Growing up is optional

I should have added to my list of predictions for 2005 that my antiquated PC would finally die. My Gateway Pentium II 350 arrived nearly six years ago on the same day that I brought my new daughter home from the hospital. At the time it was fantastic; so fast, my work PC at the time was an old 386 with 24MB RAM. Originally it came with win 98, 64MB RAM and a 6GB harddrive. Since then it has had a 30GB drive added and RAM is up to 256MB.

On Saturday it suffered its first catastrophic hardware failure: the 30GB died and I couldn’t get it to boot. Luckily I had backed up my entire photo collection about two days earlier.

Recovery was painful. I managed to get it booted on the 6GB drive alone (my main OS is on the other drive). I sighed in semi relief. At least I knew the motherboard etc was OK. However, the information on the 30GB drive is what has the value for me: my photos, my work, every website I have ever developed, music. Most of it backed up somewhere, except for the latest stuff.

I plugged the 2nd drive back in: no luck, it wouldn’t start. The next morning I tried again: by some miracle it started. So the whole day yesterday the computer didn’t get turned off: I busily burnt every single bit of data I needed to the pile of CDs.

It’s working OK now, but I will be careful what I save over the next day or two. I can relax over Christmas knowing that my data is safe, but wary that any day now I could be forced to shop for a new computer.

When designing web pages I don’t usually think too much about how they will be accessed. Usually I just assume that users will have a PC with a browser and/or feedreader. However, I gradually beginning to think that the mobile phone is going to become the main way people access the www (note the distinction between www and internet).

There are a few reasons why I think this, the main one being that cellphones are everywhere. I’m not sure of the exact numbers but I’m reasonably sure that cellphones out number PCs.

My thorough research (sometimes I travel home on the train that ends up full of school kids) indicates there are more cellphones per head in a high school classroom that anywhere else in the world. It’s no surprise that telecom wants to build cell towers on school grounds.

Anyway the point of my post is primarily a reminder to myself: pages have to work at 200×200px. The interface is likely to be fewer than 20 buttons.

I’d been thinking for a while about the links interface in WordPress. It wasn’t as flexible as I wanted it to be so I decided to try to write a WordPress plugin using Magpie to use my del.icio.us feed. After a few hours of fudging around with it I was getting somewhere. Then I broke it and couldn’t rollback. (There’s a lesson.) Anyway, rather than carry on with the plugin, I hacked the index file like this (ala Richard Eriksson, via Jon Hicks):

<!-- Joe's Delicios Links -->
<li>Joe's del.icio.us links
<ul>
<?php
require_once ("wp-content/plugins/magpierss-0.61/rss_fetch.inc");
$yummy = fetch_rss("http://del.icio.us/rss/nzjoe");
$maxitems = 10;
$yummyitems = array_slice($yummy->items, 0, $maxitems);
foreach ($yummyitems as $yummyitem) {
	print '<li>';
	print '<a href="';
	print $yummyitem['link'];
	print '"';
	if (isset($yummyitem['description'])) {
		print ' title="';
		print $yummyitem[’description’];
		echo htmlentities($yummyitem[’description’]);
		print ‘”‘;
		}
	print’>’;
	print $yummyitem[’title’];
	echo htmlentities($yummyitem[’title’]);
	print ‘</a>’;
	print ‘</li>’;
}
?>

not pretty code, but it works. Now I just have to remember to give all of my delicious posts meaningful titles and descriptions.

Of course this could be used for any RSS feed. And you can also give delicious links a specific tag for when you want them appear on your site and point it at the feed for that delicious tag. (e.g http://del.icio.us/rss/myname/mytag)

UPDATE 2: Contact me for the latest version. WP does funny things with the single and double quotes

When it became public that Gmail was introducing POP access I thought it would be fantastic. So once given access I setup Thunderbird as per the instructions and 20MB of messages get downloaded to my inbox. I proceed to sort the sent and received into their appropriate folders. Then I realise: I actually like working in Gmail better than Thunderbird.

It’s not often that I like web apps over their desktop equivalent (although is describing them as equivalent a fair comparison?) I’m can’t explain why; I guess it’s just like not being able to explain why some people prefer chocolate to strawberry. I’m interested to hear what others think.

Google have a localised firefox start page for New Zealand and others too

Introduction

This is going to be one of those long rambling posts (well long for me anyway) about different approches to selling firefox. I use the term selling as a euphamism for convincing a user to switch. While there is no financial transaction there is some cost in terms of time and hassle of setting it up, time involved in learning the new interface, getting used to it and handling ‘objections’.

There’s an old retail process for selling and the demonstration part has the acronym FABG.

Feature

What the product has

Advantage

An advantage given by that feature

Benefit

The benefit of the advantage for the user

Grabber

Gets postitive response about the benefit

Firefox a lot of advocates don’t do the demonstration well and it is to their detriment so I though I’d jot down my thoughts. By demonstration I don’t mean that you necessarily have to be showing them firefox running, just that you demonstrate concepts, although some people find it easier if you do actually show them what you are talking about.

Selling by fear

This is probably the biggest technique used by antivirus vendors to sell to the technophobic. Essentially they convince the user that if they don’t use the latest ’superjapasonic2008 software’ that a ‘virus’ (I use the term loosly, most users don’t understand or care about wheter it’s a virus, worm or whatever) will take over their computer and empty their bank account, steal their pets, drink their beer etc.

Most followers of technology know that IE is the door through which windows nasties get in, because IE is tied to the OS, so this is frequently used to convince a user to switch. While at face value this offers obvious benefits to those in the know with internet stuff, it’s not to the average user.

While this can be an effective sales method for antivirus software the scare-sell is a not an ideal way to build trust and credibility for a browser. The first time a firefox vulnerability is announced the trust goes out the window.

Instead, try pitching it like this:

Feature

Firefox is a stand-alone browser

Advantage

The advantage of it being stand-alone is that it is not inherently tied to the operating system

Benefit

Were the browser to be compromised, the integrity of your system is more likely to remain intact

Grabber

The integrity of your computer system is important, isn’t it?

To which the response is (hopefully) positive.

Selling by features

By ’selling by features’ I mean giving the user a long list of features that mean absolutely nothing to them. “It has xyz and does abc while making you a cup of coffee” is all very well, but not everyone drinks coffee. Most ‘average’ users would just switch off. Blah blah blah blah…oh are you still paying attention?

It is important that you understand the users needs (that’s the probing part of the sales process, but that’s another story) so that you can demonstrate the features that offer them benefits. those benefits don’t have to be tangible either: emotional, ethical or other influences can be benefits too.

Feature

Firefox has tabbed browsing

Advantage

the advantage of tabbed browsing is that you only have to have one browser window open even if you ar looking at lots of pages

Benefit

This means that you can keep you desktop and taskbar less cluttered

Grabber

Don’t you prefer an un-clutterred workspace?

Again we hope for a positive response

You can continue with as many or as few FABGs as you feel necessary

Closing the sale

Once you have demonstrated a few features (including advantages, benefits and grabbers) it’s time for the ‘trial close’. This is where you test if the user is receptive to your sales job. Try something like: “So would you like me to install a few different themes when I install firefox?” To which the response will be either “yes”, “no, just firefox” or some objection. Unless you got an objection you proceed to install it, congratulating the user on their wise choice. You don’t have to keep going with the features, but it can be good to give positive reinforcement for their decision.

Handling Objections

This is a whole topic on its own. The one point I will make is that the stated objection is not necessarily the real objection. So go back to your probing and demonstration.

So there you go. Hopefully you get something out of this and can convince more users that firefox is the browser for them.

Sorry IE5 Windows users, I’m no longer going to hack my stylesheet to suit you. You probably have bigger problems than how my site looks anyway, like that spambot that was installed by the last trojan you picked up.

Any IE5mac users that want to send me a screen shot of any layout glitches would be appreciated.

Rumour has it that Google are developing a browser. I expect that they have made a bad mistake if they are not.

My money would be on them coming out with some sort of OS or at least some sort of run-anywhere terminal program that hooks into their powerful platform.

For those that want to, and are willing to see google’s ads, the need for relatively ’smart’ desktop is going to diminish. PCs could be replaced with relatively dumb ‘Gboxes’, powered by ‘G’OS that ‘Glink’ into the ‘Gplatform‘. (Now that I think more, isn’t that what the Xbox is trying to do?)

This is all speculation. Time will tell.

UPDATE: The more I think on this the more I see the similarities between where Google and MS are heading. The only major difference appears to be where the funding comes from. Google’s from advertising, MS from licencing, although that could all change.