... when you're visualizing yourself as thinner in VR and you AREN'T chowing down on chips/nachos/doritos/pizza/chinese food/raw cookie dough/pure lard while throwing back soda/beer/coffee/pure liquified lard the entire time.
Which, unfortunately, is why I'm *not* thinner after all these years of online gaming...
How stupid is it that my google search returned me to the site where I read the original article... AND I DIDN'T NOTICE?
Honestly. I looked at the article, which was on websiteoptimizations.com, and then I found the site analyzer via google, which was on websiteoptimizations.com, and all I could think of at the time was "huh. They used the same css template."
I read the article... I didn't pay attention to the URL.:P
So after a quick google I found a site called websiteoptimization.com that let me plug in my url and it measured my site size. It was rather depressing.
I... honestly didn't think it was going to be that bad. It would take about a minute and a half for someone using a 56K modem to view my front page...
about 130000 bytes would be removed if I dropped the banner advertising. 6000 bytes would go away if I dropped google analytics.
Not sure how to trim down the javascript and css. I use a lot of Drupal modules and pretty much every Drupal module has its own css file, and trying to do away with them entirely is an invitation to really screwing up my site formatting. And I'm not a programmer so I have no idea what all that javascript is for anyway -- I can't take it out because I don't know where it is and I don't know what it's doing.
But... sheesh. When my site was static, on my most days my total page size was under 80K, and that *included* the webcomic. This is kind of depressing...
I mean, I can look at file sizes on my server and see that if I add all the graphics and html and css up into a single number then my front page averages 100-120K (which is mostly taken up by my webcomic, and the css file is only counted once for the entire site so even though it's much larger than I'd prefer -- nearly 20K -- it's much better than it could be) but that doesn't factor in banner ads, or any of the extra files Drupal includes that I can't immediately keep track of, or any other factors that I may not have thought of.
So is there a site where you can toss in your URL and it reads your page size? Sort of like those sites that will validate your xhtml and css for you?
I'm not a doctor. But that's sort of a point -- parents who aren't doctors don't really KNOW if the earache is something that will pass or something that is indicative of a serious infection, and at 1am when there are no experts to actively consult they're faced with the choice of either waiting to see if it will pass or taking the kid to get help. Guess what? Sometimes parents aren't willing to risk waiting to see if it will pass.
... then it's a list of names of people and the known aliases of people who commit crimes but who haven't been apprehended yet. Usually crimes like extortion, terrorism, racketeering, international stuff that makes it difficult to just walk up to someone, put cuffs on them, and haul them off to jail.
Which isn't to say this can't lead to rampant abuse -- it certainly can -- but the idea of the list is more along the lines of "this is a guy who is suspected of being involved in illegal activity right this very moment -- do not do business with him" rather than "this is a guy who just got out of jail last week -- do not do buseinss with him."
Also, what are talking about with mentioning hospitals??? You surely aren't going to a hospital on a regular basis are you?? Those are for emergencies only....I hope you're not basing your healthcare on trips to the ER!!
Your kid wakes up screaming because he has an earrache at 1 in the morning... "honey, let's call up the family doctor and get him to come over here on the double!"
"Dear... doctor's don't make house calls any more."
"Then let's take the kid down to the doctor's office!"
"The Doctor won't be in till 9."
(You looks at the kid, still screaming at the top of his lungs.)
"We... could wait a few hours I guess..."
"The first they can work us in is probably 3 or 4 pm."
I'm not a lawyer so as far as I know this *is* legal, but... how can it be? How can your license forbid someone from using another license for a different product? Aren't antitrust laws that specifically forbid that?
... but some kind of sites are going to have more challenges than others.
For example, I publish a few webcomics (at Ubersoft.net). A webcomic is an image file (in my case, pngs) which are flat-out useless to the blind. Now, there are specifications about how graphics should be used to make them useful to the blind (i.e., include a complete description of the graphic within the img tag -- using "alt" I think, though I'm not sure) but this seems counterproductive. Webcomics as a whole are somewhat useless to the blind because they are a visual medium. Granted, my art is lousy and static but it is still presented visually.
So how much trouble should I, a publisher of a medium that seems to fundamentally work against a blind man or woman's browsing experience, put into making my site accessible to them?
As it happens, I do try some, though I am unfamiliar with the latest accessibility guidelines. I use css and xhtml (as best I can) to tag the site properly and make it navigable to a screen reader. This is a bit challenging since the publishing system I'm using (Drupal) makes it difficult for me to sift through everything, but I'm making slow progress. I've also started transcribing my comic archives -- primarily to make them searchable by my site's search engine, but one of my readers pointed out that it also allows a blind visitor to actually read the dialog.
There are other types of sites -- political discussion sites, news sites, sites like Slashdot -- where accessibility would be far more useful. The web was originally primarily text, and on sites where the content is still primarily text there's no reason it can't be designed to make that text more easily accessible to the visually impaired.
... to prevent people from altering their posts in ways that will make the rest of a thread impossible to understand. There is a particularly clever kind of trolling where someone creates a rabidly inflammatory post, waits until a horde of people have responded to the over-the-top comments in that post, and then re-edits the original so that the criticism is a lot more even-tempered... which makes it appear that the people who are responding to the post in its original form have gone off the deep end. Not being able to edit your posts pretty much makes that impossible.
... oy. Why choose a word that means both "being at rest; quiet; still; inactive or motionless" and "Having the power or quality of acting; causing change; communicating action or motion; acting" for the news headline? (Dictionary.com Definitions)
In unrelated news, the inventor of Silly Putty sued Nokia for violating it's patent "re-transmission of news and other media via the transfer of newsprint by chemically-induced process."
... I mean people living in the United States. I still occasionally suffer from the conceit that everyone who reads the same web site I do is obviously from the same country.
Next, they'll get the phone companies to give them the phone records of all Afghani citizens who may be saying mean things about the Taliban. That's when we'll know the Taliban are on their way to becoming a full-fledged modern democracy like us.
... then I think I'd be willing to buy one. Although I really don't like the way they look. Still, I could suffer through the faux-Jetson design if it's a genuine 100mpg driving experience.
I do dread the inevitable tech support calls, though.
I suppose that depends on exactly how thoroughly this patch can screw up a hard drive. The advantage of booting to the CD is that it avoids the hard drive altogether, loads the recovery tools, and then lets you have a go at it.
Slashdot Mirror
I just needed to pad the list a little. I claim poetic license. :)
... when you're visualizing yourself as thinner in VR and you AREN'T chowing down on chips/nachos/doritos/pizza/chinese food/raw cookie dough/pure lard while throwing back soda/beer/coffee/pure liquified lard the entire time.
Which, unfortunately, is why I'm *not* thinner after all these years of online gaming...
How stupid is it that my google search returned me to the site where I read the original article... AND I DIDN'T NOTICE?
:P
Honestly. I looked at the article, which was on websiteoptimizations.com, and then I found the site analyzer via google, which was on websiteoptimizations.com, and all I could think of at the time was "huh. They used the same css template."
I read the article... I didn't pay attention to the URL.
So after a quick google I found a site called websiteoptimization.com that let me plug in my url and it measured my site size. It was rather depressing.
Total size of the home page: 384617 bytes
6550 bytes html
311512 bytes images
2696 bytes css images
(314208 bytes total images)
36366 bytes javascript
27493 bytes css files
I... honestly didn't think it was going to be that bad. It would take about a minute and a half for someone using a 56K modem to view my front page...
about 130000 bytes would be removed if I dropped the banner advertising. 6000 bytes would go away if I dropped google analytics.
Not sure how to trim down the javascript and css. I use a lot of Drupal modules and pretty much every Drupal module has its own css file, and trying to do away with them entirely is an invitation to really screwing up my site formatting. And I'm not a programmer so I have no idea what all that javascript is for anyway -- I can't take it out because I don't know where it is and I don't know what it's doing.
But... sheesh. When my site was static, on my most days my total page size was under 80K, and that *included* the webcomic. This is kind of depressing...
I mean, I can look at file sizes on my server and see that if I add all the graphics and html and css up into a single number then my front page averages 100-120K (which is mostly taken up by my webcomic, and the css file is only counted once for the entire site so even though it's much larger than I'd prefer -- nearly 20K -- it's much better than it could be) but that doesn't factor in banner ads, or any of the extra files Drupal includes that I can't immediately keep track of, or any other factors that I may not have thought of.
So is there a site where you can toss in your URL and it reads your page size? Sort of like those sites that will validate your xhtml and css for you?
I'm not a doctor. But that's sort of a point -- parents who aren't doctors don't really KNOW if the earache is something that will pass or something that is indicative of a serious infection, and at 1am when there are no experts to actively consult they're faced with the choice of either waiting to see if it will pass or taking the kid to get help. Guess what? Sometimes parents aren't willing to risk waiting to see if it will pass.
... then it's a list of names of people and the known aliases of people who commit crimes but who haven't been apprehended yet. Usually crimes like extortion, terrorism, racketeering, international stuff that makes it difficult to just walk up to someone, put cuffs on them, and haul them off to jail.
Which isn't to say this can't lead to rampant abuse -- it certainly can -- but the idea of the list is more along the lines of "this is a guy who is suspected of being involved in illegal activity right this very moment -- do not do business with him" rather than "this is a guy who just got out of jail last week -- do not do buseinss with him."
Your kid wakes up screaming because he has an earrache at 1 in the morning... "honey, let's call up the family doctor and get him to come over here on the double!"
"Dear... doctor's don't make house calls any more."
"Then let's take the kid down to the doctor's office!"
"The Doctor won't be in till 9."
(You looks at the kid, still screaming at the top of his lungs.)
"We... could wait a few hours I guess..."
"The first they can work us in is probably 3 or 4 pm."
"... Right. Off to the emergency room."
I'm not a lawyer so as far as I know this *is* legal, but... how can it be? How can your license forbid someone from using another license for a different product? Aren't antitrust laws that specifically forbid that?
... but some kind of sites are going to have more challenges than others.
For example, I publish a few webcomics (at Ubersoft.net). A webcomic is an image file (in my case, pngs) which are flat-out useless to the blind. Now, there are specifications about how graphics should be used to make them useful to the blind (i.e., include a complete description of the graphic within the img tag -- using "alt" I think, though I'm not sure) but this seems counterproductive. Webcomics as a whole are somewhat useless to the blind because they are a visual medium. Granted, my art is lousy and static but it is still presented visually.
So how much trouble should I, a publisher of a medium that seems to fundamentally work against a blind man or woman's browsing experience, put into making my site accessible to them?
As it happens, I do try some, though I am unfamiliar with the latest accessibility guidelines. I use css and xhtml (as best I can) to tag the site properly and make it navigable to a screen reader. This is a bit challenging since the publishing system I'm using (Drupal) makes it difficult for me to sift through everything, but I'm making slow progress. I've also started transcribing my comic archives -- primarily to make them searchable by my site's search engine, but one of my readers pointed out that it also allows a blind visitor to actually read the dialog.
There are other types of sites -- political discussion sites, news sites, sites like Slashdot -- where accessibility would be far more useful. The web was originally primarily text, and on sites where the content is still primarily text there's no reason it can't be designed to make that text more easily accessible to the visually impaired.
... to prevent people from altering their posts in ways that will make the rest of a thread impossible to understand. There is a particularly clever kind of trolling where someone creates a rabidly inflammatory post, waits until a horde of people have responded to the over-the-top comments in that post, and then re-edits the original so that the criticism is a lot more even-tempered... which makes it appear that the people who are responding to the post in its original form have gone off the deep end. Not being able to edit your posts pretty much makes that impossible.
... but it gets me every time. :)
*shakes fist at lack of edit button*
... for their NEW international standard, "how to act like a complete jackass when deciding to adopt an international standard."
... oy. Why choose a word that means both "being at rest; quiet; still; inactive or motionless" and "Having the power or quality of acting; causing change; communicating action or motion; acting" for the news headline? (Dictionary.com Definitions)
Couldn't have happened to a nicer power-hungry, scheming, ruthlessly amoral company devoted to tearing down anything that it doesn't own.
... it looks like the laptops of the future all have crappy keyboards.
It's the whole "gee, look, with touch-sensitive screens we can paint a keyboard on the screen that you can use instead of an actual keyboard!"
How the heck are you supposed to touch-type on something that gives you no tactile response?
... but lumpy.
It's a very TINY handle. And you need to jiggle it in order to get it to flush properly.
We can give a bunch of ISP's g-ratings, then we can consolidate all of them and refer to it as the g-spot.
...and then wait to see how long it takes for them to notice.
In unrelated news, the inventor of Silly Putty sued Nokia for violating it's patent "re-transmission of news and other media via the transfer of newsprint by chemically-induced process."
... I mean people living in the United States. I still occasionally suffer from the conceit that everyone who reads the same web site I do is obviously from the same country.
Next, they'll get the phone companies to give them the phone records of all Afghani citizens who may be saying mean things about the Taliban. That's when we'll know the Taliban are on their way to becoming a full-fledged modern democracy like us.
... then I think I'd be willing to buy one. Although I really don't like the way they look. Still, I could suffer through the faux-Jetson design if it's a genuine 100mpg driving experience.
I do dread the inevitable tech support calls, though.
I suppose that depends on exactly how thoroughly this patch can screw up a hard drive. The advantage of booting to the CD is that it avoids the hard drive altogether, loads the recovery tools, and then lets you have a go at it.