An online repository of all things useful and useless

I’ve recently realised something about the blogs I now read.

I started using feed readers around 2006 to keep up with the burst of blogs that suddenly permeated the internet. It was all the craze then, and everyone had a blog. My feed reader consisted mostly of friends and fellow bloggers that I met through the Project Petaling Street community. It was a brave new world then.

Nowadays, most of my friends have stopped blogging, and their section in the feed reader is woefully silent. The feeds that are updated the most are usually informative blogs, and other websites that use RSS feeds.

If my feed reader was a coffee shop, it’s an entirely different crowd now. There are a few regulars from the old days, but the place is mostly buzzing with a different type of read and feed now.

Things have changed.

I Googled “types of Facebook users” to get a background for this post, and most articles I came across generally talked about two things: Certain ways people use  Facebook and their annoyance rating. (i.e. here and here.)

Those lists are entertaining, and do have a massive ring of truth to them, but they seem to come across as “don’t do this, it’s annoying.” If you used those lists as a guideline to what not to do on Facebook, you might as well delete your account and have no social media presence. Silence is the least annoying option.

If you’re going to be on social media, it’s inevitable you’re going to annoy someone. And that all those Facebook user type lists are all written with a bias , depending on the type of Facebook user writing them (and mostly by the crusty old media stereotype writer).

So to me, I say “be yourself”. If you annoy one person, who cares. After all, Facebook wouldn’t be one great melting pot if we didn’t have all kinds. If you annoy tons of people, okay….maybe there’s something there you should really fix.

Now that we got that out of the way, here’s my biased list examining the type of people that sign up for Facebook:

Read more

I really really REALLY REALLY dislike cowboy wannabe thinks-they’re-right-when-they’re-woefully-out-of-date so-called web designers.

Web standards are there for a reason – to maintain standards! Hacks are fine, IF the designer knows what they’re doing, and will take the future of the website into account. Don’t make editing in the future hard for everyone else!

PLUS, if the website was originally designed in one way, FIND out how it was designed FIRST, and then edit accordingly. DO NOT break convention, because when the next person comes along and tries to edit it the way it was originally intended to be edited, they’re going to have a massive headache.

No wonder everyone’s moving to a CMS. Not everyone is well-equipped enough to deal with CODE.

Coding is like chemistry. Mix it wrongly and it’ll blow up in your face. No wonder everyone likes to stick to pre-mixed formulas, so they don’t have to deal with the nitty gritty of the mix.

Coders, you have more in common with lab pharmacists than you think.

Unfortunately, there are still people out there who are code cowboys, and think that because they know HTML 1.0 and CSS 1.0 they can edit XHTML and CSS 3.0. And that’s when the big picture gets messy. Sure, it fixes the little details, but what about the rest of the website??? You know the chaos theory? A website is a little self-contained chaos theory demonstrator. Have one little thing out of place and the entire thing goes to shot.

Ok. Rant over. Back to work!