When was the last time you visited your own Web site?
I don't mean when was the last time you updated a page, checked it over to make sure it validated and everything was spelled correctly. I mean when was the last time you came to your Web presence the way one of your own users might—especially a new user?
It's a good practice, and it probably should be done several times a year, but at least once per year would be an improvement for many of us. Do you have pages up that explain how your organization is planning to overcome any Y2K issues? Do you have directories filled with How To Use The Exciting New 2003 Version of the E-Mail Software? There is an awful lot of junk, online.
Cleaning it out will help you in several ways. First, it will make maintaining the rest of your site easier, because you won't have to wade through all of the distractions to find things you really want. Secondly, neither will your users. Looking things over and deleting the old stuff makes moving and updating your site structure much easier and that could be real important, real fast, if your site is one that is moving to the new UNL CMS project. Why convert a bunch of pages that are outdated and in the way, anyway?
Some of this is born of inertia. Some of it is just bad habit. In the Olden Days, I would often build a new, simple page with only the element I was working on present. That is, if I was trying to hammer out a new navigation scheme, or tweaking a table of data, I would build a Web page that contained only the new navigation, or only the new table. It was easier to me, it was less distracting. I would grind away at whatever it was and when things were working I would clip out just the relevant markup and paste it into the real page, and move on. Often as not, I would leave that stub, that experimental page, up on the server where it was unnoticed, unlinked and unloved. When I first stumbled across this method, I would name the page new -whatever the real page was. So, index.html became newindex.html. But some time later, I would find it really difficult to delete some of these stubby pages. What if I had linked to one of them, somewhere? About that time, I started naming these experimental pages bogus.html or trashthis.html. But even then, not all of them got deleted, I'm sure.
Web pages are simple text files, of course. Even the biggest are pretty small in the context of modern computing. But images are another thing. I stumbled upon a directory the other day that held about seven different versions of essentially the same image. One was 800x600 pixels. The next was slightly smaller, the next was the same smaller size, but saved at a lower quality, so the colors weren't as vibrant and the file size was much smaller. The rest were all variations on that theme—suck out some more color and trim the edges. This was really wasteful because image files (and movies) can be huge. Some folks do a better job at all of this than others, of course. But I'd bet that the average Web site may hold as much as 20% junk.
Take a look at your Web site. Look in front and behind the curtain. That is, tour your site with a Web browser and make note of links that are broken, links to pages announcing "News" that is now really History. Look for ways you can clean up the content on the page, as well. And then take a look at the file structure of your site. Look for unlinked files, duplicate files (especially images) and Things You Can Do WithOut.
When the time comes to update your site in any meaningful way, you'll be glad to have to do the work on fewer pages and files.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Priorities
They tell you, "If your house needs painting, and it's on fire, put the fire out, first". And this is supposed to teach you how to prioritize things. Folks nod and stroke their chins and move on as if they've just learned something.
I have a problem with this kind of thing. I always have. In Clason's The Richest Man in Babylon there is a story of a kid who saved his money all year and gave it to a friend who would travel to far-off lands and buy jewels. The guy brought back a few chips of colored glass and the kid lost his money. A few pages later, another guy is stuck outside the walls of the city at night, when a shepherd approaches him and makes a fast deal to sell his flock, which nobody can see because it's so dark. It sounds like a lot of sheep, there are sheep-noises coming from over here and over there and the shepherd seems like a nice enough guy and so the kid makes the deal. When the sun rises, he marches the herd into the city and sells the whole lot at a tremendous profit. I have never been able to figure out what we're supposed to learn from this. The first deal could easily have gone well and the second could easily have yielded five or ten widely spaced, noisy sheep.
At home, we're fresh back from the Home Show, with hundreds of vendors vying for our tiny fistfuls of dollars. What to do? We just bought the damned house last summer, and now we're thinking of changing things? Here's something: It's wearing it's third roof, and this one is nearing the end of its life. The water heater is giving up before the second shower is done. But we wish the bathroom was a little more up to date. We wish it had a dishwasher. We wish the driveway and the patio didn't drain into the basement. We wish the hardwood floors were a little fresher. There are unpleasantries in the yard. I am scared to death I will write a check to have something done, then immediately discover we now need a new water heater, or that new roof. Or something else we weren't even really aware of. It happens.
Prioritizing work is a gift. There are some things you just can't quantify. It's the old "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts" deal working again. Lately, I've been working on creating little videos, tiny little movies showing how to do simple little molecular tasks. Instead of coming to a two-hour session with me going over forty-'leven things the new software can do, you can now download as much or as little help as you need. There's a movie showing how to log into the system. If you have questions about how to log in, they are answered here. Nothing else is, but you will definitely learn how to log in. There's a How To Log Off video, too.
It's been difficult at times, because the system I'm teaching is growing and evolving, at the same time. So it's like trying to a hit a moving target. Sometimes I have found myself half way through an issue, only to find that the developers are tuning-up that part of the machine and things won't work Friday the way they did when I made the movie on Tuesday. At other times, I've stumbled upon things that don't quite work as advertised, only to be met with "Oh yeah, that doesn't work, yet" from the crew. Maybe it'll be done in a week, maybe it'll take a month. Maybe it won't be available until Version 2.00. There is definitely an air of plate-spinning at work, here.
But I am confident that this way is going to be a better tool. Sure, it's hard to schedule a training session that runs two hours and is only offered two or three times per month. And what do you do until that day and time rolls around? But everyone has two or three minutes in their day they could use to learn how to build tables in their pages. And why should they have to wade through twenty minutes of working with images, when all they really want to learn is how to build tables?
Some day this summer I'll look back on all of this and laugh.
Or, cry.
I have a problem with this kind of thing. I always have. In Clason's The Richest Man in Babylon there is a story of a kid who saved his money all year and gave it to a friend who would travel to far-off lands and buy jewels. The guy brought back a few chips of colored glass and the kid lost his money. A few pages later, another guy is stuck outside the walls of the city at night, when a shepherd approaches him and makes a fast deal to sell his flock, which nobody can see because it's so dark. It sounds like a lot of sheep, there are sheep-noises coming from over here and over there and the shepherd seems like a nice enough guy and so the kid makes the deal. When the sun rises, he marches the herd into the city and sells the whole lot at a tremendous profit. I have never been able to figure out what we're supposed to learn from this. The first deal could easily have gone well and the second could easily have yielded five or ten widely spaced, noisy sheep.
At home, we're fresh back from the Home Show, with hundreds of vendors vying for our tiny fistfuls of dollars. What to do? We just bought the damned house last summer, and now we're thinking of changing things? Here's something: It's wearing it's third roof, and this one is nearing the end of its life. The water heater is giving up before the second shower is done. But we wish the bathroom was a little more up to date. We wish it had a dishwasher. We wish the driveway and the patio didn't drain into the basement. We wish the hardwood floors were a little fresher. There are unpleasantries in the yard. I am scared to death I will write a check to have something done, then immediately discover we now need a new water heater, or that new roof. Or something else we weren't even really aware of. It happens.
Prioritizing work is a gift. There are some things you just can't quantify. It's the old "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts" deal working again. Lately, I've been working on creating little videos, tiny little movies showing how to do simple little molecular tasks. Instead of coming to a two-hour session with me going over forty-'leven things the new software can do, you can now download as much or as little help as you need. There's a movie showing how to log into the system. If you have questions about how to log in, they are answered here. Nothing else is, but you will definitely learn how to log in. There's a How To Log Off video, too.
It's been difficult at times, because the system I'm teaching is growing and evolving, at the same time. So it's like trying to a hit a moving target. Sometimes I have found myself half way through an issue, only to find that the developers are tuning-up that part of the machine and things won't work Friday the way they did when I made the movie on Tuesday. At other times, I've stumbled upon things that don't quite work as advertised, only to be met with "Oh yeah, that doesn't work, yet" from the crew. Maybe it'll be done in a week, maybe it'll take a month. Maybe it won't be available until Version 2.00. There is definitely an air of plate-spinning at work, here.
But I am confident that this way is going to be a better tool. Sure, it's hard to schedule a training session that runs two hours and is only offered two or three times per month. And what do you do until that day and time rolls around? But everyone has two or three minutes in their day they could use to learn how to build tables in their pages. And why should they have to wade through twenty minutes of working with images, when all they really want to learn is how to build tables?
Some day this summer I'll look back on all of this and laugh.
Or, cry.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Technology Often... Works.
Technology is great, except when it stops working.
I've had some experience with this, recently. It's been an interesting exercise in deductive reasoning, and deduct-from-your-checking-account spending.
At work, I connect to the Internet via a network. The speeds are unbelievable, usually. Since I moved to this office last summer, I have had no problems with my MacBook Pro, hooked up to an Apple LED Cinema Display, so it mostly acts as a desktop computer. But I can un-hook a couple of cables and pack it off to meetings quickly and easily. While I'm there, I depend upon Apple's AirPort WiFi to connect to the UNL WiFi network. And again, since I got this machine I have never had any trouble doing so.
Last week, something changed. My hardwired Ethernet wasn't working at all. Now, you might think, as I did, that, absent any wired networking, the WiFi would take over and I'd still be "online" but at a slightly lower speed. But that wasn't the case. When I unplug everything and take the machine to a meeting, WiFi works. But as long as it was cabled-up, it thought the wire ought to take care of things.
I did, too.
It took at least six people and six days to fix this problem. Along the way I was comforted, some, by the knowledge that it wasn't just me that was having the problem. Also, along the way, I discovered a bunch of things I was supposed to have done last summer never got quite finished. I had moved the money-accounting paperwork from my old cubicle to my new office. But I had not moved the network-accounting paperwork over. There were other issues, too.
At home, we awoke Tuesday morning to no Internet. Ours comes through our cable-TV folks, and the machinery was all downstairs. So, I went downstairs and turned everything off, then turned it all back on, one unit at a time... First the cable modem... then the AirPort WiFi hub, then I came back upstairs and started the iMac. This is usually all we've needed to do, but no matter how many times I did it, nothing ever seemed to improve. The telephone guy said he could "see" my cable modem and he could see that it could see the AirPort machinery.
Some weeks back, I'd purchased an Apple TimeCapsule backup machine and it featured Apple's AirPort wireless, too. I bought it so I could literally plug it in anywhere, but if you do the math, it can function as a base station, too. So, over the weekend, I plugged it in (upstairs, this time) and tuned it up to act like WiFi as well as backup. That solved my problem and so now I have Internet at home and at work, just like a month ago.
But it was an awkward week or so, there. It amazes me, how quickly new technology becomes necessary, and how difficult it is, to back down to previous technology. What was state-of-the-art just a few years ago, is barely workable, today. I have no idea where I might even buy a modem, today, if it came to that. I'm glad it didn't.
I saw a news story this week saying there is one, one new car available today as a 2011 model, that comes with a Cassette interface in the radio. Kind of ironically, at least it seems to me, it's a new Lexus. The times they are a changin', huh? One day there will be an even better/cheaper/faster way to network our machinery. And one day we will celebrate, with a sense of nostalgia, the last album to be released on CD.
From the Time Marches On desk: Today is my mother's birthday. This morning, my sister Amy stood, with her store-bought foot. What a present for mom, but mom couldn't quite enjoy it because she was in the emergency room. They've put her in a room at least for overnight, and we'll know more tomorrow, probably. But the wheel keeps turning.
I've had some experience with this, recently. It's been an interesting exercise in deductive reasoning, and deduct-from-your-checking-account spending.
At work, I connect to the Internet via a network. The speeds are unbelievable, usually. Since I moved to this office last summer, I have had no problems with my MacBook Pro, hooked up to an Apple LED Cinema Display, so it mostly acts as a desktop computer. But I can un-hook a couple of cables and pack it off to meetings quickly and easily. While I'm there, I depend upon Apple's AirPort WiFi to connect to the UNL WiFi network. And again, since I got this machine I have never had any trouble doing so.
Last week, something changed. My hardwired Ethernet wasn't working at all. Now, you might think, as I did, that, absent any wired networking, the WiFi would take over and I'd still be "online" but at a slightly lower speed. But that wasn't the case. When I unplug everything and take the machine to a meeting, WiFi works. But as long as it was cabled-up, it thought the wire ought to take care of things.
I did, too.
It took at least six people and six days to fix this problem. Along the way I was comforted, some, by the knowledge that it wasn't just me that was having the problem. Also, along the way, I discovered a bunch of things I was supposed to have done last summer never got quite finished. I had moved the money-accounting paperwork from my old cubicle to my new office. But I had not moved the network-accounting paperwork over. There were other issues, too.
At home, we awoke Tuesday morning to no Internet. Ours comes through our cable-TV folks, and the machinery was all downstairs. So, I went downstairs and turned everything off, then turned it all back on, one unit at a time... First the cable modem... then the AirPort WiFi hub, then I came back upstairs and started the iMac. This is usually all we've needed to do, but no matter how many times I did it, nothing ever seemed to improve. The telephone guy said he could "see" my cable modem and he could see that it could see the AirPort machinery.
Some weeks back, I'd purchased an Apple TimeCapsule backup machine and it featured Apple's AirPort wireless, too. I bought it so I could literally plug it in anywhere, but if you do the math, it can function as a base station, too. So, over the weekend, I plugged it in (upstairs, this time) and tuned it up to act like WiFi as well as backup. That solved my problem and so now I have Internet at home and at work, just like a month ago.
But it was an awkward week or so, there. It amazes me, how quickly new technology becomes necessary, and how difficult it is, to back down to previous technology. What was state-of-the-art just a few years ago, is barely workable, today. I have no idea where I might even buy a modem, today, if it came to that. I'm glad it didn't.
I saw a news story this week saying there is one, one new car available today as a 2011 model, that comes with a Cassette interface in the radio. Kind of ironically, at least it seems to me, it's a new Lexus. The times they are a changin', huh? One day there will be an even better/cheaper/faster way to network our machinery. And one day we will celebrate, with a sense of nostalgia, the last album to be released on CD.
From the Time Marches On desk: Today is my mother's birthday. This morning, my sister Amy stood, with her store-bought foot. What a present for mom, but mom couldn't quite enjoy it because she was in the emergency room. They've put her in a room at least for overnight, and we'll know more tomorrow, probably. But the wheel keeps turning.
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