Rubenerd

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

fickledawn:

Egyptian anti-government protesters sleep in front of an army tank to prevent it from moving during the night.

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

theworldwelivein:

Firefighters work to extinguish a bushfire in Roleystone, near Perth. Bushfires are currently burning around the Western Australian state capital of Perth, where dozens of houses have been razed.

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

fuckyeahmoe:

K-ON! Manga to continue in the Spring

…and that’s pretty much all we know.
More details soon to come!

(read more on sankaku complex) 

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

nevver:

Pink Freud

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

Some good news from Malaysia. Well sort of, 24,000+ people is still a heck of a lot.

The number of flood evacuees in Johor and Malacca has dropped to 24,712 this morning as floodwaters continue to recede in the affected areas of the two states.

Brazil, Malacca and Johor in Malaysia, Queensland and Victoria in Australia… all in the space in a month. And then there were those floods in Singapore last year (#1, #2). There's definitely something going on.

I don't read Gawker sites since they decided buying stolen property was journalism, but when I was informed of Gizmodo's latest site redesign, I was quick to check out how their latest mess compares to mine. I can't design sites either, you see. Anyway, is this a joke?!

Ruben can’t design stuff

Now as you can see from my site here, I know nothing about web design myself, I just created what I thought was the simplest thing I could get away with. Still, as a user I could spend my time critiquing the slow rendering, awkwardly designed new version of Gizmodo, but there are plenty of other people doing that for me right now…

This Is the New Gizmodo ★
Terrible.

…and I don't even read Gizmodo! Instead, here's a rant about graceful degradation.

No, its just un-graceful degradation!

Its a very simple concept, when you develop a site (or even software) you provide for an alternative version[1] when dynamic content, cross site requests, cookies and other media are either not accepted by a security concious user, or for when the client software doesn't provide the capability to render or use them.

[1] If you’re really talented you don’t even provide an alternative version, you simply design it in such a way that clients can render at least some of it when they can’t render it all, and still make it usable and visually appealing. If you’ve got a designer who can do that, pay them well and do everything you can to keep them!

It doesn't just make your site more accessible for people using screen readers, text browsers and the like, but makes sites easier to crawl by search engines and those daddy long legs spiders that sometimes make their way into my computer room that I'm okay with because they eat insects and they've never scared me. But I digress.

Aww, but it’s too much work!

Gawker media sites have long used JavaScript to load in fundamental parts of their sites such as comments which obviously isn't good for usability or security, but this time if you don't have cross site requests enabled by default it doesn't load anything other that what I can only imagine was an early prototype for the site. A VERY early prototype, there's no content whatsoever, and the navigation bar contains only two entries, neither of which link to anything!

There may be legitimate reasons for them to be loading in content from five million places and nothing from their host domain (load balancing, performance), but the fact that their site exists in such a way that under certain circumstances[2] it doesn't display anything should be a concern, perhaps even moreso than the fact that they're current design when being rendered properly isn't terribly attractive at best, and is painfully slow at worst.

[2] Well, I mean Rubenerd AND Gizmodo don’t render anything when your computer is turned off (another potential certain circumstance), but I can hardly be blamed for that ;).

And in case you think I'm being unreasonable, Gizmodo's arch rival Engadget loads most of their content just fine even with all my archaic, paranoia-induced Firefox extensions, and in a site design I'd argue is infinitely more usable. It is possible folks!

Perhaps it simply attests to the kind of people that read Gizmodo.

WordPress, for convoluted reasons, has assigned this post an ID of 8000! Click to see!

//rubenerd.com/?p=8000 → //rubenerd.com/wordpress-id-8000/

Of course, such a milestone is entirely meaningless as this is only the 3294th post, but I still thought it to be an occasion worthy of merriment, particularly given where I grew up! And it's not as if this is the first time I've celebrated such a pointless milestone! Anyway, happy WordPress ID 8000!

When I wrote a post in 2006 about the Hinton Train Disaster and a followup post in 2007, I never expected them to be some of my most commented on and read entries, let alone appearing #3 in Google for the search term. This latest comment was left by Margaret, a student at Carelton University in Ottawa:

I’m writing an article on the Hinton Train Disaster and would love to speak with anyone who can provide me with information and insight into their own experience. If you can help, please send me an email at omrshll[AT]gmail[DOT]com. Thank you very much in advance!

Republishing her comment here if you can help her out. Much appreciated ^__^

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

RUNS TO START PLAYING ALL THE TRACKS!