Gary Haran.com

I came to your site after spending over an hour speaking to people at Sympatico support. I was highly motivated to go with a competitor but your site made me question my motivation. Sorry to say, your site is even worse than Videotron.

You’ve done so many things wrong that I just had to make a list:

1) Don’t ask me what language I want.

My browser already tells you that.

2) Don’t ask me if I’m a business or a consummer.

Your site should be able to catter to both easily from the same page or offer a link to that effect on the page.

3) Pay a real graphic artist to make you a site template.

Your site is the ugliest one I’ve seen in this millenium, except for Myspace. Images are blurry, blocky and/or grainy. It’s disapointing for a tech company to have this window to the internet. I’d expect you put more emphasis on how your Internet image looks.

4) Consider text links instead of images

We’ve already established that your graphics were an eye-sore. The links you have on the navigation of your real home page are worst yet because they differ from the user’s normal fonts, take longer to download and cannot be resized for usability reasons.

5) Test your site before going live

From boutiquerogers.com I clicked on “Services Internet”, there I was given ugly flash animations with blocky images instead of a well laid out description of each package. I decided to click on each to see what they each meant but I arrived on a page that perhaps your programmer’s could fix: http://www.boutiquerogers.com/store/cable/internetcontent/express.asp<%=justSID%>

I honestly think you guys can do better.

Internet Explorer 7 will not longer require Windows Genuine Advantage validation. Because the majority of Windows users have pirated versions of the OS they will now have access to a free update without having to purchase Windows!

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/10/04/internet-explorer-7-update.aspx

I’d argue that IE7 still is sub-par when it comes to standard compliance but it is light years ahead of it’s prior incarnation and way more stable so I don’t get to feel like an asshole when I tell someone… “dude your browser sucks, it’s not my fault it crashes when you visit my site. That thing is ancient”. I’m so happy that I cannot contain my joy.

First we shamed IE into releasing an update to their ancient browser, now we shame them into releasing that browser to the world! Raise a glass developers! The web is about to get that much more interesting!

Tonight was another interesting Montreal on Rails meetup. As was explained in briefly at the end of the evening the reason why James and I presented tonight was because we pushed one another to share our knowledge more. François Beausoleil also presented a great tool to solve the problem of subversion externals causing havoc on your repository.

Anyways as promised here are a few links to downloads.

Slides in PDF format - 675kb

Not much in that pdf but it’s there for the taking.

Rails Application I Used For The Demo - 1.8Mb

This is the full rails application including table.js, the sortable table plugin I mentionned I was open sourcing at the meetup. I’d wait for version 1.1 before doing anything major with it.

I was told that we’ll have video and pics of the event getting uploaded shortly. I’ll link to them in another blog post here soon.