saying this is the case, but if you don’t want to pay for an OS; there are plenty of amazing, free ones around.

Google has quickly learned from twitter that knowing about your users as in where they are or what their name is, or what someone said in an email isn’t worth nearly as much as knowing every little thing about our lives. Where you’re going to eat, what you ate when you got there, what you’re reading, what you recommend, what movies you like, where you work, what you do whilst you’re at work, all of that makes anything you’ve got with a screen and a Google product on the potential to be a tiny billboard for any type of thing that can be programmatically deemed applicable to you – and it’s not independently moderated – if someone finds out you like the sound of an iPad, you aren’t going to be getting legit ads on where to get one, you’re going to be getting shitty “GET A FREE IPAD IF YOU JUST GIVE US YOUR CREDIT CARD DETAILS AND MAIL US YOUR FIRST CHILD” ads. You’ve seen Google text ads, right? You might even use a plugin in your web browser to block them, so why open yourself up to have them put all over your life?!

It’s hard to blame Google for this, and they’re not the only ones. I mentioned Facebook; they’re getting just as bad, and they’ll probably end up worse, and this is why. You willingly tell Facebook EVERYTHING. Date of birth, who you’re related to, stuff you like, your employment history, political views, music taste, everything. You then proceed to give it up-to-the-minute information on all the stuff that’s catching your attention now. You’re a fickle idiot, and so was I until this all occurred to me. What’s potentially worse about Facebook is that you’re telling all of this stuff to them, giving them all your secrets, and they’re giving this data to anyone who knows a web developer. When you install an application, I bet you don’t read what they get access to – those little cancerous quizzes have access to “your Profile information, photos, your friends’ info and other content that [it] requires to work”. Do you really like quizzes enough to tell Johnny Nobody all that stuff about you? I don’t.

So, what’s the point in this? Mark Zuckerberg says that “privacy is no longer a social norm“, and I agree. Everything that you can write down about yourself can be leveraged to try and sell you something. Fair enough, it could be something that you might want, but I want that ball to always stay in my court. If I want to buy something, I’ll look for it. Eric Schmidt says that “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place“. This is utter bullshit. You’re entitled to have secrets and you should have secrets. Maybe don’t tweet about them, or post them on your Facebook wall, but they’re not secrets if you’re doing that. What Mr. Schmidt is saying there is “if you have a secret and you use one of my company’s products, I’m going to use that secret to get some scammer to try and sell you shit”.

Now, I’m not against avertising. It can be pretty useful. However, Google used to just be a box to search stuff in. Then it was a box to search stuff in with ads on it, then it was an online equivalent of everything you used to do on your desktop computer. Now it’s all that stuff from before, plus it’s got its own backup of the internet, and soon it’ll have phonelines. It’s always changing the game, and it keeps all that stuff it had from before. No matter how they decide to change the game up, they’re always going to know everything you’ve ever told them, whether you know they did or not. Same with Facebook. So, think about what you’re telling websites about yourself and who might end up knowing that stuff and, if in doubt, walk outside with your eyes closed and tell the first person you bump into what you were going to tell that website – if you’re comfortable with them knowing it then you’re OK!

I was linked to a quote on twitter by someone way higher profile than me, and it appears to have sparked a bit of a debate, so I’ll weigh in.

Honestly, I’m shocked that in 2010 I’m still coming across ‘web designers’ who can’t code their own designs. No excuse.

I 100% wholeheartedly agree with this. How can you possibly design for the web if you don’t understand the limitations of the platform? Sure, you can draw a picture of a website, but will it work? If you’re lucky. Not EVERYTHING you can draw is easy or even sensible to interpret to a website layout, so you’re really limiting yourself or risking a substantial backlash if your design process isn’t influenced by a knowledge of CSS, browser inconsistencies and all of the cool little things web browsers can and can’t do.

I have to work with quite a few people who are “web designers” but don’t know HTML and it’s the most frustrating thing. It’s so clear when you’re working with a design of someone who doesn’t know the platform.

A couple of responses were to do with top chefs not working in their own restaurants or product designers not making the products they design. That has missed the point entirely (which is odd, because the source of one of those comments is incredibly well-respected) – chefs CAN cook, and could do it beautifully if they wanted/needed to. Product designers MUST know about the production process of the product they’re designing – you couldn’t just sit down and design a car or an aeroplane without knowing about production, materials and the thousands, probably millions of things you need to know about the product and production process.

So, from now on, if I work with you in your design capacity and you don’t know HTML or CSS, you’re not a web designer, you’re a website picture drawer.

Iconpaper is a great website. Relatively trustworthy source of customisation stuff for OSX. Browsing today, I came across a large-type Adium theme, Bloc, which suited me down to the ground. It’s tracked on Macthemes; basically a goldmine for people who like to tinker with how OSX looks.

After having had a couple of small problems with the original, I sleuthed to try and get in touch with the author of the theme. Turns out, he’s a very nice bloke who agreed to do me a theme in the same style as my website. Whilst it may be difficult to believe, I love the way this site looks, and I couldn’t be happier with it (sad, right?)! I’m pretty sure that those of you who use Adium and aren’t lame should give it a go. If you don’t like my personalised variant, there are some other great colour schemes bundled with it.

No real reason for this post, other than a big thanks to krayon (the author) and to try and throw some more links his way.

Amongst the many positive things you could say about the internet, the fact that it’s made country boundaries borderline irrelevant is probably my favourite. You can communicate directly with someone from anywhere, and where they live doesn’t come into it (unless they live in China). In fact, the only people obsessing over what country you’re in are people who flat-out don’t get it, or are stuck in an age where it actually mattered. Licencers are pretty much top offender on this one. They have a product that doesn’t require any delivery charges, can be consumed pretty much anywhere that has a computer and a phone line and yet it’s still more difficult for me to watch the latest season of Heroes when it first airs than it is for me to buy a teacup from the other side of the world. It ain’t right.

Why is it taking so long for the recording industries of the world to capitalise on the Internet as a distribution platform. Not a week goes by when I don’t hear that some company is in dispute with Apple over performance rights for song demos, or Spotify because they’re broadcasting music that isn’t licenced for a specific country (does that even make sense anymore?!). It seems that they’re happier to chase down and try to punish the few than they would be squeezing money out of the many!

The main reason for this came from the BBC’s commentary of Oinkgate (it’s a pattern, and I’m sticking to it!). I learned something I didn’t know about the site’s “owner” – that he has/had around $300,000 sat in PayPal accounts. The upkeep for a site of that popularity isn’t going to be cheap, so the fact that he was able to accumulate that amount of money and keep the site going is indicative of an ability to profit from this model (as an aside, if the owner of Oink was the scumbag, ripoff merchant he’s being painted as, there wouldn’t be $300,000 sat in PayPal account – it’d be sat on his drive. The fact that he didn’t spend the money indicates to me that he was either undecided on what to do with it, or was rainy-day saving it. Well, it’s raining pretty hard on him right now! If I’d donated any money to Oink, I’d be absolutely fine with it going towards his legal costs!). So, what we have here is a website with a (supposed…) subscription model and 100,000 users max, netting the owner of the site $3 per user profit. If you can’t see where I’m going with this already, you may as well close the window now. All you need on top of that is track previews to see if what you’re downloading is actually worth the money and you’ve got yourself a profiting business.

Now I realise that this sounds almost identical to Spotify, but with one important inclusion for me – the fact that my money got me something quantifiable. Spotify charges a lot of money (an amount that I’d be happy to pay for a good download subscription service, by the way) for what you get, and I think they’d give you more if they weren’t being constantly hounded by record companies to stay within their anachronistic constraints!

In conclusion, recording industries of the world, stop fighting the people you rely on for money. If you’re really about maximising profits, try giving us something that we actually want, for a reasonable price, for a change. You’re never going to stamp out piracy, but when you try to make things harder for the pirates, you’re actually making it harder for the people who legitimately acquire your product (see DRM, region encoding, copy protection, serial numbers, the list goes on…). If you need some help getting something started, I hear Alan Ellis, 26 is pretty good at this sort of thing.

Fortunately or unfortunately, however, it’s caused me to look at the way I use and abuse social networks and the repercussions that has on my relationships with people. Taking the most frequently accessed, Twitter and Facebook; there are times when I basically have nothing to say to people in real life because they already know everything that’s going on in my life. They know that I tried and didn’t like Starbucks, they know what song I like at the moment and they know what I’m doing this weekend. With some people, this starts a bit of dialogue that would, otherwise, not be there for lack of social networks, but it’s really the same few people. That’s not to say that I don’t value the digital interactions I have with people, because I really do, but I feel sometimes like it cheapens physical encounters because there’s nothing to talk about any more.

From this, I could go two ways, I suppose. Either stop using social networks in an attempt to try and personalise communication with people (as opposed to spitting in a crowd and seeing who gets wet), or stop seeing people in real life. There’s obviously a happy medium somewhere in there, but I’ve never been good at finding that so I feel like I’ve reached a bit of a fork-in-the-road. What’s more, is I feel like I’ve already made my decision. I’ve not posted to Facebook or Twitter for the last few days and I already feel like I’m having better interactions with people. I don’t have to preface everything I say with “I don’t know if you saw on Twitter, but…”, which is rewarding in itself. And now, here I am having a characteristic, verbose brain dump with lots of words and no real structure.

If I was going to commit Web 2.0 Suicide, I wouldn’t want to do it permanently. I’ve only used these networks to get back in touch with people I haven’t seen for ages, or to continue talking to new people I meet – it would be counter productive. I think I’d try to be more graceful about it; leave a final message on each network with contact details and a desire to talk and hopefully stir up at least one proper conversation. Maybe I’m being non-commital and self-destructive (oxymoron?), but I keep feeling like the less effort you make to keep a relationship going, the less that relationship is worth. Social networks make relationships zero effort and, by extension, zero worth and I’m not satisfied with that.

Subject to major edits/rewrites/hypocrisy/reorders.