Month: August 2003

Another RSS Bigot joins the fold. Get with the program, people, and recognize how valuable an RSS feed is for your site!

Jenny Levine, Exactly!

Count me in as an RSS (and other feed formats) Bigot.

On the same topic, and further to yesterday’s post, how many Flash websites–for musicians in particular–boast RSS or iCalendar feeds? None that I’ve seen; they can’t even be scraped. Conversely, many non-Flash websites do have them; see Emm Gryner’s Journal, Newsfront, Website Updates, and Tour Dates for some good examples.

Finally, and off-topic, I wanted to call this post RSS Bigotry or something similar, but I’m not interested in the Google traffic the word bigot in the title will generate. Anti-keywords, anyone?

Flash sucks.

Well, that’s not entirely true: it’s the uses of Flash that suck. Flash websites suck. Flash ads suck. Flash used for the sake of using Flash sucks.

Even website designers recognize this: when’s the last time you saw one of those bloated Flash introductions without a skip button prominently displayed right next to it? (Extra points off for irony: the put-the-skip-button-inside-the-Flash-intro pattern.)

(A lot of the above goes for Java applets used in similar situations, but at least it’s useful on the server side too.)

When doesn’t Flash suck? It’s probably indicative of how bad things are that only one site comes to mind: Homestar Runner, home of Strong Bad’s e-mail.

This rant brought to you by a guy who’s seen one too many pointless Flash sites today. And the letter Z… that’s zed, not zee, and is a topic for another day.

Serendipity: Tim Bray’s post on a similar topic, published at 10:42pm local time but which I didn’t see in my aggregator until just now. Although he does use the phrase Flash sucks, the gist of the article is this: given the choice of a Flash UI or an HTML one, users …ended up going for the HTML version every time.

Mark Pilgrim points out Andrew Clover‘s parasite detector, which automatically searches for spyware etc. when a Windows Internet Explorer user browses to a webpage. As of now I’ve installed it on the main and most-requested pages of this site as a public service.

As Mark says, IE sucks. Use a better browser.

By now most everyone’s heard of the FIR technique for replacing plain text with images using CSS. Stuart Langridge has come up with a (better?) solution that doesn’t require extra tags, which I presume from the URL is to be referred to as LIR. It doesn’t seem to have garnered much attention to date, so I’m going to do my small part to make it better-known. I’m in the midst of my Sirens website redesign and didn’t relish the thought of having to go back to add <span/>s everywhere, so Stuart’s idea appeared at just the right time.