Category Archives: rants & raves

blogposts op blog.futtta.be met geklaag en gezaag of met ongegeneerde idolatrie (or; ranting an raving, to be taken with a pinch of salt)

The end of web utopia?

Gerry Mc Govern about the echo-chambers of the web and our diminishing attention-span;

They call it the World Wide Web. It may be worldwide in its physical reach, but is it leading to a worldwide culture, or a sense that we are citizens of the world? […] in many countries today […], we see the emergence of a new hyper-tribalism led by populist, strongman, authoritarian figures. It’s like we’re going back to the Nineteenth Century rather than advancing forward into the 21st. […] There are indications that the Web is a web of the like-minded. A Web where we search for what we’re interested in and ignore the rest. […] For a great many, the Web does not expand horizons, or change minds or attitudes. Instead, it reinforces existing attitudes and intentions.

This is a sad realization for those of us whom Stephen Fry described as “early netizens”;

I and millions of other early ‘netizens’ as we embarrassingly called ourselves, joined an online world that seemed to offer an alternative human space, to welcome in a friendly way (the word netiquette was used) all kinds of people with all kinds of views. We were outside the world of power and control. […] So we felt like an alternative culture; we were outsiders.

Pessimism is taking over, I must be getting old.

Is the web doomed?

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Off course the web is not doomed, but despite the fact that web performance is immensely important (think impact on mobile experience, think impact on search engine ranking, think impact on conversion) the web keeps getting fatter, as witnessed by this graph from mobiforge;

web-page-size-revisited-revised

Yup; your average web page now has the same size as the Doom installer. From the original mobiforge article;

Recall that Doom is a multi-level first person shooter that ships with an advanced 3D rendering engine and multiple levels, each comprised of maps, sprites and sound effects. By comparison, 2016’s web struggles to deliver a page of web content in the same size. If that doesn’t give you pause you’re missing something.

There’s some interesting follow-up remarks & hopeful conclusions in the original article, but still, over 2 Megabyte for a web page? Seriously? Think about what that does that do to your bounce-rate, esp. knowing that Google Analytics systematically underestimates bounce rate on slow pages because people leave before even being seen by your favorite webstats solution?

So, you might want to reconsider if you really should:

  • push high resolution images to all visitors because your CMO says so (“this hero image does not look nice on my iPad”)
  • push custom webfonts just because corporate communications say so (“our corporate identity requires the use of these fonts”)
  • use angular.js (or react.js or any other JS client-side framework for that matter) because the CTO says so (“We need MVC and the modularity and testibility are great for developers”)

Because on the web faster is always better and being slower will always cost you in the end, even if you might not (want to) know.

Why would you still be on PHP 5.2?

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For Autoptimize 2.0.1 I declared a pretty complex regex to extract font-face’s from CSS using the nowdoc-syntax which is supported from PHP 5.3 onwards. Taking into account that the first PHP 5.2 release was over 9 years ago and support ended with the release of 5.2.17, over 5 years ago I assumed using a nowdoc would not be a problem for anyone. How naive I was; several people contacted me with this ugly error-message PHP 5.2 throws;

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_SL in /wp-content/plugins/autoptimize/classes/autoptimizeStyles.php on line 396

There is a workaround and even a more fundamental fix for that already, but who would still want to run PHP 5.2, which has this huge list of security issues? Moreover PHP 5.5 and 5.6 seem approximately twice as fast as 5.2 according to these test results and PHP 7.0 is even over three times as fast as 5.2! And still almost 9% of all WordPress sites are running on that old version (so I could have known this was coming really, bugger).

I you are one of those, do urge your hosting company to urgently provide you with an upgrade path to PHP 5.6 (or even 7.0)!

Firefox OS dead or just resting?

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So Peter-Paul Koch (Quirksmode) declares Firefox OS dead. I’m afraid he’s right. A pity really, as I loved the idea of an entirely open web-based mobile OS. Mozillians don’t agree, saying they’re just not going offer Firefox OS phones through carriers any more.

Or maybe It’s just resting?

Customer: I wish to complain about this here fox what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique.
Shopkeeper: Oh yes, uh, Firefox OS …What’s,uh…What’s wrong with it?
Customer: I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it, my lad. It’s dead, that’s what’s wrong with it!
Shopkeeper: No, no, ‘e’s uh,…it’s resting.
Customer: Look, matey, I know a dead fox when I see one, and I’m looking at one right now.
Shopkeeper: No no it’s not dead, it’s restin’! Remarkable software, Firefox OS, idn’it, ay? Beautiful openness!

 

Apple to start charging you for Apple Music unless …

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Apparently you have to go through a less-then-obvious procedure if you don’t want Apple to automatically start charging you for access to Apple Music;

Back in June, Apple Music was born. […] It was free for the first three months […] Whether you’re loving the service or not, there’s good chance you may have forgotten that you entered your bank details when you signed up, ready for the paid subscription to start of 30 September. Here’s how to stop the automatic monthly payments. Only if you want to of course.
(source: BBC Newsbeat)

Isn’t it ironic (really) that a company that prides itself in the simplicity and usability of its products, requires users to jump through hoops to disable automatic payment?

Wordfeud, server maintenance & monetization

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wordfeudSo I’m a Wordfeud-addict (you know, Scrabble without the TM infringement) and the game is down since this morning. Their Twitter-account reads;

#Wordfeud servers are going down for maintenance around 06:00 CET. We expect 2-3 hours of downtime.

This message is 9h old but still no Wordfeud, so they must be facing major problems. Which begs the question; is Bertheussen IT into server-technology? And wouldn’t they invest more if paying customers could simply stop paying if service-level became too bad instead of paying a one-time fee?