Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot's Vastu
nanopolitan writes "Wired has a story on harmonious website design according to Vastu, 'the Indian counterpart of feng shui'. The graphic accompanying the story has an analysis of Slashdot's design by Dr. Smita Narang. Her verdict? This site is 'in desperate need of balance'." From the article: "Thirty-year-old Smita Narang is rapidly becoming one of India's hottest Web designers. Her method: applying vastu shastra, the Indian counterpart of feng shui, to the online realm. The process entails mapping page attributes - HTML, colors, graphics - to elements like fire, water, and air. 'Any disturbance of these established elements can cause an imbalance in the site that directly affects its business,' Narang says."
I thought it's funny and laughed.
If he encourages the use of the blink tag I vote we brand him a heretic and burn him at the stake.
I'm not kidding.
Shh.
and this analogue is bs too
Seriously, all crap like this is, is a way to justify stupid expenditures based on some self-riteous asshole's personal opinions.
Only people with double-digit IQ or a severe case of money poisoning actually listen to these jackasses.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I just took a look at her site and it's pretty crappy.... Maybe I just know nothing about what is attractive.
Wtf .. she called it a negative .. I like a long page length .. seriously who the heck wants to click through multiple pages??
.. why not?
People who advocate short page lengths probably don't use the web for information.
And yes I think google should default to 100 results
Shut up and help me point /. towards the West to balance our vastu/feng shui
Trust me, it will ward off dupes.
The lack of symmetry parallels the random nature of visitors viewpoints and ideologies.
The colours are earthen and comfortable.
Penn and Teller had a decent show on Feng Shui, and I agree with with their conclusion.
It's all bullshit!
Just like the subject of this news post.
... is undoubtedly that it provides their high priest advocates with income.
Coming from the scientific side, I'll dispense with mystic harmony in favour of logical and self-explanatory layout, thank you.
need I say more then RTFA? Someone at WIRED, got an up and coming web designer to rate /. you pompous twit ;) This design is older then that individual.
The corner of a round room
I don't think you read the article properly. Slashdot's design was reviewed by that "doctor", not designed by her.
... that the average /. poster is 'unbalanced'.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
Ok.. I just have to point out... You might want to actually *read* the summary and article. Yeah, I know it's pointless drivel, but you wouldn't have even made that comment if you had. No. Some idiot in India is making a lot of money applying their version of Fung Shoe (or whatever it's called) to web design. They analyzed Slashdot. It made their spiritual advisors puke. Or whatever. Wulfe Too tired to be gentle.
Ok, no examples, no theory, no reason.
For all I know, after reading the 'article', this person doesn't even exist.
What the hell is the point of posting this submission, if it is nothing more then an unsubstantiated opinion, utterly and completley lacking any substance.
If this person really has a clue, and is such a wonderfull designer, where is the evidence.
Article author and "one of India's hottest Web designers", please take your 'vastu shastra', (aka feng shui), and place it deep into your anal cavity.
Windows Vastu.
It's clear that Microsoft's GUI designers have been smoking some pretty serious weed and studying arcane bullshit notions and ologies of myth when you use Vista or IE7.
Of course Slashdot's Vistu is bad...The site is full of the Dark Spirits of No-life Geeks and Noob-bashers. ;)
http://www.webvastu.com/
.. I dunno maybe cuz .. CAUSE IT'S AS UGLY AS GORILLA ORANGUTAN BALLS!!
"When houses, restauants, shops, shopping centers can be made according to the ancient science of Vastu Shastra then why cann't the Websites also follow the same rules"
-Dr. Smita Jain Narang
Gee
(btw, what's a "restauant"?)
While I agree that Slashdot is ugnly as sin, that has to be the worst "evaulation" I've read in a long time.
The page should have less articles so it's "proportionate"? What do they think it is, a book?
sic transit gloria mundi
"Narang reports that of the 500 sites she's redesigned, three-quarters received an immediate boost in traffic."
Good to know this is a professional magazine, where the facts are checked, not one of those lame blogs.
Erk, has anyone taken a look at Dr. Narang's website, The fusion of two sciences, Web Vastu?
More PONIES!
"The page should scroll down for only two or three screens, not six". We need less news! Maybe if the whole world followed vastu shastra we wouldn't have this problem.
i'd like to map my nuts to her face.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Some links to sites she's designed according to these principles would be useful. This is apparently the website of the book: http://www.webvastu.com/ and it more or less exactly fails to please the eye.
If I wrapped it in Eastern Mysticism, they'd get a guru, moving company, and reed sandals.
Stupid, Stupid Rat Sheeple. {...with apologies to Jeff Smith}
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
Assuming that the site for the book (http://www.webvastu.com/) was done according to the principles within it I don't see what this text could offer. My knee-jerk reaction to the aesthetics of the site is that it looks as if it were done using the Frontpage WYSIWYG in 1997. Looking at the HTML the site uses table based design, has presentation markup in the html, and contains a host of other minor errors (i.e. uppercase tags). The CSS http://www.webvastu.com/style.css) is a mess and demonstrates a lack of understanding of modern 'best practices'.
I might be able to accept the idea of some people using such a whishy-washy approach to design if the end product could stand on its own but that's not what I'm seeing by any measure.
Come on now. This is just plain ridiculous. What evidence supports that this actually brings business to the site owner and not to the person analyzing the site?
It's interesting to see that each culture will independently discover the same form of bullshit.
-Grey
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
On my newest aquisition, a 19" widescreen (stop laughing, this is serious) lcd panel, Slashdot's content takes up the whole screen, as it should, expanding to fill available space.
Dr. Narang's website, however, cowers in one corner of the screen, daring not venture out, for fear of losing it's balance. Instead, it ends up looking forlorn, as though it expects my mouse pointer to begin beating it at any moment, knees tucked under it's chin, tears streaming down it's face. It truly is a pathetic, juvenile attempt to create a website.
http://www.webvastu.com/
Yes, it's a picture of beauty which adapts web standards from, er, well from a few years back really.
The site looks like a large blob of curry stains, but boy, is it ever harmonious, with the use of white text on a curry brown background !
Note how the footer is in black italic text and how the whole construct is cunningly created in tables!
Note the subtle use of a ruddy great drop shadow on the logo!
Hear the stunning web page background music when you visit the news page - that sounds like it's playing out of a toilet after a heavy nights drinking in a curry den.
Yes, folks, it's a far better layout than Slashdot, indeed.
After all, who needs good design when you've got Webvastu !
It's harmonious darnit, because we all love muddy brown websites!
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
2. I hate having to click "next page" on sites where the content is mostly text. It's just another set of ads to view and another pause for the page to load.
as much as i don't believe in feng shui; some of it does serve a purpose with common sense, in design we do have things called balance and these are represented by different shapes with different weights when they have an equal mass, not only shapes but also colours have the same impact, just draw a neutral Grey box inside a Green square and a neutral Grey box inside a Blue square. but simply standing back and analyzing what isn't right can be done by anyone, but understanding why it isn't right takes practice and education. like take restaurants, you dont want to put a mirror facing the door as people's psychological impression is theres someone there, feng shui attributes this to 'loosing wealth out the door', also say you have a long Bar thats narrow (pub type of bar), you dont want to use patterns that attribute to the fact that its long, you'll want to break up the area with different patterns or furniture.
all these things can be applied to a website, along with page layout can be applied, a really good read of this can be found in "the Zen of CSS design" - this was a very good read for both technical and design principles.
I can't be the only one who noticed that the lead story of Slashdot on the day they critique the page reads "Mistrust of Today's Technology". I find it ironic that they choose that moment to use ancient pablum to analyse the site. That's right - everything old is new! Fung shui is the new rational thought, vastu is the new fung shui! Why is it that none of the supposedly free-thinking new-age whackjobs out there take you seriously if you're not drawing on the ages-old wisdom of people who thought the world was flat?
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
So will several cups of tea or several glasses of beer.
(As for "...Rob Malda chose an excellent URL, even though it's confusing when read aloud", one wonders why the good doctor thinks the domain name was chosen in the first place.)
What I really want to know is what Web Vastu says about loading up your page with stupid Flash animations so that when you go to a new page, the page slowly drops down or slides in or rolls down, or the letters fly into place one at a time, or something such as that. The people ultimately responsible for the decisions to create pages such as that should be disemboweled and strangled with their own intestines; I'm willing to let the Web designers off if their client demanded it and they really needed the business.)
So does actually reading. Taste foot much?
This design is older then that individual.
Um, the current slashdot site is a redesign from earlier this year. Did you miss all the posts from CmdrTaco evaluating the various design submissions?
Sometimes my arms bend back.
I kinda like the layout. it's not much different than the old version... besides, on-line diffusion methods differ greatly from RL diffusions. so any similarity is purly coincidental. once you are used to a site and its layout, any change from that layout causes confusion and dissemination. sometimes when a site changes too much i stop going there for information. another thing that ticks me off are those late night text-messanging commercials. theres far too many of them. BAH!!!!
For the newbies among us: http://zombo.com/
I'm a designer, and have worked as a consultant for much of my career, and this is the kind of stuff that makes me cringe. She's applying bullshit to design principles, and undermining any productive discussion around form, content, or technologies. And yes, /.'ers, there are such things as "design principles." What really makes me sick is that people are paying for her services.
I propose a new system of enlightened aesthetics, "Ustav," based on the spiritual nature and teachings of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Everything shall be have wings, be curly, and use serif typefaces.
Why? Because when the FSM speaks to me, this is what he tells me. He doesn't speak to you? Well, says more about you than the FSM, doesn't it? NOW PAY ME.
Whoa watch it with that reasonable attitude. That could get you hurt around here.
You mad
She said, "Well, Daddy, if I had some nuts on my chin would those be chin nuts?"
I said "Hell no bitch, you'd have a dick in your mouth! mouth! mouth!"
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
As I posted above, all truth and beauty is http://www.zombo.com/ .
Blessings.
/. should look more like this!
http://www.webvastu.com/index.html
Uh, under preferences.
The link just to the right of the text box that says preferences.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
I'd like to tell this Vastu person the same thing I tell the Feng Sh...way people.
I appreciate what you're trying to do, but I will not hesitate to beat you into a coma with anything you've moved & I kick in the middle of the night.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
It's so t of like a dine .
http://validator.w3.org/check says Result: Failed validation
If you can't get that right you've got no chance.
Common sense is not so common
I don't know anything about the principles of Vastu Shastra but the lady has a point. Slashdot's laziness in revamping their site design and usability is what enabled Digg to completely trump Slashdot's massive head-start and leave it curled up in a ditch, coughing blood.
I do occasionally come back here, mainly because I get pulled in by the RSS feed but, sweet Jesus, the slightly flashier new design still doesn't make up for the random, inadequate nature of the ratings system - if I don't have mod points, I could see the most interesting post but have no way to vote it up. What a ridiculous waste of their readership.
I don't get it. Colored flashing orbs. Nothing else. Someone say "whoosh" and then explain it to me please.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
One more reason I hate my country. India is so religious and stuck in superstitions that it makes you feel sick. I have seen computer scientists ( haha ) arguing
that a star's gravity has effect on your brain and is the reason why astrology is correct.
Guess that's why we have all the dupes and the trolls hanging out around here.
Imagine what it'd be like with a harmonic feng shui or - if you will - vastu inspired design:
- No dupes
- Well written summaries of articles
- Good grammar
- No Ms bashing (you think? really?)
- No trolls
What a load of bollocks. What follows next is the sales pitch to glue some special crystals into the web server to help it reverberate with only good juju, like a cosmic drum ... or whatever.
These are pretty tall words coming from someone with such a shitty website, too; http://www.webvastu.com/ needs more gradients, larger leading, more fonts, narrower columns, and definitely more orange. Especially the orange. For a special treat, disable style sheets: accessibility++. I would make some statement about karma here but (A) I don't know the Indian-equivalent term, and (B) I'm assuming Dr. Smita is in fact already completely blind.
Is it wrong of me to also be cynical that the good doctor can't even spell their own gimmicky 15-seconds-of-fame loanword, "Vastu", consistently on their own website? No, go back to smoking your hookah, doc. Your website is awesome, dude--it's everyone else that's got it wrong.
Check out the official website. Wonderful isn't it?
Last time I saw so much orange was when the dutch fans swarmed into a german airport during Germany 2006. Also, one piece of advice from a friend:
Don't overlay solid red divisions on top of gradient orange/yellow backgrounds, and when you want to do gradients don't do it like this.
It looks totally uncool.
All a matter of taste IMHO.
;-)
:(
Instead of fighting sites with aaptive layout such as slashdot, this guy should fight agains most corporate sites that are not able to handle screens of various size but 1024x768 ! Anybody with a 1980x1200 screen will understand what I mean by "stamp-like-website"
Guys, there are known techniques using CSS (relative font sizing, flexible layout positioning to adapt to screen size !). So to any web UI developer out there, do care or your website will never look optimal on high end computer
Thanks a fucking lot, my 2-month-old kid was finally falling asleep now that it's nearly five in the morning, and then you had to go and write what you did.
I suggest submitting the name change recommendation to Microsoft along with a suggestion that the default skin should paint everything with orange gradients.
Vastu doesn't include validation I guess.3 A%2F%2Fwww.webvastu.com%2F/
http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%
According to her analysis, the ideal slashdot web design is this.
Whoosh. :)
You need to have sound turned on. I think it's poking fun at vacuous marketing promises, dotcom absurdities and the everything-can-be-done-online mentality that gave us the iLoo. Well, "could have given".
I don't know what planet you live on, but digg hasn't - and will never - trump slashdot. Even though digg is successful, it has nothing to do with the slashdot's interface. Digg has more of a "leet hacker" feel to it (at least it did for the 6 months I tried it out), and none of those moronic antics would last a minute here on slashdot. You don't have to be a genius here. Hell, you don't even have to be knowledgeable about the topic you're speaking on. But you do have to be well spoken, and digg is too over-ran with teenagers to ever become a major player in the news website game. The only benefit to digg is the speed at which it's updated. Because the stories don't have to pass through the editors, it tends to be more up-to-the-minute than slashdot. However, the drawback is ever more dupes that slashdot, and the occasional mindless drivel that the kids voted to the front page.
I'm sorry, but I left digg months ago, and I haven't looked back.
Nah.. Slashdot isn't unbalanced it's dynamically stabilised, just like a Segway!
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
And like feng shui, IT'S BULLSHIT!
While the explanations claiming "energies" for Feng Shui may not be correct, the human psychology behind it is. Those same principles may or may not be applicable with regards to web design, but don't discount entirely that which you clearly do not understand.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
http://www.webvastu.com/ - the page is horrendous, I certainly hope people don't adapt her style too much!
Slashdot's moderation system is what makes it unique. It's not perfect, but it works a helluva lot better than anything else. Oh, and yeah, the more mature audience (mostly :-P) helps too
:-P
Now watch me get modded flamebait or something
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
...What she'd make of fark? :-P
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
Relying on someone whose design is somewhat scary and made in glaring colors only (yes, there is an audience for sites like that, no, I don't think tech people would be fond of permanently blazing colors), has no sense of space and prefers to mush things together and applying arbitrary set of rules to all sites no matter what the target audience is. It's like asking Paris Hilton to design work clothes for a fireman.
:) Logo is squished, icons are a bit scary, though been around for so long people are used to them
;) ALWAYS! Because footer needs to be thick. Frankly many pages have no footer at all. Footer and footnotes can't be overloaded as that means "footnote" becomes primary content. These days footers are pretty much reserved for stuff that makes legal department happy. Of course Slashdot has links in the footer too ;)
;) )
Plus, even that short recommendation is full off weirdness.
A) Instability of "horizontal layout" is stupid. Put the pencil down horizontally. Is it unstable? How about standing on it's end?
B) In case of established site URL does not matter, so this point does not apply. If people know that site has interesting stuff on it, they will put a bookmark or remember the address. Easy to type ones are good for radio/tv commercials
C) Yellow? Even CNET toned down their yellow colors lately. Say hello to the world of Taxi Web sites? Green and blue are present as main elements. So... off the point
D) What little graphics there is it's actually not the best feature of the Slashdot
E) I wonder if she never reads anything that is more than 2-3 pages long. Or has that obsessive clicky-clicky-syndrome where person wants, no, needs to click on something NOW! Hence desire to split everything into tiny pages and users that have to use tricks (such as "Print this page") to re-assemble stuff back. Again, technical field pretty much demands more text than, say, some short poems collections
F) About the footer... She has to wear bell-bottoms then
Conclusion: more bullshit than usual, less design and pretty things than one'd think. Slow news day at Wired. Slashdot is not for the customers of Vastu-fied sites (but *gasp!* you already know that
Hyperom.com
Hmmm, let's see...
Apple: those sweatshops are there for the good of mankind, trust me
Google: China? what's China?
Microsoft: Bill Gates is donating billions to charity? it's just a tax dodge!
Yep, I'd say Slashdot is in some serious need of balance
Why was this posted? Is this news for nerds? Is it stuff that matters? Is it anything other than irrelevant bullshit?
I wonder what interesting stories were rejectd so this crap could be posted.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Here is a nice one for this Vastu person:
http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
My eyes, they buuurrnnn...
Her methods are a step back in web development. Using a gimic to convince poor business decision makers.
I had to go visit the Zen Garden to purge myself.
That's so wrong it's difficult to know where to start.
Seroiusly I hate clicking 10 times to view relatively short article or a "gallery" ;]
That's why I use antipagination a FX extension.
A lot of /. readers are full of hot air, so I think Smita is right in saying that there is "too much air flow" in /.
I went to her supposedly "Balanced Site", and I see nothing there that would indicate that it is balanced in any way! Just because she has a "Dr." in front of her name doesn't make her an expert on what is a functional site or not. Besides she's just trolling for responses, so let's let this one die the quick death that it deserves! Here's the one glaring point that the "Dr." misses, and this is a hugely popular site, so much so that when all of us /.'ers read a story, and if there's a link to it the site can be shut down because of all of the traffic from us, and it even has it's own name...that's right the /. Effect! So, her pathetic opinion does not hold water!!!
Thank you.
Even though some follow these 'rules' religiously now, I think they were primarily established to promote good atmosphere/convenience by the ancient people who set it.
And there are always people who try to make money off it, by scaring people into believing that 'something bad' might happen if it isn't followed. And there are people ready to buy them.
Sent from my desktop computer
Since Vastu for buildings is crap, therefore it follows that Vastu for websites smeels even more strongly of ordure.
Here in India vastu has a sporadic following. Otherwise apartment blocks with flats facing every which point of the compass wouldn't be popular - but they are.
Even worse than being ugly, the page uses fixed-width tables for layout:
She shouldn't be writing books on web design; she needs to read quite a few of them first.
And that's her problem...
She wants the function to follow her form.
It lets too many marketing scams on its front page. I mean, why would Slashdot be offended by someone insults their design, and yet designs sites like this one.
This 1995 style homepage with terrible code in desparate need of a complete rewrite.
Yet, she/he (?) just said "Slashdot is out of balance" and you fall for it. I wouldn't post this obvious-things-your-already-know post, if it wasn't happening all the time.
Just few days ago we have a book review article here, of someone who believes good web design involves huge paragraphs of page text rendered as a huge tall GIF image.
Water flow harmony? on a fucking website? Sweet Zombie Jesus...
Slashdot's good water flow is great for the tubes !
I knew it! My faith in Slashdot and Taco have been restored and also I restored the faith to all of you that no one will RTFA! I've once again joined the ranks of people that go off half-cocked and spout out vitriol with only having 1% of the facts. Bravo I say! I'm carrying on a tradition!
Next time, I'll be fully-cocked and won't try to respond to something when I'm half-asleep. I literally wrote that post after being awake for only 2 minutes.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Checkout The press section of that webvastu site; and be knocked out with 3 or more movies/sounds playing alltogether at once ...
;)
It drives me nuts... For so far balance to the mind
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Alexander notes that in modern times the "timeless quality" is gone -- due to monstrous architectural ambitions, and the lack of personal involvement of the homeowner with the building of his own home. I believe that these traditions, such as feng shui, are in essence a collective pattern language. They are a way of preserving those patterns which make a home good to live in. They are indeed phrased using mystical terms, such as the 4 elements and the like, but what they're saying through these terms essentially sums up to something like Alexander says. So I agree with the insightful anonymous of some comments ago, saying it's "common sense" -- only it's a bit more than common sense -- it's the collective common sense of whole communities gathered for years of collective living in homes and building them.
The question remains if this applies to websites. I believe it is not.
Is this some kinda Web 2.0 thingy? [ROTFL]
No, seriously. Without this fifth element, we're all doomed.
Its ok for people to scoff and laugh at this kind of thing, but if you look into the misty roots of mankind you'll see that Vastu Shastra, just like Feng Shui, is another part of the art of "separating people from their money."
These arts can be bring you closer to what the ancient sages called the "state of complete bankruptcy."
Life is both river and mountain, ocean and sky
To know life is to be part of life
Please give me a cheque for the full amount now
Namaste
A friend of mine is a Vastu consultant and from what he's told me about it, this is total bullshit. Vastu is primarily about aligning a the energy of a building with the magnetics of the planet and so on, which is impossible to apply to a website.
...using Google, and the best I could come up with is this. It's an absolutely ugly reddish, brownish, yellowish turd of a web site. Is that the ideal we are supposed to be striving for? Does anybody see the irony in trying to hawk a book about web design using an ugly website?
Since when do we care what a woman thinks about Slashdot?
This phrase summarizes the only real redeaming quality of "sciences" like Feng Shui.
The truth is, there is no "science" behind these collective wisdoms. But that doesn't mean all of the conclusions derived are by definition wrong. Unscientific and wrong are not the same thing.
Once upon a time, collective wisdom (in some areas of human civilization) stated that the sun rose every day, carried on the chariot of a God. One could argue that this perception derived from the collective experience of a shared physical observation, the human desire to understand that experience, and the state of human understanding of the world at the time. Many religious beliefs could be seen to have possibly been derived this way.
Now, a citizen could use that understanding to predict the sun would rise the next day (cloud cover aside). Very unscientific, as the belief Helios was at work was based on very unprovable assumptions. But the prediction could hardly be called wrong.
Collective wisdom can provide valuable information, even if the method it is arrived at is little more tha trial and error with a folk explanation on top of it. The folk explanation could be seen as being a handed down tag-on from a "knowledgible leader" ages back who capatilized on mankind's need to understand as a means of self promotion.
Vastu is not just for the building. My dad would not sleep with his head to the South. Had to completely rearrange the bedroom furniture to accommodate him. If only all the Vastu rules were so easy and painless to implement ...
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Did you use feng shui to determine the aesthetics of your post's punctuation?
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
First, it says the page is too wide, then, it says the page is too long, making it out of proportion with it's wideness... That simple contradiction alone is what makes me think the analysis is nonsense.
White America buys this crap because they have no culture of their own. Go ahead and ask the average white person where they came from, what are some of their origin's cultural practices, food or langauge of that came from their ancestors. All you'll get is a blank stare. Its because most white people are muts, mixed up so badly they don't know who they are. No wonder they have to resort to stealing other people's culture.
But I don't come here to look at a pretty site, I come here for the articles.
And the links to pretty site.
Can I bum a sig?
The cover article of the print issue that contained this was "The New Atheism: No Heaven. No Hell. Just Science. Inside the crusade against religion" - and then they have an article based on some woo-woo bullshit...
Vastu Shastra is NOT website shastra. Its for structures only. Its no good using a part of vastushastra [emblems and company] and thus half baked calculations for websites! What next, Aye Karamaba, Abra ka Dabra?
From her Website
"We all know that the five elements that comprise the human and the world are called the "Paanchbhootas".
Yeah, that's what I call common knowledge
Isn't that grey header the left-over of a blocked ad banner?
No wonder that slashdot is unbalanced if you remove crucial parts with an adblocker.
Er.. shouldn't it be Shastra (sanskrit for education, knowledge)? At least the good doctor should know what she is specializing in ;-)
Exactly, there is NO science or anything behind it other than someone trying to scam someone who is either undereducated and rich or uninformed and rich out of money. It is the atypical scam and she is simply casting her net wide to see what kind of marks she can zero in on.
Glad to see India catching up to the scam artists here in the USA. It's a greaat sign they are nearing the end of their prosperity explosive growth and some of the lower moral level people are exploring new ways of keeping money from other countries flowing to thier personal accounts.
BTW: for 1/3rd the price I will not only do the exact same consultation for you but I will also give you a energy reading for your website and give you a list of the dead that think it appeals to them, Believe me I'm an expert! in fact I'm so much an expert I dont even haveto see your websiteand I already have your analysis finished and ready to download.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Umm... I wonder what she had to say about Wired's website.... Maybe she couldnt even say anything because she was too busy using a dremel tool on her eyeballs.
THE MAGIC WORDS ARE SQUEAMISH OSSIFRAGE
Ah, now I know why I feel a strange disturbance in the Force every time I visit Slashdot -- as if a million web designers cried out all at once and then suddenly went silent.
The Big News Page
"D: Type and Graphics. The graphics and sans serif font induce good Water flow." Gee, I always wondered why viewing slashdot gave me the irresistable urge to pee.
I believe here we can find the true source of the imbalance on Slashdot!
Similar to the upcoming US election results
The 100 on top are to balance the flow of train car.
...Am I the only person here that *likes* the new Slashdot layout?
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
...I spotted a bit of thinking the other day re: treating web page design as typographic design. Most of the web is text, ergo it should be designed to maximally benefit its use, ie. ability to communicate quickly and accurately to the user. Something typography has been fine-tuning for the past several hundred years.
And it made sense to me.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Irrespective of the gender confusion of parent, or the relative merits of using Vastu Shasta in preference to Feng Shui or one of the western astrological website balancing methods, this website designer needs some serious help:
A website designer needs to be held to a very high standard of compliance. This website designer fails it.
This post deserves to be modded as very, very funny...
Hmmm. There's an awful lot of hot air floating around here...
I was under the impression Slashcode was open source. That being the case, all this lady has to do is fork the code, set up a site and see what survives. If her ideas are not without merit, that's a good thing, everybody gets to enjoy the benefits. Otherwise her theories will be consigned to oblivion.
Nothing personal, and nothing to get steamed up about.
I don't know about you, but in my opinion, the author's site (http://www.webvastu.com/) looks like hell. Content boxes that look like google adwords, wide image borders, red backgrounds and white text? I'd say Slashdot looks much better than that.
From your link's main page:
'We all know that the five elements that comprise the human and the world are called the "Paanchbhootas"'
Priceless!.
I'm going to scratch my paanchbhootas for a while. Bye. Hugs & kisses. Over
(I haven't seen that Penn and Teller presentation.) IMHO, the key questions are: are there "laws" of aesthetics which can be modelled? Does Feng Shui happen to be (or include) that model?
If I had to answer the first question, as a scientist, I would probably just poll a whole bunch of people to try to figure out peoples' opinions of a bunch of test cases, and then look for a pattern. And yet, I have a bad feeling about this, because I already know that my polls aren't going to reveal that 99% like this and 1% like that. Everything is going to be so subjective and inconsistent.
Of course, I haven't actually run the poll. But I've made a prediction about it. Maybe the first step of a scientific investigation is to check my predicition of unpredictability, against an actual poll. ;-)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
nope, but i did encrypt it
See subject.
Software patents delenda est.
Ahhh! Many thanks. You are quite right -- speakers were muted. ;-)
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Strange,
Vastu is my name, Utsav, backwards. Utsav means festival in Hindi.
In this very discussion already we have blue (water), white (air), and several flamewars, why he think we are not vastu compliant?
Well, NOW we do. Thanks for the update!
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
Actually in a way this does make sense, after reading the quick summary photo that lists /.'s "errors" I can see where there's room for improvement. I think what she's aiming at would be to: /. could trim down the page width personally I like it the way that it is. /. to actually figure out that I needed to spell s-l-a-s-h-d-o-t.
A) I'm not certain how
B) URL is great, but like she says it is confusing. It took me several tries when I was first looking for
C) take the Slashdot banner and simply remove the black header altogether (why its so large on her screen grab is beyond me, but I'm using FF so maybe there's a difference?)
D) She likes the font and graphics so those are cool, apparently not even a comment about the icons being squished
E) Her complaint about the screen being too long could be fixed simply by shortening the side info bars and making the headlines scroll independently of a fixed set of side links. Tables can do this, I suppose CSS would also work though I've not worked much with CSS.
F)The footer being a more earthy color, would lend a little bit of balance to the color palette of the site but isn't terrible as is.
Any ways that's just my $.50
I just love seeing someone posting mangled grammar and a misspelling of righteous then go on to look 'down' on those with sub average IQs...
Too bad her website is so fugly... http://www.webvastu.com/index.html
Penn & Teller did a great show covering Feng shui. (It was pretty funny having several experts on the topic independently do their work, and have absoultey zero consistency between them, for a supposed ancience "science.") The name of their series ("BullSh*t"), pretty much sums it up. I expect a lot of the same would apply for this new science of web science beauty...
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
She is just jealous....
I'm seeing a lot of discussion here that really hits home with me, because I'm right now trying to figure out how to deal with mystics. I'm totally nonmystical, nonreligious, etc, but I've gotten myself into a funny situation where I live with a massage therapist that informally practices half a dozen different religions, is full of countless bizarre, pseudoscientific, and mystical beliefs, and who often talks about "energy" in a way that is not one half em vee squared, or power multiplied by time.
What I have found is that while I am intellectually convinced that it's all bullshit, it is also very clear that she knows something that I don't. When she talks about "energy flowing" from my thoughts, or "EMF" from my computer, it helps to interpret these things as metaphors for things that are real.
Some examples:
You don't have to buy into mysticism to know that some people are sensitive to things you aren't. There is a whole world happening under my nose that I know nothing about, and even if it's not faeries and dragons and psychic rays, doesn't mean it's nonexistent or fraud, either. So when someone starts talking about a website's "vastu," don't worry about their terminology or the goofy models. Just listen to their suggestions, maybe try them out, and see if it works. If it turns out that they're right, and you're curious how they knew what to change, then maybe abstract away their terminology as metaphors for concepts that you don't know about (yet). Then try to learn those
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Well, even though spaces are not technically legal in a URL, there's no actual reason to encode them in a URL, because space has no special meaning when parsing a URL, unlike [:/?&=%#+]
Also, URLs are not the only things inside HTML attributes. What about alt tags for images? Those often have spaces.
HTML was designed to be loose to encourage adoption... which worked! But now we are stuck with a good deal of broken HTML and browsers that have to do a lot of guesswork, which leads to MORE platform incompatibilities. The more regular and consistent a language is, the less errors you are going to have. Period. Things like missing quotes can be detected by the parser and are easy to fix.
I think Firefox needs to start popping up warning dialogs for bad HTML.
Now, I completely disagree that a web designer - a visual/interaction designer - should have to know all the ins and outs of all the standards. That's why you have web production people. They are two completely separate disciplines (well, three, visual and interaction design are quite different from each other).
-If
Run a pencil-and-paper RPG campaign with your far-off friends: Gametable!
and of course, half-remembered first year philosophy augmented with skimread wikipedia has its downfalls. modus tollens (if a then b; !b; therefore, !a) is valid. I was thinking of the (if a then b; b; therefore, a) form, which is invalid, and what I first wrote before deciding to check if it was correct :P
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
... Bullshit. Besides anyone can see that the silver, blue, grey, and white color theme/ page layout is remeniscient of Star Trek TNG and is therefore soothing and assuring to /.'s target audience.
We are all just people.
A) agree.
t eid=ibm&location=canada&user=12315asdfasdggfdjsdfg &destination=developer"
B) I disagree -- a site with an URL of "http://www.ibm.com/developer" is much more appealing to me at a deep level than "http://www.ibm.com/checkurl?id=sdafwerud23432&si
C) Yellow sucks -- its the most apparent colour to the human eye, so use it sparingly or appropriately. Her own website gave me a headache looking at the title bar.
D) Graphically, depends on your audience. I think Slashdot could use a little spice in the background graphics and such (not where the text is, but in between). Several good CSS demos (CSS Zen garden for example) show how to do this tastefully.
E) Scrolling sucks, but its necessary. Do your users prefer scrolling or clicking? Do whichever makes them happier. Offer a copy of each and see which one people use more. Try iframes and such, etc.
F) Footers get ignored by most people, period.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
The process entails mapping page attributes - HTML, colors, graphics - to elements like fire, water, and air. 'Any disturbance of these established elements can cause an imbalance in the site that directly affects its business,' Narang says.
Ah! That explains why her site has all the hits, and the millions reading it every single day and commenting and fighting about posts and reviews. Slashdot business, on the other hand, is doing bad. So bad that they have to take orders for articles by individual e-mail.I'm a western yobbo and even I knew that.
I don't know if she designed this website, but if that's her vision of perfect design, God help us all. http://www.webvastu.com/
how is babby formed?
"While the explanations claiming "energies" for Feng Shui may not be correct, the human psychology behind it is."
Yeah. There's a sucker born every minute.
The mind is affected by the relative world. Or perhaps you'd behave the same if you walked into a beautifully designed church as opposed to a toxic waste dump. AFAIK, the principles of Feng Shui are all about the relationship of the mind with the environment, and that that relationship exists is extremely obvious.
The problem is, I DO understand it.
Ha ha! Shouting at stupid people to make them understand.
btw, Feng Shui takes many years of discipline to understand. One must have a stable mind and a keen appreciation of subtleties and ascetics, and a deep understanding of the human mind and it's facets. Such people are generally kind and tactful, and generally don't presume to know things that they don't (that's called pride, which is related to earth), nor yell about them either (that's anger, related to water). I believe that understanding the nature of pride/anger and their relationship to the mind is part of understanding Feng Shui. Extraordinarly smart people spend decades trying to understand the nature of their own mind and emotions, and according to recent scientific research into the nature of happiness, they are easily the happiest people on this earth.
This is why I call it like I see it. Bullshit. First to last.
I live at a complex in the country that was designed by a Feng Shui expert, and it rocks. No really, it's beautiful, and people say so who visit. For us, hiring the Feng Shui consultant was an excellent investment.
First to last??? Perhaps you've never visited such a place???
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Slashdot is just an electronic version of a bulletin board, which has centuries of history in the western world. You know, the people that invented the printing press?
(half joking, but I'm definitely 100% sick of people trying to start fads like this in order to hawk overpriced services and 'consulting')
That's rich. Feng Shui has nothing to do with aesthetics. It's hit or miss whether it can achieve that goal or not. It certainly doesn't specifically try to optimize anything that we can identify as being aesthetically pleasing or not; part of that might be in the interpretation of the "sacred rules" through the eyes of what amounts to be an interior designer. It's his or her aesthetic sense coming out (which is probably going to be shitty since he or she can't cut it as the real thing) and they couch it in Feng Shui or Vastu or whatever Eastern crap to justify their decisions.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Now, if you need to do something fancy with XML (like, apply a transformation, or build/test an XPath expression) and you don't have much experience with it, I can see the value of XML Spy. But for writing an XML document with a schema that I'm familiar with? I'd rather use Programmer's Notepad or something.
I like nano and vim in Unix, as well as gEdit. (Really, gEdit is nice for a GUI editor, you should try it).
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
"When houses, restauants, shops, shopping centers can be made according to the ancient science of Vastu Shastra then why cann't the Websites also follow the same rules" Hmmm.. Seems like I remember a book that answers this question. http://www.amazon.com/Web-Pages-That-Suck-Looking/ dp/078212187X/ref=pd_sim_b_1/002-7345104-9047259
Vastu shastra confirms it, Slashdot is dying!
This site is nothing appealling - http://www.webvastu.com/. Brown and yellow is ugly and the gradient shading makes it feels tacky.
She must be new here.
licet differant, aequabitur
Unless you're a fan of "print... [next page]... print... [next page]... etc"
First of all, I do web design almost for a living. So I will pretend that I know a thing or two.
No visitors and you have to rely on Fenshui and Vastu to lure them? WTF? This smells like total bullshit all over the place. It also spells R I D I C U L O U S
If you want to attract more users, do the followings
In this age of science and yet the fact that this "Dr." woman caught on popular is an amazing indication that some CxO guys are extremely, sorry, stupid.
So here's something from Buddhism: karma - cause and effect. If you follow this woman's "advices", your site will soon be vanished. Don't blame the media for popularizing her, blame your stupidity to listen to bullshitter.
Sorry for the bad language, it's late (2:33AM) and I am trying to be as critical as possible.
http://www.alexle.net