Google’s New Seach Suggestions Is Really Annoying and Not Blind Friendly

Google’s search has this new drop down search suggestions box at their site. It’s very annoying because it intercepts the key presses on my keyboard. I’m a keyboard person, using Opera. I often use Opera’s Shift+Arrow keys to move up and down the search list and then hit the ENTER key to select the item on the search results to go to that site. With Google’s search suggestions javascript intercepting my keystrokes, the ENTER key no longer works.

Even though I search from Opera’s search toolbar, the suggestions JS still comes back to bite me, because I can’t actually get to the page linked from the results. Not unless I use the mouse anyway. What happens to blind people who are totally reliant on the keyboard?

It’s very irritating. I initially disabled JavaScript for Google at first, since Opera makes it easy to disable JavaScript on a site-by-site basis. Then I found that I couldn’t log into my Google Accounts because the latter uses JavaScript (how stupid).

I can’t stand this new seach suggestion thingy. Please get rid of it.

Filed in Outraged, Opinion, Web Design.

Favicon on WordPress.com

I wonder whether there’s a way to set a favicon on a blog on WordPress.com the way you can on normal websites, like this article on favicons says.

I tried looking into the Media section, but it’s just a list of pictures I’ve attached to posts or my banner. I’m not sure if I’m looking in the right place though. Or whether such an option is even available.

Filed in WordPress, Web Design.

Microsoft.com is Not Compatible with IE8 Standards View

I got a good kick over this: Microsoft.com is on the list of sites that is incompatible with IE8’s standards view. As mentioned there, the list can be obtained by typing res://iecompat.dll/iecompatdata.xml in IE8’s address bar.

Filed in Browsers, Web Design, Software.

Google’s Greatest Fear and Archilles’ Heel: New Developments

Google’s archilles’ heel is its dependence on links to indicate authority of a website. Which is why it makes so much noise about paid links, whereas the other search engines don’t really care.

The newest fracas came about as a result of the formation of a new company that promises to connect link buyers with link sellers. Predictably, this brought out Matt Cutts, Google’s part time mouthpiece and full time web spam engineer, who denounced the practice as illegal or some such thing. In response, others like Jeremy Schoemaker, of Shoemoney fame, called out Google’s hypocrisy in the whole thing. It’s illegal when others do it, but when Google does it, and it still does it till this day, it’s not illegal.

I think everyone knows that Google is no longer the company it set out to be a few years ago. There is widespread sentiment that it’s now a monopoly abusing its power and engaging in the same bullying tactics we saw from Microsoft in its heyday.

Filed in Outraged, Opinion, Web Design, Advertising.

WordPress 2.7 Beta 1 Released: Very Promising

WordPress 2.7 Beta 1 has been released, with a Release Candidate probably due on Nov 10 and a final by the end of the month. This new version is very promising, and is much more usable than the older one. I read their previous blog entries about how they got some usability testing done. I can’t wait for it!

Filed in WordPress, Web Design.

Monopolies: The Google Abuse of Power

Blogoscoped is on the rampage to expose a couple of what they regard as Google’s unfair practices as a monopoly:

• Google Uses Public Service Ads to Link to Own Election Page – where Google uses other websites’ advertising space to advertise its election biases without paying them. They abuse a feature designed for other purposes to this end.
• Another one where Google gets webmasters to treat Google specially while hypocritically saying that webmasters are to treat all visitors and bots the same.

They are not the first to try to expose Google’s hypocrisies. There are other examples having to do with how Google favors big companies by allowing them to spam the search engine index but penalizes small websites.

Filed in Outraged, Opinion, Advertising, Web Design.

Results of Survey of Bloggers

TechCrunch points to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere report, reporting many interesting aspects about bloggers and their blogs.

Did you know, for example, that bloggers rate the success of their blogs primarily on the following, with the most important items listed first and the least important items listed last?

1. Personal satisfaction
2. Number of posts or comments on the blog
3. Number of unique visitors
4. Number of links to the blog from other sites
5. Number of RSS subscribers
6. Your Technical authority and/or rank number
7. Accolades from other media
8. Number of people who are ‘favoriting’ you
9. Revenue
10. Number and quality of new business leads

How did they read my mind? And are we all really so alike? The above more or less reflects how I feel about my blogs too. How could it be so accurate? I didn’t take any survey.

And like the other bloggers, revenue is low on my list. Of course, on wordpress.com, revenue is non-existent since we can’t put ads. But then, I didn’t start this blog to make money.

The report has other points too. Those who post more frequently are more likely to be top blogs. Or maybe it’s the other way around. The top blogs can afford to pay staff to blog. Bloggers like me blog for fun. There’s no way I’m going to bind myself to a schedule of posting 3-4 times a day.

Filed in News, Web Design.

Will WordPress.com Please Provide Us Better Web Statistics?

Yesterday, when I looked at the HTML code for my blog on WordPress.com, I noticed that WordPress.com put some Google Analytics tracking code into the blog. As a blogger, I have no access to that data. Instead, I have the smidgen of information WordPress deigns to reveal in its half-baked, brain-dead stats report. And I can’t even put my own Google Analytics code, because JavaScript is not allowed.

Come on, guys, since you have the data, make it available to us.

For example, after posting my review of Chrome, I’m curious to know what percentage of my readers use Chrome. Ars Technica wrote that Chrome has a 7% browser share on their site. I want to know the Chrome browser share for my blog too.

I also want other details. Mouth-watering details provided by other software. As it is, I can only drool.

So can we have better stats? Please? Pretty please?

Filed in WordPress, Web Design, Browsers.

Google to Launch Own Browser on Sep 3: Google Chrome

Everybody’s talking about it. Google is about to launch their new open source web browser, called Google Chrome. The link doesn’t work yet, but it will when the browser is launched.

Since it hasn’t been launched, there isn’t very much information about it yet. There’s supposed to be a comic on it, but the server hosting it is down. All I know is that the browser will open a separate process for every tab, so that if a particular site crashes the browser, only that tab will close. And when the user closes the tab, the process will terminate and all the resources consumed by the browser for the site will be released. Apart from that, I don’t know anything.

Stay tuned.

Filed in News, Browsers, Software, Web Design.

Drupal 6.4 and 5.10: Another Security and Bug Fix Release

What’s going on with Drupal these days? Are they trying to compete with WordPress for the greatest number of new releases within a short period award? Actually WordPress seems to have slowed down a bit lately, which is good, because I’m tired of having to update my other blog which uses my own WordPress install.

Anyway, Drupal 6.4 and 5.10 have been released. The announcement says that upgrading is strongly recommended, and that it fixes several critical security vulnerabilities as well as other bugs.

Those running 6.3 or 5.9 can just patch their installs with the 6.4 patch and the 5.9 patch. But the patch leaves your install in an unversioned state, a matter that I complained about before.

Filed in Web Design, Software, Security.

WordPress.com is Getting More Irritating By the Month: The Progressive Loss of Control

WordPress.com proves that you really need to install your own copy of WordPress for your own blog instead of outsourcing it to someone else.

1. When I first started, I noticed that it plugged in links to its own tag pages into my blog posts. Ugh!
2. Then I found that when I surfed to my posts without logging in, some of them contain ads. Yucks.
3. The latest irritation is this “Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)” content that is embedded right into the content of some posts. The indignity!

There’s a progressive loss of control over the blog when you let others run things. I mean, who knows what they’re going to do next? Change words into ad links within your post itself? Can you even trust these people?

Filed in Outraged, WordPress, Web Design.

Drupal 5.9 Released: Security Fix

Drupal 5.9 has just been released to fix a security hole introduced in 5.8. Sounds serious.

Filed in Web Design, Security.

New Versions: Opera 9.50 and Firefox 3

This is a month for new browser versions: Opera released version 9.50 last week and Firefox released its version 3 today.

Although a bit late for the party, IE 8 Beta 2 will be out in August.

Filed in Software, News, Web Design.

Did Network Solutions’ Security Flaws Allow Comcast’s Domain to be Stolen?

The recent Comcast’s domain name theft, where two kids took over the domain name and redirected it to another site, may reveal problems in Network Solutions that are just the tip of the iceberg.

The kids said that their technique “relied on a flaw at the Virginia-based domain registrar”. A poster on Slashdot, in a post called “Everything old is new again” said that Network Solutions has had this flaw for a long time. His site tells how his own domains were stolen while on Network Solutions too, and how “Network Solutions were of no help” in helping him regain his domains back, so he had to “steal” them back again.

So here’s the tally sheet of Network Solutions’ problems:

1. They hijack subdomains hosted with them.
2. They steal domains from people who search for one at their site, thus getting sued for it.
3. And now, if these people are right, they allow domains bought from them to be stolen by others.

Filed in Outraged, News, Web design, Opinion.

Save the Developers: Ditch IE 6

IE 6 is a wretched nuisance to develop for. It is broken in so many ways: its ability to render pages properly according to standards, as well as its security holes. Some web developers have set up a site called Save the Developers to try to get users to upgrade from IE 6 to just about any other browser around, including Firefox, Opera, IE 7 and Safari. All you need to do is to put some Javascript on your site, and if your visitor arrives at your site with IE 6 they will get an unobtrusive notice that overlays the top right of their browser for a short while, asking them to upgrade.

Unfortunately, I can’t put that script here, since wordpress.com doesn’t allow JavaScripts.

Filed in Web Design.