23Musings

Apologies for the break in service. Had a break from work to clear my head and deal with other more pressing issues.

Will be posting regularly again very soon!

Nomensa, the well respected usability/accessibility consultants have surveyed 30 top retailers websites. The results appear extremely disappointing!

Only the homepages were surveyed and out of the 30, not one reached single A compliance. Sites surveyed included Amazon, Apple, Argos, Carphone Warehouse, Dell, Expedia, lastminute.com, Marks & Spencer, Next, O2, Tesco and Thomas Cook.

More from Silicon…

A great new bit of kit coming soon from Denon for DJ’s. Professing to be a one-stop-shop for DJ’s it features a hard-drive, external memory, software for looping and stuttering etc. Looks like a pretty cool bit of kit and if I can get a try of one it may even make me give up my vinyl (not really, I’ll always use vinyl as well), but this could be a fantastic bit of kit if it allows the use of CD’s and MP3′s/samples.

More info at www.dn-hd2500.com

Visit the site www.ie7.com and you naturally expect to find something to do with Microsoft, don’t you?

Well not in this case, some enterprising Firefox fan has registered the domain and put it to good use promoting his favourite browser.

Do you reckon he could be the next to suffer from the MS lawsuits against cyber squatters??

So sad to hear about Steve Irwins’ accident this morning. I’ve enjoyed his programmes for years and have always been amazed by his bravery in the face of animals that would make me quivver!

At least he died while doing the job I’m sure he loved. Very sad for his family and my thoughts go out to them!

In my job I look after all the technical aspects of a million pound a day travel website. I love my job, I get to talk to the best techies, inspiring marketeers and loads of very boring commercial headed bods The one thing I don’t get any time to do anymore is code xhtml and css.

So the last few nights I’ve been getting home at a decent hour and coding just for the fun of it, bringing myself up to date with some of the latest hacks and techniques and I’ve realised just how much I miss both the creative aspect and the perseverance required to get the layout just right (in every browser available).

Building pages that look stunning in the latest browsers and degrade perfectly in a handheld is so satisfying! I’m now thinking I may need to get my hands dirty a bit more often at work!

So airports in the UK are getting back to normal slowly after the recent terror alerts. It’s caused quite a drop off in bookings at the travel company I work for and a loss of business through cancellations. I reckon the new restrictions on hand luggage may well be here to stay which will annoy all those business types (me included) who like to carry a small wheeled case onto the plane to avoid the queues.

It was amusing to see the lack of preparedness of some travel websites. We’re well set up with a message system that can be included or not included on the site easily when it is needed. Other websites weren’t so lucky! Thomas Cook Signature chose to dump a whole message into the middle of their homepage which totally runied the layout, other sites had obviously hurriedly added a new section to their homepages with little thought for layout (or in one case standards as they used font tags and depracated tags).

All we need now is for hurricane season to start in earnest and our targets will be a distant memory…

The turnaround speed of the internet is amazing! Some enterprising person has created a site which allows you to search the AOL data online. It could do with tweaking a bit but top marks for getting this online so quickly! Be voyeuristic here

Tired this morning and my fingers aren’t doing what my brain tell’s them. So I head over to the Google blog for my Monday morning catch up on the search giants news and inside views and find myself reading a page about swimming goggles!

www.goggleblog.blogspot.com must receive a hell of a lot of traffic from tired Monday morning surfers like myself

Yesterday AOL put the search history of up to 650,000 users online. The data totalled 20 million or so web queries including info on what they clicked on from the results.

AOL have changed the usernames to numbers but you can still identify the searches a single user has performed online. Some are saying that this could be enough to identify a user and if there’s something slightly dodgy amongst those search terms…..

Of course marketers world wide are clamouring to get hold of the file, it’s been mentioned on Drudge and is going to drive a lot of traffic to the mirror sites that have been set up.

It doesn’t appear to breach AOL’s statement of privacy so it’s unlikely anything will come of it, but it is another nail in the coffin of what in my opinion is an outdated service provided in a very outdated manner.