RasterWeb!

I’ve been thinking about a few of the features you see on some web sites, mainly the ‘send to a friend’ type thing that lets you fill out a form to send someone a link. I almost never use this, but is it because:

• The function is built into my browser
• I fear the use of my name/email for evil purposes
• I have no friends

I wonder what kind of stats are kept on such a feature and if there is added value to the user in it.

The other feature I question is the ‘print this page’ feature, which (usually) allows you to print a page without the navigation doodads and silly banner ads. I’ve worked on sites that have implemented this, and four years ago it made sense, but now that we have browsers that properly handle print style sheets, is this really needed anymore? Do you ever use it to print a page?

I’m contemplating the importance of such extra features in relation to taking a page and stripping it down, providing to the user only that which adds value. Less is more, right?

I welcome any comments on this….

Those folks at Slim Devices have done it again, this time with the Squeezebox, a wifi enabled network music player. (See review.)

I like these guys, even though the SLIMP3 and Squeezebox don’t really have a place in my lifestyle (lack of budget and lack of listening to music in the home) I’m happy to see them make great products. And to top it all off, they’re a great example of a company that benefits from open-source software, while also giving back to the community. The server software is written in perl and you can download it and use it even without their device. they are also open to the hacker community, and welcome their work.

It’s good to see Slim Devices make cool hardware that people like, and cool software that people can use as they wish. Good Luck guys!

File under: D.I.Y.: Using a Linux box as a sign…

See PHP::Strings:

PHP has many functions. This is one of the main problems with PHP.

Any function that would be silly to implement has not been and has been marked as such in this documentation. They will still be exportable, but if you attempt to use said function you will get an error telling you to read these docs.

heh…

I had a brief discussion with an IT guy about Firebird, and what it might take to get his organization using it instead of IE. (The subject came up when he was giving advice about preventing popup ads and spyware installations.) It turns out he actually uses Firebird at home, but since it was still not quite done, and in beta, as it were, if they deployed Firebird, they would have to do it again when it became an official release. I mentioned that deployment of Firebird to a large number of machines should be pretty easily automated, to which he agreed. His next point was that Firebird was a nice browser, but besides tabbed browsing and blocking popups, what real improvements did it offer the users? Hmmm, what indeed… He also mentioned that changing a piece of software that a user uses can cause familiarity problems. This is true, but for most casual browser users, are the differences that dramatic? Knowing that he’s a big fan of Microsoft, I didn’t push the issue, but I am interested in what it will take for Firebird to get into large, often slow-moving organizations, taking the place of IE.