Do you want me as a customer or not?

I just had to assume the rant position on this one. I just had the worst web site usability experience ever. Well, maybe that's an exaggeration. The worst website usability experience in over a week. A month at the outside.

I signed up for a free trial of an online software solution, as you do, and wanted to ask the customer service department if they supported PayPal as a payment method as that's my preferred mode of operation for online stuff. Seems to fit well: online service, online payment.

Off to the contact form I go....

The evil Super Admin Password

So you've survived a disaster, fire or other adverse event, and you need to shift staff home to work because the office is a pile of smoking rubble. Their PC's from work are by a stroke of luck usable, and they've got broadband. Two thumbs up there.

But about that printer driver you need... It requires admin rights. The domain controller, well it's at the bottom of a crack in the earth, or in the IT guys garage.

Random password generator update

Firstly a big thanks for the feedback I've received on the random password generator I stuck on the site a wee while ago, it's had quite a bit of traffic so I'm going to assume it's been of use to more than just myself!

I've fixed a minor bug where occasionally it would produce a password shorter than the length selected, which caused confusion for at least one person.....

Website Indexation on Google Part One

The web site at work has many issues, and one of the slightly vexing ones was that a site: search on google only showed 540 odd of the 1100 pages in our site map.  Google webmaster tools was showing 770 pages indexed, but that still left  400 pages missing in action.

I'm a realist and understand that google will never index everything you offer up, but we also have the paid version of google site search and it can't find those pages either which is a little more annoying as that means that visitors who are already on our site might not be able to find something.

The real problem with partial indexation is where to start. What is it that Google hasn't indexed exactly? How do you get the all seeing google to tell  which of the 1100 pages are included.....

Productivity tools can be viable alternatives to work

Ever since some smart chap, or chappess, came up with the idea of a check list and impressed the boss the world has been beset with a search for bigger, better tools to replace what was essentially a very good idea.

Taken to the it's illogical conclusion this search can lead even the most sensible people to a point where the productivity tools themselves are a very viable alternative to work.

Gantt charts, mind maps, flow charts, to do lists, issues registers and all manners of witchcraft will not be of much use if you're woefully disorganised. Conversely if you're a maniacally organised.....

Another bite of the Apple: Postscripts for the electronic age

Out in the real world where sales people send physical letters it's common practice to use a postscript, or P.S. at the foot of a letter or proposal. It increases engagement with the item, and gives you a little extra punt at the end of your message.

Truth be known you'll probably find that a percentage of people read the postscript first as it stands out at the bottom of the page. This is by design with companies deliberately folding material into the envelope so the order of viewing is letterhead, footer and finally the body of the text.

It works either way around; If you see it first it distracts you from all the fine print in the body, or if you do read it last it'll to seal the deal with a cherry on the bottom. Either way, it's a powerful addition to the letter when used with care.

Next time you get one of those annoying Readers Digest sweepstakes mailers because your cousin signed you up, don't through it out.

Open it up slowly and think about what you see first, they spend a great deal more energy and money on designing their mail outs than most other companies and have been known to abuse the awesome descructive power of a P.S. more than once per mailout.

So, how to get the same little kick in the tail for your emailed sales pitch?

The nature of email is that you see the header and then scroll down a bit, maybe...

Telecom New Zealand DNS fail

This tickled my fancy, so just had to write a up a few words about it.

Telecom is the largest telco in New Zealand, and it appears they can't run a robust DNS setup for their own domain.   Their ISP, Xtra, had some problems last year with their DNS, which caused problems for many of it's customers, but this time around it's their own corporate domain, telecom.co.nz that has fallen into the cyber bit-bucket....

Underscores vs Hyphens and an apology

If you read my blog via an RSS reader you probably noticed at few odd goings on earlier today. I changed a few things on the site and all of the posts going back to last year appeared as new again, even if you'd read them.

Sorry 'bout that, but there was a method to my madness, or at least a method to my fiddling.

Although it's not entirely obvious, one of the main reasons I started running this site was to mess around with search engine optimisation and try out the theories of various experts who also run a blog but with a great deal more focus that me.

To that end, I've re-written the code that generates my rss feed, and included some in line formatting to make it easier to read.  Now when you read the blog from a feed reader it should look a bit more like the website, give or take. Well, more give than take.

While some of the changes were purely cosmetic, I also changed the URLs for all my blog posts.

The new URLs is the bit that caused them to pop up as new posts in at least feedburner and Google reader. The change to the URLs was to remove the....

Javascript compression with Apache 2 and Debian Etch

If you're trying to wring every last drop of performance out of a website you're probably wanting to compress all your content before it hits the wire.  While I was messing about with another project I noticed that the javascript from this blog wasn't getting compressed.

If you just want the solution to the issue, skip to the bottom of this post, but for those interested in the finer detail, read on.

This site uses Apache 2 on Etch, and after a bit of Googling I didn't really find a direct mention of this issue, so I though I'd slap it on here for other folks afflicted with un-compressed javascript.

First step is to enable mod_deflate in the first place...

Why is it so hard to think up a good password?

I've been working in IT for a wee while now, a shade over 20 years even, and in all this time there is one consistent thread of frustration that nibbles away at my very sanity. Trivial Passwords.

I'm sure this isn't just be going nuts here, there must be thousands of network administrators and web masters going quietly bonkers all over the planet right at this very moment.

We slave away with intimate pride of our collective nerdiness, building robust and secure IT systems for all to behold. Fussing and fettling over minute details to...

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