Debian Linux Stretch - Installing WordPress

Ok, earlier I installed Debian Linux Stretch using this guide.

It was wordy because I wrote it, and it had 26 steps because I wanted to make it absolutely as easy as making breakfast.

It worked because this is being written on that machine.


Next I installed the LAMP stack using this guide.

Not so wordy, and again, that's this machine.  LAMP is a web server, and if you're coming here to find out how to install WordPress, you already knew that.


Now I am getting ready to install Wordpress.  I'm doing it as I am writing, so assuming I have the right information to guide me, I'll have success.  I am using this guide to help me.  Also if I haven't made a thorough hash of installing LAMP, it should "Just Work".

WordPress is a pretty easy install, I've done it before on a Cloud Server, and I've done it before on a machine here, and a couple of random places in the past.

My install here expects a few basic things.

• You followed my guides to build the server and it is running.
• You have physical access to the server to simplify the process.
• Commands will be run from the terminal as root.

Creating the database for WordPress:

A) Log In as Root to Mysql or MariaDB

• mysql -u root -p

B) Create a regular user for WordPress- replace userpassword with a much better password!

• CREATE USER 'wpuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'userpassword';

C)  Create wp_database

• CREATE DATABASE wp_database;

D) Grant the WordPress User full access to the wp_database

• GRANT ALL ON `wp_database`.* TO `wpuser`@`localhost`;

E) Flush your privileges and exit MySQL/MariaDB

• FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
• exit;

Get WordPress and Unpack it

A) Download the package into your ~/Downloads directory

• cd Downloads
• wget https://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz

B) Unpack the package into the WordPress directory

• tar xpf latest.tar.gz

C)  Remove everything in your web server's html directory and copy the WordPress package to it. 

• REMEMBER:  If you have anything important in that /var/www/html directory it will be gone so back it up if you need it
• rm -rf /var/www/html
• cp -r wordpress /var/www/html

D) Set permissions and ownership for the WordPress install to function as designed.

• chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html
• find /var/www/html -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
• find /var/www/html -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

Set Up WordPress

A) Access the process.  The WordPress setup is Browser Driven.  Surf to your localhost, or the correct web address URL to get to it.  In my case it is in Firefox:

• http://localhost/wp-admin

 B) Supply wp-admin the correct information.  In my case:

• Language: English
• (OK)
• (Let's Go)
• Database: wp_database
• Username: wpuser
• Password: userpassword (Yes, Literally 'userpassword' or your better password)
• Database Host: localhost
• Table Prefix: wp_
• Click Submit 

 
C) Run The Install by clicking the button.


The Five Minute WordPress Install Process

At this point, you launch into an install to create the basics for your WordPress website.

A) Information Needed:

• Site Title - This is the name of the site you wish to create.
• Username
• Password
• Confirm use of weak password if this box appears.
• Your Email
• Search Engine Visibility (Click the check box if you do not want to show in searches)
• Click (Install WordPress) button

B) The Success page will show you your WordPress username and indicate your chosen password for you to proceed.

• Click Log In

Now you can do a happy dance.  You're done.  Go create a site.

WordPress will put a red button up for each thing that it needs to have updated.

At this point you may be creative and make a site.  You may want to explore templates, but a basic site can be slapped together quickly.

The results are that if you are on that machine, and surf http://localhost you will get a basic page with the information that you put in.

On the other hand, this is not perfect.  I surfed it from my phone and another computer here, and I got all the text but not the template.  So you will probably have some configuration to do.

But... This is good enough to get started.

Debian Linux Stretch - Installing The LAMP Stack

This Linux Thing is no more difficult than your Windows Thing.  Let that sink in.

It's an operating system.  You have probably been using Windows since you were a wee brat.  That is bound to be years and years of training.  I've been using Linux since the mid 1990s, probably earlier.

Oh and I am still learning.  I like to learn so that's why I keep coming back.

One very important point - It's all about how good you are at finding the Correct Instructions.  

I spent three hours going through some instructions that were from the Debian Wiki until I hit a road block.  That led me to realize that the Debian Wiki has an incomplete article on how to install the LAMP Stack on an older version of the operating system.  Even if I had read it through top to bottom first, I would not have found that out until I actually started using it.

LAMP is what you are installing.

• L is Linux.  If you got here, you have it or are researching it.  Debian, or a derivative like Ubuntu.
• A Is Apache.  That is the actual web server.  You can write basic web pages if you have this installed.
• M is MySQL or MariaDB.  It's the database so you can write data driven pages.
• P is PHP or it could be Python or Perl.  That's your scripting language.

"Yeah, I know, me too."  That was basic stuff for people just learning.

At any rate, I went back to the web and found another page from which I am using for my own instructions.  If something isn't quite right with what I am writing below, then check back there.

This is a recipe so I can come back later when I get interested in trying this on another machine.

Importantly, there is a design strategy called "Don't Break Debian".  Don't install anything outside of Debian's Repositories or you may end up with a broken install.  While that is a bit impractical in many cases, and I have gone "outside" Debian, things do sometimes not work or they work strangely. 

If you find an install somewhere that says add a repository, then your caution flags should go up.

On the other hand, it also implies that you should use Debian's information first before you go outside to another site.  Since i am writing this, it shows that I don't agree.  Their info was flawed.


Here are the instructions, as brief as possible:
All commands are done from Terminal as Root.


Prep - Get the Computer up to date.:

• apt update
• apt upgrade
• apt dist-upgrade

MariaDB:

• apt install mariadb-client mariadb-server
• mysql -u root -p   (add a root password)
• CREATE DATABASE newdb;
• CREATE USER 'user'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
• GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON newdb.* to 'bill'@'localhost';
• FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
• quit

PHP:

• apt install php7.0 php7.0-mysql

Apache2:

• apt install apache2 apache2-mod-php7.0

Testing the Server

• mousepad /var/www/html/index.php

• enter this on the first line, save, and quit:  <? php phpinfo( ) ?>

• firefox localhost/index.php 
• Result is you will see information about your system in Firefox, or chrome if you must.

PHPMYADMIN:

• apt install phpmyadmin

Answer following questions by hitting space and then tab to OK and enter:

• Web Server: Apache2
• PHPCOMMON: Yes
• MySQL Application Password - same as you created earlier

Test with the following to get to the PHPMyAdmin login page:

• firefox localhost/phpmyadmin

That's it.  You're done.  Took me less time than installing the operating system which was under a half hour.  Granted I'm on a fast computer and reasonable internet speeds.

There is one more thing to consider.  I am not worried about anyone hacking my server because this is not exposed to the internet.  If you are going to proceed with this server serving pages to the world, you will most certainly need to get the security brought up to date.  I don't believe that this server even has a firewall active at this point.

Is Anyone Writing Documentation Anymore?

So the last exercise I had done before Hurricane Irma hit was to take a computer and completely install a new operating system onto it.

I will be doing that again today, from my own instructions.

Sure, it's a bit esoteric, some people are good at reading between the lines. 

The problem with that is that you end up spinning your wheels and finding that something you assumed, you assumed wrong.

For the record, when I write documentation, I write it as I do it.  That way I know it actually works.

It may have taken 26 steps once you had all the pieces, but if you had my hardware and the right software, you'd have a nice happy laptop running Debian.  Thinkpad Laptop, X201 or fairly similar, although the version of Debian I used (Non-Free) was fairly liberal with getting what you need for many more laptops.  Evil Wifi Drivers not withstanding.

The next step was to find documentation to install a web server.

The trick with installing complex software these days is that you basically have to find the right documentation. Or to be more precise, the correct documentation.  Documentation that is complete and actually will work.

Oh and of course you personally have to read and understand what you are reading.  No distractions allowed.

However, it is rare that you will find exactly the right documentation to do what you want.  Often software is updated and that documentation you used two years ago to do that exact thing no longer works.

Highly common in the open source world, some very minor tweak will change where the files are and you are back online doing a search for what you were looking for.

In the consumer software world, you have a similar situation where the documentation was only partially updated since it was originally released.  Think Windows XP vs Windows 8.1 vs Window 10.  Things just moved around drastically within Windows itself let alone functionality.

I got "caught short" with trying to install a web server.  Did it before.  No problem.  Since it is an open source project, you get what you pay for sometimes.  Following the wrong guide I got the entire web server working.  I just don't have any passwords for anything.

As they say on a football field:  Drop Back 5 and Kick.

That would be American Football.  I never played Soccer, at least not for any length of time.   All that running around annoyed me.

So at some point I'll re-attempt that mess.  FInd another tutorial that promises to install the LAMP stack and write down what I did.

Or I will find that one bug and fix it all.  My choice, after all.  

That is why I keep this blog.  Many times I need to do something more than once.   Create a Linux Web Server, save it off, then reproduce the results on a different computer a year later.

So when I post a long diatribe on how to do this and the other thing, I'm doing it for Future Me.  So I don't end up banging my head on a wall.

Like Today.  I got it wrong.  Happens.  Time to start over.

For now, I'll just go look for the football.  Maybe the dog will chase it around the yard.  Blow off some steam.  Finish my Spanish for the day. 

Try, Try again.

Dice.com Latest Upgrade Broke The Site

At least as of 6AM to 9AM, the job search website for tech, www.dice.com is not useable in my experience.

They went ahead and rolled out a major revision of their website today.  There actually were a few things in it that were kind of slick.

When you go in to do a search for a position, and it makes sense to do so, you have a slider for a criterion.

For example, when you are requesting a page for a search, you can tailor the number of results you want back by using a slider to change the number from 10 to 100 in increments.   The 100 is a big help.

Distance works the same way.

There are a few others, but the problem is that there should be a little box at the end for you to enter in a specific number.

Why? 

Simple - I live in Wilton Manors, Florida.  I used to have a search that would look for a 27 mile radius.  That would include West Palm Beach but specifically exclude downtown Miami.  I don't want that commute, nor would I want that for anyone else. 

If there is a slider, you need to be able to enter in a specific number.

They also deleted the ability to search for an Area Code or a group of Area Codes.  Broward County is 954 and 754.  Palm Beach County is 561.  Having the ability in a large urbanized area like this to simply search for something within a county is very helpful.  Otherwise, the distance must be used, and will slow one down with extra searches.

They deleted the ability to exclude recruiters.  Recruiters in my experience are unreliable.  I tend to look for direct hire only.

They clearly did not test their site when they went "Live" today - by the time I got to it.  It may be fixed later, even later today.  Much of this could simply be because they are rolling out changes at this moment.

When I get the results of a search, they come back with either "Relevant" or "Date" available, but the default is usually Relevant unless you caught the tick box and set it.  But the link is dead to change it back - normally, but not always.  This sort of inconsistency is very common within the site.

That's the problem.  Things work sometimes but not always.

So basically their site is not useable as of this writing, 9:15 AM EST, 12/15/2014.

As for the way it looks? 

I personally am not a fan of the Web 2.0 Look And Feel for things where there are a lot of items to search. 

Dice.com is one of those sites.  They are presenting a database of links and a tight list format is the most useable. 

I understand that they want to look different than the other two big sites, www.Monster.com and Careerbuilder.com however, their search results in LARGE FONTS and lots of Whitespace means that you're constantly paging when you do get the 100 results per page, if you can actually get things to work.

Thank you again for the 100, it helps.

But when you page through the site on a large monitor (1920x1080) getting only seven results per view until you page down is limiting.  Put as much on a line as possible.  I guess that means it's first page with 4 links, then 13 pages of 7 links (or so) plus the remaining 5 links (or so) - that's how the math works out.

Your User Interface guy must have missed that particular meeting.  The Testing folk are confused too - I got a page coming up using the old interface and immediately thought "THANK YOU!". 

Then I refreshed the page and it was back to the new design.  There were no links though, kind of a surprise since I saw links on the Old Format Page.

I'll be waiting.  The new design needs A LOT OF WORK.  The site has so many bugs in it that I simply closed every window that I had.   All my old links are no longer functional.  If I try to recreate them, the site is so buggy that I can not get anything even remotely like the results I expect.  I can't page to the second 100 results.  Not even the old text search works properly.  If you want to search for Business Analyst, and put them in quotes, the new software thinks you are looking for "Business OR Analyst".  It's not the same thing.

For example, if I search for anything within 20 miles of zip code 33301 I am showing results in California.  California is a great place but a bit more than 20 miles away from South Florida.

Oh and one missing thing that is extremely important.  Dice removed the number of hits that a particular resume has.  It's a metric that needs to return.  How else would you know if your resume is effective unless you know now many people look at it in a given month?

At this point, there's nothing else that I could suggest other than telling someone who wants to use a job search engine to wait this one out and hit the other sites.  Dice.com is unusable due to UI, UX, and QA issues today.  

They tried, but ... well, maybe tomorrow.  They went with a Big Bang Release and broke what they had before.  Would be best to roll it all back and try an Agile Project Management approach of gradual improvements instead of what they got here.

Will Garamond Save the Government 300 Million?

There is a 14 year old up in Pittsburgh area named Suvir Mirchandani that did an analysis on different fonts.  Since I play with fonts in creating web pages, it rang a bell with me.

 
In short, most of the government documents in the US are printed in Times Roman.  It's that "default" font you get when you have text with little tags on the ends of the letters that are called Serif.  Garamond looks similar to Times Roman and its derivatives, but it's a lighter font.  The idea is that if they switched to Garamond at the same point, you end up saving money.

True, but... A 10 point Garamond is shorter and thinner than a 10 point Times Roman character.  To get the same height, you'd have to bump the size up on your text to a 12 point.

You should still save money but maybe not quite as much.  Since printer ink is ludicrously expensive, around $4285 a liter, any savings add up.

Does it matter?  Maybe, depends on how much you print.   You certainly will save money using the Light or Condensed version of the fonts, but you may not notice it.  If you're printing out the resume, you don't care, you just want it to look good.

I don't tend to care anyway, I print very rarely, and besides I strongly prefer Gill Sans or similar like Trebuchet.  That's the "Keep Calm" Poster font.  London Underground is another similar font. The M in Trebuchet is wrong, but that's why I call myself a Font Geek.

What is more important than whether our 14 year old friend is completely right, or slightly wrong, is the idea that if you look carefully at a situation, small changes can make for a big difference in the end.  This is why things have gotten thinner in the manufacturing process.   Cutting costs, or even cutting corners, will save the manufacturer in the end.  If it is something to be thrown out and disposed of like packing peanuts, use the absolute minimum quality that will get the item to the ultimate person using the item.  It's trash anyway, and trash is a massive problem.  Make enough of them and save a dollar a piece and it ends up being real money in the end.

The flip side of the packing peanut problem is the thickness of something like sheet metal in a car can be a life or death situation.  Thinning the grade of the sheet metal in a body panel of a car can be fine, if the car is never in an accident you won't care.  If someone leans against the quarter panel of your brand new car and it crumples like a sheet of aluminum foil, you aren't going to be safe in a crash.

The Warranty of Merchantability or Implied Warranty is a concept that fits well here.   The warranty states that a manufacturer "warrants" that a product is suitable to the reasonable use for its intended purpose.  You don't expect to use your computer screen as a wheel chock to stop your car from rolling down a driveway, but you do expect to get a couple years at a reasonable brightness at a certain setting.  You know, so you can look at all those pretty letters, and fonts, and pictures of cats.

English Common Law is a wonderful thing, in this and many other cases.

So what do you take away from this?   As a web designer and consultant, I design things so they look good to me.  If I intend to print something out, will I be saving it for multiple uses?  Then splurge on the "bigger" fonts.  Once only?  Try not to print at all.  In the middle? Judge your audience.  Web only?  Make it pretty and change it when you get bored.

That last bit is why this page renders in one font and then snaps to another when it has finished loading.  The background there is that there are only a few web fonts.  Arial and Helvetica is one family, Times Roman (remember that one?), Trebuchet, and a few others in another family.  The font I picked for the blog looked good a while back when I changed my template.  It's something called Cuprum in 14 point.  As one of the Google Open Fonts, I can use it freely, without royalties, and on any machine that supports the format even in commercial usages.  Blogger does the translation behind the scenes so that you, my reader, don't have to have Cuprum on your computer.

Whether that saves ink if printed, I don't know.  I could change the color to a dark grey and the result is I'd use less ink if I chose to print it out. 

Maybe our 14 year old friend should check that out?  What if you keep the font at the same size and weight, but change the color from black to grey?  From #000000 to #888888 for the web developers in the crew.

As long as it never gets printed, it just doesn't matter.  What does matter is that you still have to be able to see it and after all if you can't see it, it's a waste of time, isn't it?

Monster.com, Are You Kidding? Fancybox? Really?

In business, there is a phrase.

"Eat Your Own Dog Food."

Monster.com doesn't seem to realize this in their roll out of new "features".

You see, Eat Your Own Dog Food really means that you're going to use your own product to make sure that it suits what you intend it to do, and that you aren't giving the competitors an unfair advantage.

In web development and Project Management, this means finding someone who becomes the "Subject Matter Expert" and "Product Owner" and takes on a very special role.   When I worked at the university, and in every position I have held back into the beginning days of my career, I've assumed this role.  It means that you are going to step back, listen to what the "Main User" of the system says about it, and champion that role within "Development" so that the Main User's need are best served.

It means that you have to anticipate how any person will use the system and make sure that problems do not occur, and that when they do, problems are dealt with gently and "Gracefully".

It also means that unintended consequences sometimes occur like in this picture above.

It is one of my least favorite features, the "Fancybox" or the "Lightbox".

It is also very very rarely used correctly.

This is an example of how badly monster.com used the fancybox.

I did this under "my signon" and on another browser with no signon and it repeats itself.

Simply put, go onto Monster.com and do a search for any position you like in what ever zipcode you prefer.  Monster will return a list of positions.  It may even give you more than one page.  When you go from page 1 to page 2, it will put a "fancybox" up on your browser asking you "Let These Jobs Come To You".

No, you blistering idiot, that is not what I wanted.

You see it will do that for this page, and any future page I want to look at. 

Every Blistering Page.

Ok, so I'm quoting the TV Sliders and Dr. Arturo with his wonderful rants and insults, but the point is still valid - Fancyboxes rarely serve a useful purpose For The User.

I went in immediately to my browser, clicked "Adblock Plus" and found a script.  I blocked it, and refreshed the page, and now I'm back to the old Fancybox Free behavior.

If I wanted an RSS Feed of the search parameters, it would not work because since I live in a major metropolitan area, Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, there are thousands of jobs.  I have given up on RSS Feeds for this because they "max out" at 50.  I typically would need around 500 to be able to see the last two days worth of positions on this given search.

I have many searches, and have saved each individual page to save me a LOT of time that would be otherwise wasted clicking on "Next Page" buttons.   If I were not able to do the search the way I do, then I probably would have stopped using Monster.com a long time ago.

So all you need to do is go into your adblock plus and block the script called:

http://media.newjobs.com/nmy/usen/iperceptions506.js

It is badly written code, your QA, Development Department, and Project Managers have made a mistake.

It simply does not belong in a professional product like we have come to expect in Monster.com.  It only can have come from someone who has sat in too many Marketing Meetings and thought they could get more "buy-in" from their users.

Firefox 25 is Here

Getting caught up this morning I spotted an article speaking about how Firefox has been updated.

The short of it is that it's more stable because they patched some internal stuff.

Internal stuff like memory problems and stability issues.  This is for Windows, Mac, Linux and probably iOS and Android too, but I haven't gotten to the last two yet.

I was finding that Firefox 24 would simply pause.  Since I have on any given moment about 30 to 150 tabs open, that's kind of scary.  Most of what I was doing would just... pause.  Pause for a couple minutes, so I was losing a fair amount of time when it would happen about once an hour.

Upgrading is pretty painless.  I clicked on Help, and About, and found the picture you see above.  Didn't even have to click on a button until it was done.   When done the "Applying Updates" message changed to a button saying Restart. 

Now I'm on Firefox 25.  Whether other bugs will show up, I don't know.  I do know it hasn't locked on me in 3 hours of surfing about 200 web pages in tabs.

Since that's done, I can get back to developing web pages, search engine optimization, and other "web development tasks".

If you want all the deep and dirty info, here's the article that I found that told me to check.

Avoiding Astroturfing

We've all looked at reviews online.   I actually find them entertaining.   Some sites really do have some over the top reviews where an inconsequential widget like a can opener is shown to be the end all of all creation.

Those are usually very easy to spot.   You will hear about an item on an auction site that has taken a life of its own and frustrated comic writers try to sharpen their wit and see if they get any attention for it.

That is rather harmless, kind of a prank.  A recent one was the three wolf moon T Shirt review on Amazon where putting on the T Shirt has been said to cause the wearer to get the powers of levitation and control over a pack of wolves, specifically in a Wal Mart.  This one has been going on for a couple years now as an established Meme.

But that isn't astroturfing.   Astroturfing is the practice of posting fake reviews by someone connected with the company or product in order to drive sales or traffic to the site.   They're usually pretty easy to spot, and pretty easy to avoid.   When you hit a review site like Yelp, simply skip all the Five Star Reviews.  They're usually written by some second cousin of the owner of the shop anyway.

I've spotted them in company reviews posted on Glassdoor. Glassdoor is a site that exists to allow people to research a company they are interested in working for.  Hopefully they will give a glimpse inside the Glass Door to allow them to decide whether the company is worth applying to.   I have seen some reviews on Glassdoor that were clearly written by the owner, and they're always "called out".  What generally happens is that someone who was working there will post an anonymous review stating just how awful the company is and how it is mean to puppies and kittens and ...   well you get the picture.

But Astroturfing also has a darker side, and luckily we have New York to thank for spotting it.  There's a practice called "Search Engine Optimization" where a website is written in such a way to raise its ranking on a search engine.  The current wry definition of frustration is the act of proceeding to the second page of a web search in order to find something about something you need.   So webmasters, myself included, will try to add helpful links and comments in the page in order to make it more important and more pertinent to the web search engine.   The problem is that the rules are never told to the webmasters and they change all the time.

Search Engine Optimization is usually a guess.   A "Scientific wild-assed guess" or a SWAG, but a guess.

So what happened in the case of New York is that the State created some yogurt shops and looked for help in getting their pages optimized.   The shops never existed.   Some companies were valid and helped the shop "owners" work their webpages over with some commonly accepted techniques.   Others were more devious and resorted to Astroturfing.  These companies offered to have fake reviews posted in Yelp and others to drive traffic to the site.   That isn't exactly legal as it deceives the potential client by having people in places like the Philippines and others posting these glowing reviews of a shop that they never visited and doesn't even exist.

It's also apparently illegal in New York, and should be illegal everywhere else.

Luckily these reviews are usually easy to spot, and normally easy to avoid.  Just avoid your Three Wolf Moon T Shirt.   It's out of fashion now and worn "ironically" just like the reviews.

Web Annoyances - Websites Where Keyboards Don't Work

This one gets me a lot.  
It's so basic that I have to wonder who on earth is making these web pages? 
Worse, who on earth is approving and testing them?

Oh, that's right, you can't do Proper QA any more since everything is written overseas on the cheap.

You get what you pay for.

Rant aside...

For the most part, even now, the place most people are doing their "heavy duty" web surfing is on a browser.  I'm basing that on this blog's statistics, and I feel confident that that feeling is backed up by most web services.

The proportion is roughly evenly split between Internet Explorer, Firefox (and its variants), and Chrome.

I personally have noticed this on Firefox and on Internet Explorer, on Windows, Linux, and on Mac OSX.

It just doesn't happen on a tablet or a phone since the way you use a webpage is different there.  You only have a mouse (touchscreen), you rarely have a keyboard.

I notice this on a daily basis on Monster.com, but it also shows up with many other oddball sites.

Here's how to find the problem on Monster:

• Surf Monster and do a search.  Doesn't really matter what kind of job you search for, your own zip code will be fine.
• You will be presented with a list.  Pick one from the list.   It doesn't really matter which.
• Now that you are looking at a page, a job really, use your Page Up or Page Down keys.

They don't work.

You actually have to click inside the body of the page to get the page to move.   You can tab around, cursor around, whatever you choose, but it just doesn't work until you click inside the page.

If you are a web developer and call this done, you are bad and you should feel bad.

Zoidberg doesn't like you and neither do I.

This also works with the Windows or Linux alternate page down, the space bar.  

Navigation is simply locked down until you click inside the page.

My best guess is that it's a function of working with the software behind the scenes (Ajax) and having reworked your browser so that all the keys are forced to do a certain special task.  Don't know but it's still wrong.

Now go back and fix your web page.  That's a rookie mistake.  If you're good, Robot Santa may leave you a gift.

Web Annoyance - The Fancybox or Lightbox rant

Welcome to my own personal rant... er annoyance.

Since this is my own personal blog, I'll keep it "constructive".  You see, I don't like it either when people get shouty.  However, whenever I encounter this sort of thing, I want to find the person or people responsible, grasp them by the shirt collars and start screaming at them.

Usually from six inches away from their nose.

Loudly and repeatedly.

What is this thing?  It's a "Fancybox".  It's also called a "Lightbox".

Yes, seriously, that is what they're called.  I'm not making this up.

It looks like this picture below.

Don't think I'm "Hating On" yugster.com, they aren't the only ones out there with this kind of laziness.  The idea in this case, and many others is to get the person to sign in to their website.

Ok, sure, for a couple pennies off the inflated price of whatever you're hawking, I'll sign in.

In the specific case of Yugster, their marketing is a "Deal A Day" site that grew a bit to include a few limited items.  Great!  They're usually at a good price, and I do check them out every day.

BUT...

I do it VERY quickly.   It doesn't take long to scan a page and see that "nope, not today" and close and move on ...

What this site, and very many others, are doing is getting you to log in.   They then leave a cookie on your machine saying Hey!  Here's Bill again, lets change what's going on just for him and then present the page without the fancybox next time.

In one word:  Nope.

Why?  Cookies are a security problem.  One of the first things I do when I set up a computer for myself or others is to explain this, then go into custom settings.   Turn off third party cookies.  Immediately.  Then I set the browser up to delete all cookies when I close the browser.

The second one is important.   Sure, it's convenient to have your browser remember you and your signon, but what about your banks for example.  Most banks do not do this, although Chase does seem to depend on cookies for some strange reason.

Here's the deal.  You sign on to their website, it places a cookie on your laptop.  You go on about your business blissful in knowing that These People Remember Me!  Yay, I'm warm and loved in happy cyber land!

Now I go out to The Mall.  I want my laptop since my partner intends to go shoe shopping and I already bought all the shoes I need on deep discount via the web months ago and they're taking up space in my closet behind the dog crate.

Go, Me!

I'm sitting in the food court with my shiny laptop and get hungry.  Getting up, I walk over to the Chinese place and decide that I need some Gung Po Chicken and a large diet iced tea.   Turn around and a shadow passes through my peripheral vision.

Going back to the table, I notice my laptop is gone.

*Poof*

Now, some people don't have a laptop with a password, or are so dumb that they made the password "1234" or "qwerty" or some such simple crap.

That nefarious character has your laptop, got in, and is now snooping around your favorites.  Finds your bank and bang, he's in.

All because of a fancybox.

Yes, It's a flight of fancy, but it illustrates a point.  The idea that you can expect to keep those cookies intact is a truly bad one.  It doesn't have to be a laptop, your big beefy dinosaur of a desktop machine will be one of the first things to go when your house gets broken into.

Still feeling good about that warm plate of cookies and your fancyboxes?

It isn't so much that these websites believe that everyone must stop and log into their sites, its that once you do that, they expect you to want instant access to their site, always.

Bad idea folks.

So if you don't want to be lined up against a wall and told how nasty your website is, leave the fancyboxes and lightboxes off.   They're a bad idea.

UI and UX - Get Out Of My Facebook!

User Experience and User Interface is a term in web development these days.  Basically the idea is that you should take a look at your website and think of it from the stand point of someone from outside.  How is that person sitting in a random apartment somewhere removed from you going to look at your page and use it?  Will that person say "Nope, you're ugly and your web developer dresses you funny and I'm leaving"?

And that's about as technical as this article gets today, you can relax.

You are looking at what really gets me these days.  If I see a banner here asking me to like them on Facebook, I'm thinking of the socially awkward kid in elementary school who tagged along whining at you to take them with you when you do some cool stuff.  How about the "Extra Needy Girlfriend or Boyfriend" who is begging for you to come over and spend some time when you're out fighting fires or some such?

This is the modern web equivalent of me saying "Stuff it" I don't need you. 

Yes, I meant "STFU" and since I keep my blog G Rated, I will allow you to define that acronym however you like.

You see, if I like this page and every page that I stumble across in the course of doing my daily research/entertainment/job hunting/shopping/ and so on, my Facebook page becomes a mire of inconsequential crap.  I depend on my Facebook News Feed to be pertinent.  It saves me from having to go to some of those websites and surf every single article to stay informed.  I know I'm not alone here, many folks have started to use Facebook the same way.  So why add all this junk?

My first impression of the page is now "Oh for crying out loud, not again".   Or something stronger if it is the 43rd time I've been greeted by this kind of needy uselessness.

A Web Page, just like a blog, is what the owner wants it to be, and not the reader.  You are the product, you are not the customer.  You are typically being sold for your information.  So being slapped in the face by a Facebook "Like me" whine is their way of roping you in for a little extra advertising face time on Facebook.

That's how it works. 

My Second impression is to click on Adblock Plus and see if I can find the script to defeat it.  Sometimes I can, other times I can't.

Usually I hit about 50 of these useless needy girlfriends (I'm A Guy, Ladies, Don't Get TOO Bent Out Of Shape, Just Mentally Remap it to Boyfriends or Lost Puppies, MmmKay?) in the course of a morning.  I do a LOT of research on technology and software/web development in the course of a day.   Getting slapped by www.pleaselikemeorIwillwhine.crap doesn't make me like you any more than finding another flaming bag of web garbage sitting on my virtual doorstep would.

A Facebook Like button is fine, completely repainting your page with a "lightbox" like you see above is a great way to get people to move on like I did.  It's the modern equivalent of a web pop-under window now that everyone has that little box clicked in their setting of their favorite browser to stop pop-up and pop-under windows as a default.   This one will be the next default, give it time.

So if you want to experience this stupidity for yourself, it was at this link on www.upworthy.com.  I closed the page, I don't even know what viral information was there.  Maybe after I switch to decaf... Nah, I just closed the window and I won't bother watching this supposedly important video as a result. 

I Know I Am Not The Only One Out There Annoyed By This Garbage.   

So folks, its a terrible idea to annoy your customers.  It doesn't work in the real world.  If that grocery store changed their piped in music to, say, Death Metal, a small percentage would love it and their sales would generally drop from all the sweet grannies who can't understand why they're playing growling in the frozen food aisle.

Yummy, Dummy, or Middy, how about a Date?

I have a habit of reading international press.  Through the day I will see articles written in various countries, and all of them have their own way of doing things.  One of the things they all seem to get wrong are dates.

No, not those sweet things growing on a tree on the corner of Wilton Drive and NE 21st Court.  I'm talking about "Today's Date".

You see, I have more years writing computer programs than I care to count.  I've written more reports, displays, screens and web pages full of data that if you show me something, count to 30 and ask, I'll tell you what has been done wrong or if it's right. 

Sure, that's a lot to say right there but really am I full of myself or do I have a point?

Most of the time these reports are nothing more than a long tedious list of numbers and words.   The trick is getting them all in the right order.  Something will be listed in the main order, then there may or may not be a secondary order, and that can be crucial to the person using the report or web page.

In the United States and many countries, we use what we call a Middy Date.  At least we did when I was learning programming.  Month Day Year is the order.  MMDDYY or Middy. 

It doesn't work. 

Take a long list of dates and sort them in order and you find yourself trying to make sense of "this year" or "last year".  Sure, last year should show first but if you are just looking at the date as 06/01/11, it will come before 07/02/12 but after 05/03/13.   You have to take the year into account.

Europeans with their Dummy Dates aren't any better.  Day Month Year is rubbish when you are looking at a list of dates that are before the 13th of the month.  You won't know until you find a later day in the month, say the 21st that you are looking at a report displaying in DDMMYY fashion. 

Most reporting tools will look at a setting on your computer and check to see if your date string is Middy or Dummy, and display things in that fashion.  The truth is that most data is kept in a database and that is even another weird format based on second since the epoch - January 1 1970 is one number that comes to mind.  The computer will add up all those seconds, do calculations and spit out a date based on where your setting is.

When I was writing programs in old school COBOL, I had to consider these things.  COBOL did not have that built in, and you were constantly fiddling around with dates to get them in the right order.  We settled on a third solution - Yummy Dates.   Store your dates in Year Month Day Order or YYMMDD.   The problem is that outside of programming, nobody uses those dates naturally.

Or do they? 

Actually if you're trying to keep long lists of files and dates are important, Windows can be tricked to use those Yummy dates in the file names.   Sure you can sort the files in Date Order, but then you find yourself having to check the status bar for when that file was created. 

Where I use this heavily is in anything financial.  I have a directory, er, Folder that has a printout of each transaction I have done.  The printouts are all PDF files so I can see exactly what the web page looked like so many years back.  The first few characters of the files are the Yummy Date.

For Example, a bank transfer to checking done on March 19th, 2012 was called "2012-03-19 Transfer To Checking.PDF" and sits in that bank's folder.   Makes things quite tidy.

That reminds me... instead of writing about it, I've got another transfer to checking to do and time to pay the Charge Card. 

Hope that's all clear and not like mud!

Careerbuilder.com Update Broke My Job Search

Yep, it's another tech post.

See here's the deal.  Everyone who 'owns' a website is always looking for ways to refresh it so people find more reasons to come back.  More visits mean you're more likely to click on an ad and send a few pennies to a few dollars their way.

Sometimes the refresh works, other times they need to go back and rethink it.   This is one of those times.

This is also a good illustration of why I put "User Experience" and "User Interface" on my resume.  I've written about how Dice.com made a change, why it was wrong and what they needed to do to fix it.  They hit that blog posting and decided I was right on some points, and used my ideas.   I'm sure they read it because they're out in Iowa and nobody from that city had ever read my blog before that posting.  It was easy to find.

A little background and high order discussion. I'll try not to get too "techie".  In fact, I pride myself and have been told I'm successful in writing about weird tech issues and getting things across to people who don't understand them.

I look for permanent work around 35 hours a week on average.  I use the major job boards and some of the minor ones to ask the question "What Jobs Are Available within 30 Miles of Zipcode 33305 in Computing Within The Last Three Days".  You know, IT and Project Management.   Since I live in a major city, that search returns a lot of positions.  I further finesse that by saying search for specific job titles, certain exclusions of companies that are inappropriate for various reasons, and even some arbitrary things.

Once a week I have a similar search that is targeted at specific companies and all of the cities and towns in my county and a few neighboring cities that I know about.

Pretty straightforward, there are millions who are unemployed, underemployed, looking for permanent positions, and just curious that go through similar processes every day.

This process can be called "Data Analysis" or "Data Mining".  You do the same thing every time you use a spreadsheet.   

One reason why I prefer www.dice.com to all the other sites is that it further categorizes things as to whether it is a "Direct Hire" which is a company vs a "recruiter" which typically is just reposting a position that a Direct Hire had posted the day before.  Needless to say, I know which recruiters to skip.  If they have a "hot deal" they'll call me with the position and most likely I've already made my judgement as to whether to pass or not.  We'll talk but usually they realize I've been there, done that, and moved on.

You can see from this picture that everything that I need to see is presented on one line.  Dice.com has successfully reduced things down to just the information you need to decide whether a position is worth looking at further.

Basically I've managed to use Dice in a fashion that is slightly inconsistent with their website.  I save each individual page as a link so that I don't have to click onto the next page.  Each page is it's own link in a folder in Firefox and I can look at each page in it's own tab. 

When you are opening 150 pages a day, you want to save every last second you can.

The list is presented in Job Alphabetical Order, all jobs are within the last three days, and I can tell at a glance whether I need to pursue looking at a link.

By the way, a helpful hint.  If you are looking at a webpage, hold down the Ctrl key and click on the link and it will open in another tab.  You can do that many times, and look at all those links later.  It saves a lot of time!

That's the biggest criteria about this.  Saving time.  Can you imagine doing this by hand in a newspaper? 

Now here's what happened with www.Careerbuilder.com. 

Careerbuilder is a little different.  They're big and they partner with many newspapers around the world.  You're going to hit one of their sites if you are looking at a branded website for many organizations.  It also has a few quirks.

One is that no matter how hard I tried, I can't get it to give me more than 25 positions at a time.  That forces me to open up as many as 20 links for a given criteria.

Their sort is semi-broken.  If I have more than one job type on a given link, it's going to put a few jobs from "today" at the tail end of the search.  When you are looking at 400 jobs for that criteria, that means you have to load up 20 pages just to get to the tail end. 

Now that you're committed to opening all those pages in tabs, you have to consider what you want to look at.  If you're looking at this thing every day, you don't need to look at three days worth, you can skip to the end.  Check for "Today" and "Yesterday".  Today, in a list of 20 opened tabs, Today and Yesterday were pages 1 and 2 and part of 3 then again in page 20.  That's a lot of extra page hits for no good reason.

This screen grab from Careerbuilder.com illustrates how just a few little problems break the page and make it more difficult to get to the information you are looking for.

They used to have a handy page number at the top of each listing.  Minor perhaps, but knowing you are on page 4 of 20 and looking at positions 76 through 100 is surprisingly helpful.  After all, you expect to have to skip ahead to the Next To The Last Page, so you need to know where you are at.  

The date is not shown, but it is implied by saying "posted today" and "posted yesterday" all in grey lower case text.  I can handle the grey, but the date would be more useful since it is more compact.  I would prefer to see the date as "Mar. 18".  The year can be implied, we all make the same mistakes on our checks but by March or even the second week of January, the mental block against the year has been past.

Most importantly they slid all of the position specific information into a single column.

Position Name
Company Name
City Name

Position Name
Company Name
City Name

... is not as helpful as stringing it out in one line.



Position Name     Company Name     City Name   Date
Position Name     Company Name     City Name   Date
Position Name     Company Name     City Name   Date

The reasoning is that if you're skimming through 400 positions for a given search, you need to be able to skim the column and check on position name first.   Ctrl+Click to open that position into a new tab and continue onwards.


That brings up another point.  The order it is presented is incorrect and there is no way to specify which column you're sorting on - and you need more than one column.   The job name should be the most important order.  Ideally this should be Sorted first by Date, then Job Name.   What the result would be is now that you have all the "Business Analyst" positions sorted together for "today" and not mixed in with the "Data Analyst" positions.  They are similar but distinct disciplines and while many of the skills are similar, they don't completely overlap.

After all they have different position names don't they?

Luckily they have the position names all in blue and the rest of the text in other colors so with a mind trick I can try to turn off the rest of the info until I need it...

When you redesign a website as complex as Careerbuilder, you are trying to balance a lot of needs.  You don't want to do a radical redesign because it will get so alien to people that their minds will switch off.   It needs to be evolutionary.   Things as minor as the list of pages you are on will be noticed especially if you're skipping to the end of 20 pages and can't get to page 19 unless you go to page 20 first like I did the other day.

Basically the information is all there - Content gets an A Grade.
Presentation?  You can do better.  C Minus perhaps. 

Dice.com did it right. I need more light.

I promise you this won't be technical.

Much.

More "functional" - or the Way things work instead of What You Do To Get them to work.

A while back, I posted a detailed series of articles about the website www.dice.com when they made some changes to their website.  Many of them were picked up by Dice and used, some were not.  My observations were a little flawed since I aggressively block advertisements on websites.  When I'm working to find a Project Management Job, I don't want some blinky or otherwise distracting piece of "graphics" slowing me down.  I've been online long enough to remember what the web was like before they started putting ads in web pages, and for the most part, that is my experience when I surf - I simply do not have time for that when I spend three hours a day looking for work.

Yes, three hours a day, every day, average, every SINGLE day of the year.  Add to that the actual time that I spend applying to jobs and it is well over a full time job of more than 40 hours a week.

I use Dice heavily, and it probably is the first one I hit every morning.

When you go to a page that you use frequently you have times where you have to change your information.  There are ways to protect that sign on, but the most widely known and used ones are called a "Captcha".  They're supposed to captcha the computers and let the humans do their thing.  It usually is text but it's in weird fonts or colors and it makes it hard for a computer to scan. 

It also makes life tough for people.  The ones on Google Sites are the worst.  I have a lot of trouble guessing if "this" blob is a "cl" or a "d" because they're so twisted around.  A quick jump to this link will show you what I'm talking about.  Just look at the picture and I'll wait for you to groan "Oh God Those Things".

Welcome back...

Dice had a system of around six different number strings in pictures so they couldn't be scanned and it was stable - which is to say repetitious.  "MrVies" was one of them.  I have a theory that he was a farmer down the road from the folks out in Iowa that produce this website but I can't really be sure.

I'm assuming they, Dice, knew this and realized something had to be done because it changed.

For the better.

You see instead of putting up an almost unintelligeable blue blob next to another, they went to something simple.

Well crafted questions in ... GASP!... Clear Text.   You know, like you're reading now!  The same size as any other text on your screen that you can make larger or smaller, copy and paste and so forth.

Oooo Text.

Repeat after me... "Oooo Text!"!

Ok so where's the rub?

It isn't with the website this time.  The problem is in what I heard described recently as the "Organic Biological Computing Interface".  Yes, you guessed it, it's that 224 pound slab of semi conscious meat that sits under the computer. 

Me.

Yours truly.

Yes, I'm a bit stubborn.  At 645 in the morning when I start, I'm also not completely awake.

Sure, I'm a morning person but even I have my limits.  The breakfast hasn't boosted my blood sugar levels to "awake" nor has the little weak computing chip that I call my brain warmed up enough with some prime home roasted coffee and its subsequent jolt of caffeine induced energy.

In other words, yeah I'm half asleep when I start.

It's also not quite sunrise yet and these homes in Florida are built to shade you from direct sunlight.  At that time of day, you frequently need to turn on the brass Orient Express lamp that you gave Mom back in the 1980s as a present and shed some light on the deal.

So as you are looking at a Clear! Text! question like "Enter the number twenty three thousand five hundred and thirty in digits" you are also running into a problem.  Where the heck is that number five on the darkened keyboard???

It also exposed a little problem, I got a little "ferhuddled" as they say in Lancaster County, PA.  I'd swap digits back and forth while I am going through my morning dyslexia and get it wrong.

Three or four times.

That is until I get off my duff and semi-close the lid to the laptop to shed enough light on the matter.

Score:  Dice.Com 1, Moose 0

Yep, I'm satisfied, and laughing at myself yet again.   I do a lot of that.

So if you're listening Dice.com here's a little Technical thought for you (You see I lied, but only a little bit, about that functional stuff!).

If the website was done correctly, you should have all these captchas stored in a database.  You should have an internal web page to add new questions as you think them up and delete out old ones that are stale, or just leave them in the database to cycle through.   All in all it's a good solution that you came up with.

And no, I don't really need access to that database. Although... hmmmm think of the power!  WOO HOO!

A Hunt for a Cure For Writer's Block with Photography

A Picture or 1000 words?

Not today.

Actually, I'm always on the look for new things to take a quick picture of.  It has been said here many times, you should always take your camera with you since you never know what you will see.

Being involved with web development, sometimes it is much easier to decorate a blank page with a background picture and use less text.  It's a style question - what does the owner want the page to look like.  There are similar concerns in home decoration, construction, urban design, as well as many others.

Maybe that last paragraph should be "decorate a blank page with a background and useless text"?

Depends on how cynical you are.

With the tools at hand to someone who has the means to use them, or simply the open source and free tools I am fond of using, you can do some intriguing things with those pictures.  Reduce the opacity of a picture so instead of it being bright and in your face, that beautiful frame is now more background and subtle.

Grab just a section of something, shrink it, spin it, invert the colors, then use it again as a watermark.  Add text and you have your basis for creation, your digital canvas is complete.

On this particular picture, I was standing outside at the 6pm dog walk following after my dog.  Instead of grabbing the plastic bag, I managed to grab my camera instead.   The light was just right to make an interesting texture out of her sunlit side.  It was shimmering in the sunlight, and I thought I might like to see what that looked like close up when I am not dealing with sun glare. 

So what I have there is a bit of a Hair of the Dog Cure for Writer's Block.  I may even sneak it into a web page in the future, you never know where my dog will show up.