Signs you've been CSSing too much

You're drafting an email and hopping between paragraphs, unsure whether to take out the last paragraph or to add some further explanation and leave it in.

You decide to put it to one side for now.

Your fingers reach instinctively for the keyboard, and just before they touch down you realise in horror that they were about to comment-out the paragraph...

The Saga Continueth

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned the grief I was having with a Year In Industry training course. The upshot was that a) it's a week long, b) it's at Southampton university, about two hours away, c) it's not a residential course, so we have to sort out (and pay for) everything ourselves, and d) I was told by my point of contact that she was "looking into accommodation" in the halls of residence for us.

Two days later, an email arrived Cc'd to about twenty of us who'd obviously enquired about accommodation - it read:

I know you some of you were looking for accommodation at the University of Southampton for the Southampton CMI training course. I am pleased to say that the accommodation office has a few rooms available that week. Please see info attached, which includes prices. Can you please let me know, today if possible, whether you want me to book it. These rooms go VERY quickly so I need to hear from you ASAP.

How nice, I thought. I quickly replied and asked her to book a room for me.

A week later, I'd heard nothing back. So I sent off another email asking whether the rooms had been booked. Nothing. Almost a week after that (this morning), I tried yet again, blind in my optimism. The reply I received, from a different person, was rather disconcerting:

Thank you for your email, I am sorry that you had not yet had a response.

Unfortunately you have missed the deadline, can you please contact the Accommodation office directly on [telephone number]. It is a possibility that Helen may have already booked you a room unfortunately Helen no longer works with the Year in Industry and I can't seem to find any information regarding the room bookings.

Oh joy.

I phoned the accommodation office, and talked to a sleepy-sounding woman who told me she'd pass the matter on for someone to ring me back "soon", and forgot to even ask me my name. I phoned again almost two hours later, and she went off and talked to whoever was meant to be ringing me - she came back and told me to email the other woman explaning the situation.

So I emailed her (at a group accommodation@ email address) explaining in detail. An hour later I received a reply. Well. Um.

It's always bad news when the return email starts:

Thank you for your message regarding "$SUBJECT"—

(Quite literally, in case you were in any doubt.)

Retraction

Like many others, on February 9th I duly downloaded and installed FireFox, the 0.8 version of the browser previously known as Firebird (and Phoenix prior to that). I was as excited as everyone else, and yet in the past month I've grown to dislike it.

I knew there could be a few major differences since I've never bothered with nightly builds, and so my version of Firebird was from November at least. Some of the new snazzy features I did indeed find to be snazzy, but a lot of the defaults are just downright annoying.

When I was running Firebird, one of the extensions I had was This Window (forces links to open in new tabs instead of in new windows), which I was very enthusiastic about at the time because there was something bizarre with my copy of Firebird - when a second window was opened, all the links on the bookmarks toolbar doubled up, meaning that I couldn't access more than five or six different bookmarks because only 10 or 12 icons would fit on the screen. So, I preferred just the one window, and accessible bookmarks.

With subsequent downloads of Firebird, which I had to get due to all the reinstalling of OSs, this bug wasn't present, so the extension was a little redundant. I disabled it (but didn't actually delete it).

When FireFox was installed, I went through downloading my preferred extensions again. For the record, my definitive list has now changed to:

Paste and Go

An Opera feature - when there's a URL on the clipboard, choose Paste and Go from the address bar context menu so that you don't have to go through all the tedium of pasting and then pressing Enter.

Mouse Gestures

Again, something I got used to in my six months or so of using Opera - I only use it for opening new tabs, but it's so useful!

EditCSS

Must have. Really. The CSS of a page is loaded in a sidebar, you can edit it and the changes take place 'live', without reloading the page.

Web Developer Toolbar

So many useful features - I mainly use it for View CSS (which, to be honest, EditCSS also achieves), View Source (which can easily be done from the context menu, although it doesn't open the results in a background tab), and resizing the window to a smaller size.

Tabbrowser Extensions

Very possibly the most crucial - drag and drop tabs in the order you want, undo close tab, save tab session, middle-click on a tab to close it... to be honest, I've forgotten whether much of the functionality is built into Firebird/FireFox, or whether it's a feature of the extension.

Link Visitor

Toggles the visited/unvisited status of a URL, which can be useful.

Flash Click to View

I've grown very used to this, and having to click a large area every time I want to see a Flash animation really doesn't register as an annoyance. Far less than having to see the unwanted Flash animations though.

IE View

An extra item in the context menu - View this page in IE (or, if you're clicking on a link, View target URL in IE). Very good for pages that haven't been designed properly (or alternatively, for seeing how IE renders some pages that have been designed to standards).

None of these can I live without (well, possibly Flash Click to View, or Link Visitor), so much so that I'm nagging Kevin to set me up a profile in his copy of FireFox, just so I can use extensions he doesn't like :-)

By the by, installing extensions in FireFox carries a damn sight more tedium and hassle than in Firebird - you have to restart the browser after installing each and every one, otherwise the next one doesn't download properly at all. Even then, it does seem sometimes that they still aren't guaranteed to download properly (either telling you that it's downloaded when it hasn't, or vice versa).

So I installed my extensions. I then went to edit the mappings on the Mouse Gestures extension, since the default gesture for opening a new tab is Up, not Down as I like, and it's defaulted to operating with the left mouse button as well, not the right. I went, I looked - and my settings were there already. It was obviously picking them up from my previous Firebird installation.

Fair enough, but what it also did was to pick up on my previous installation of the This Window extension. The one that I disabled. I went to Extensions in the FireFox options to disable it again - but since I hadn't specifically installed it for FireFox, it wasn't listed.

I went rooting around in Application Data, found thiswindow.jar and deleted it. Nothing doing. It was still in effect. And, in addition to what it did before, under FireFox it also would open all comments boxes in their own tab instead of a little popup window. It was incredibly annoying, but I'm lazy, so I lived with it.

However, a couple of weeks ago it suddenly decided that it wasn't going to open comments boxes at all. It was such a pain, I can't describe it.

It also seems that the built-in popup blocking has become more aggressive - I deleted a spam comment last week, and it blocked the little window that comes up saying, "Delete this comment?". Blocked it. It even told me that, in the mistaken belief that I would thank it for doing so. I've had to add my and Kevin's (for the linklog) domains to the "Always allow popups from..." option, just so I can rebuild my own website.

What else, what else...

Oh yes, annoying default #42b - the new snazzy Download Manager. How is it useful, or usable, to set the default to "Always download all files to [folder]" rather than "Prompt me for each file"? How many people have just one single folder for anything at all that they want to download? More than the number who like to select where their file saves to? I think not.

Other than that, there have been a few minor quibbles, mainly due to my extensions screwing up bizarrely. This isn't to say that all the changes are bad - one thing that's really appreciated is that it keeps half-completed URLs in the address bar between switching tabs, and the autocomplete works properly now - but in my experience, they've been noticeably overwhelmed by annoyances.

I uninstalled FireFox last week. Then I got rid of the relevant Application Data folders for all the users. Then I got rid of Firebird, which I still had installed. Then I uninstalled Mozilla for good luck.

I noticed that .html files were still showing a Firebird icon - it had evidently dug its roots into the hard drive somewhat. Since this was last Friday evening, I waited for Kevin to come round the next day to advise me on how best to get a clean install - in the meantime, browsing happened in Opera (the other decent browser I have on my computer).

Goodness, but that thing had permeated the registry good and proper. It was still set as the default for a fair few things, including (as noted above) opening or editing .html files. Rather than hack it all out by hand, Kevin set IE to be the default browser (which promply gobbled up most of the values that FireFox/Firebird had taken), and then we started going about a brand new install.

I was undecided as to whether to try FireFox again (and then have a good solid basis for rejecting it if I still disliked it) or to revert to Firebird. I went with FireFox, went through and reconfigured everything again, redownloaded and installed all the extensions again, and it was a little better than before. But a couple of my extensions have started screwing up again, displaying bizarre behaviour - I think until they're updated to work properly with FF, I'm going back to Firebird again.

Conversations where my shortcomings are revealed

<Cathy>

but I blogged lots last week!

<Missie>

sweetie... you blogged twice

<Cathy>

that's about twice as much as normal!

Um, yeah. I'm really not doing much for that whole "frequently updated" definition of blogging, am I?

Calling Cathy of the future

FutureMe.org (discovered via Vaughan, via Meg, so I'm told).

A service which allows you to send emails to yourself to be delivered at any point in the next 25 years? Oh my.

Given that I'm someone who writes an occasional journal for which one of the primary motives is that I can reread it at a future date and revel in the crystallised human memory, it's not shocking that I was immediately grabbed by this. Yeah, I sent one. I have a bad feeling I'm going to find this far too addictive, glibly throwing out spillage of floating thoughts every time I feel like it. Whether it'll result in avalanches of random and bizarre emails at indeterminate points in the future will depend on how haphazard my arbitrary choice of dates is.

You can choose to make your email private or (anonymously) public; it's possible to read through random entries written by others. A lot of them make for interesting reading - people expressing their hopes for the future, wondering if they've achieved certain things by then or just reminding themselves of how lucky they are right now. (I did see one that said: "Dear FutureMe: Well, you're thirty now. You'd better be rich or I'll be pissed.") Reading them does seem to indulge the voyeur instinct even more than reading personal blogs, because you're not simply reading someone's polished report of their thoughts presented for an audience - it's written for themselves and is therefore much more direct than the average blog entry.

I may have to restrict myself to writing a maximum number of future-delivered emails per month. I tell you, it's a damn good thing this service is free, else I might have had to ban myself altogether! As it is, I believe I'll be donating a little something.

Update: Okay, have just reread the above - I'm crazy, aren't I? This isn't what normal people do, is it? Someone convince me this is a bad idea, please! Otherwise I shall be lost forever...

Maintenance and upkeep...

...and how I'm not doing any of it.

See, this site badly needs an overhaul. Even just things like completely tidying up and redoing the CSS and markup. And then I get to thinking about slightly more back-end things as well, such as pushing all the content into Movable Type rather than having bent back tulips be a hybrid growth that's half generated by a CMS, and half completely handwritten in Notepad. Moving my include files to become MT template modules instead of having to FTP in every time I update my Reading sidebar. (And it's only in the last month that I stopped FTPing from the command line prompt.) Installing a couple of plugins that looked useful or interesting.

And then there's all the little things that need adding or tweaking, and I just never get around to doing them. (Well, actually, I generally start doing them, but they never quite seem to make it from my computer onto my server. In truth, I redid the markup and the CSS more than six months ago; it's just never been uploaded.) By far the biggest thing I've achieved since the summer is to add the linklog, which only took as long as it did because that's when my internet connection decided to die on me at intervals of a couple of minutes.

The favicon is more recent, and today I actually spurred myself into writing a contact form, which I've been meaning to do for about... oh... a year? It only took about an hour in total, including looking it up, writing it, looking up how to do an HTML form (despite my general proficiency with such things, I don't think I've ever written a form before), styling it, uploading it and testing it, and bearing in mind that I'm not a programmer at all.

Why do I find it so difficult to do the smallest and simplest of things?

On the plus side, I know all the things that I want to do with the site. I have them all written down in a list, you see. (Well actually, since it's me, I have them all marked up as nested nested nested lists, since they're categorised by task type, and presented in an HTML page which has the barest of markup and neat elegant CSS to back it up. So sad.) But it seems to take an incredible amount of effort to goad myself into achieving any of these things.

I'll be staring at the List, trying to decide which I should do first, and then I'll get distracted by trying to write some Javascript that lets me click on completed tasks and cross them out, plus a cookie to remember this. And then it'll take me an hour or so to convince myself that when I said I don't know Javascript, I really don't know Javascript, and this blatantly isn't going to get anywhere.

And so it goes. Sometimes I despair, I really do.

Comment (on) registration

Unless you've had your head buried under a rock for the past week, you may have heard some of the kerfuffle over the announcement of TypeKey, Six Apart's soon-to-be launched comment authentication service. (Incidentally, I think that's the first time I've ever used the word "kerfuffle" on this blog. Shocking.)

TypeKey is a 'comment authentication' service, designed to help stamp out comment spam. The idea is that you register as a TypeKey user and are accepted into their database. You are then a known non-spammer (so the theory goes) and free to comment on any TypeKey-enabled (and, of course, non-TypeKey-enabled) weblogs since you are an authenticated legitimate user. Note also: TypeKey implementation will not be limited to just Movable Type or TypePad weblogs, so it seems that Six Apart are aiming for this to become a universal thing.

The interesting part is what happens if you do not register with TypeKey, and yet still want to comment on these weblogs. When I first heard of this, I assumed that it was an all-or-nothing measure - no commenting without registration. However, the FAQ that was released this week clarifies this. I quote:

With Movable Type 3.0 you have options. You can:

1. Only accept TypeKey-authenticated comments where the commenter sends an email address
2. Only accept TypeKey-authenticated comments
3. Accept TypeKey-authenticated and moderated comments
4. Accept TypeKey-authenticated and regular comments
5. Accept moderated comments
6. Accept unmoderated comments
7. Accept anonymous comments

I imagine that, as with so many things, the problem will not be with the service itself but with users' implementations of it. For example, I don't believe that all-out registration-only commenting is appropriate for the vast majority of low-profile blogs such as mine. In fact, the only situation I can think of where it really would be necessary would be a very high-profile blog where there were, perhaps, dozens of new commenters each day. My vision of the ideal next step down, which should be more than enough for most people:

1. When someone comments for the first time, their comment must be authorised by the blog owner
2. By default (but toggleable per comment) authorising a comment will authorise that commenter for the future and their comments will be unmoderated
3. TypeKey-authenticated comments are unmoderated

The immediate problem I can see with the above is that comments would be arriving on the blog at different times according to whether they are classed as moderated or unmoderated. I really don't think you should ever have to register in order to comment on a blog. There's the bottom line. It should only be implemented where it's necessary. There are other compromises for all but the most extreme cases. Personally, I don't get enough comment spam to even adopt moderated comments, so this blog will be a TypeKey-free zone.

What will be interesting, and will, I believe, hugely influence how widespread and over-used the service becomes, will be what the default configuration of Movable Type 3.0 is. I shall think poorly of Six Apart if the default is to only accept TypeKey-authenticated comments, and I hope upon hope that they don't do it.

Off and away

Just to let you know - insofar as it will make any dent at all in my typical blogging frequency - there will most likely be no updates until at least the first Monday of April. The reason for this is that my Year in Industry course (affectionately mentioned here and here) takes place this week from Monday to Thursday, and then I'm having a long weekend with Kevin. Then I'll have a week's catching up of work to do, so I wouldn't hold your breath for immediate updates either :-)

For those curious about the resolution of the accommodation crisis, it was all sorted very hastily at the last minute, after much chasing up and pestering was done. Now I have maps and things, and will be able to take buses from accommodation to the course location rather than taxis now that they've changed the location, a couple of days beforehand, to a different campus. Um. Yay?

(Note: pre-course complaints coming up, to stem the tide of mid-course complaints. I shall henceforth not moan or whinge.)

I feel the most traumatic part by far - apart from the fact that it's a management course, with full group exercises, personal development lectures and such - will be the lack of the very thing that sustains me day by day in normal life. I am talking, of course, of the internet.

There will be no internet. No keeping up with world news. No reading of blogs. No strange and amusing sites or articles thrown up by various linklogs. No IRC! This could be a very expensive three nights in phone calls.

Anyway. I'm off.