Copacetic

I registered a domain for a mate today. It had to be a .ie domain and even though I am a .ie conscientious objector I will perform the act for friends in need.

Blacknight.ie has good hosting offers for low-end users and they are an accredited .ie registrar and are cheaper (by 50%) than direct registration.

Unfortunately their order Wizard has one nasty bug which must be loosing them a lot of business. On the page below, you are expected to enter a county. 

 Its highlighted in red, but the workflow happily lets you proceed and fill in a pretty heavy duty multi-part form later on in the workflow. It then complains that the county is missing but there is nowhere to fill in the county at that point. Very confusing.

On the plus side, I rang up blacknight.ie and their support desk spotted the problem immediately and were able to indicate the fix. Still I had to rekey all the registration, address and VISA content again.

Two simple fixes are apparent here. Either, stop the user proceeding at the above screen (why do you need the county at this point anyway, you could just remove this field) or allow them to add the county when putting in the rest their address.

I would guess many people abandon the cart and this point and head somewhere else for a solution.

John Keyes has come up with a sweet hack to a problem I’ve been seeing since we switched to gmail for domains. He uses the stylish plugin for FireFox to restyle the google fixed font to be courier. Without this hack any formatting (e.g. —+ style boxes so beloved by Trac) all get screwed up. Run over there and try it out.

If you use IE your SOL….

Mike Arrington is having a bad week. First everybody hates his new web design for TechCrunch then his web designer spits the dummy and resigns because he posts an alternate design to CrunchNotes.

Web designers eh, can’t live with ‘em, can’t shot ‘em!

Good news from Infoworld for all us Python developers out there.

Darren points out that Microsoft’s new ad-center doesn’t support Firefox (or I believe any browser other than IE). This is a patently stupid position and the immediate reaction is to look on it as a deliberate attempt to exclude Firefox and other browsers. However I believe the explanation is simpler and runs right to the very heart of Microsoft’s culture.

Most people in Microsoft drink the coolaid and are completely immersed in Microsoft culture. In their eyes Safari and Firefox users are marginal communities they don’t understand and could care less about. All their internal propaganda tells them that IE is the world’s most popular browser and also has the biggest market share. There complete technology stack is based on activeX controls and the the minute they start coding it takes a huge amount of energy to buck the status quo inside MIcrosoft and say we will work with the other browsers. They have time to market constraints just like the rest of us. So they take the path of least resistance, whack their site together with Visual Studio Web tools and hey presto, instant incompatiblity, straight out of the box.

It would take a message from Bill to change this but that ain’t about to happen, despite all Robert Scoble’s good works.

Just spotted this, looks like Robert agrees with me.

Check out this HTML table generator from Blended Technologies. I’ve struggled with the problem of inserting tables into Wordpress recently and these seems to solve the problem perfectly. It’s a webpage where you populate a table of data and then click a button to generate super clean HTML that can be pasted into your wordpress editor window.