Um, so, a short post here. I kept running into this problem where a site of mine was stuck on a white page whith the little “page loading” spinner going for minutes on end and nothing happening.

That’s easy, “it’s PHP loop” you might say, but no. I talked to my web host, did a tracert request, and they said it was something to do with xo’s servers dropping pakets, but they were working to fix the problem. I smiled an nodded, and left for lunch. Came back, and things were still a no go.

Then I noticed the key to the problem. bottom of the browser was stuck “waiting for gg.google.com” after a few web searches I found my answer.

THE ANSWER

The freeze is a conflict with the web developer FireFox plugin called “Fire Bug”.  Disable the “Scripting” panel, and things should work fine.

Thanks to Brian Pedersen and his site where I found the answer: http://briancaos.wordpress.com/2009/07/01/waiting-for-gg-google-com/

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It’s amazing the assortment of sites streaming this event. They must have seen record amounts of hits. If 2008 was the year of online video, maybe 2009 will be the year they iron out online live streaming video. I remember Obama’s acceptance speach, and his announcement of Joe Biden as his running mate, both as a smoother viewing experience, but not without hangups.

For the inaugural address I tried watching live coverage on cbs.com, foxnews.com, and hulu.com, with similar results. CBS seemed to hang less than others, but I can’t tell you how frustrated I got jumping back and forth and having to watch that damn Audi commercial over and over again.

For some reason, I have never been able to get the video from Fox to work in either IE or FireFox, but the stream from Hulu.com came through, even though it seemed to be a repackaged Fox broadcast.

Thankfully, I should add, I’ll be able to watch, and even download the speech, from any number of sites when I get home tonight.

Did anyone have a positive live online video streaming experience of this event? If so, what site(s) were you on?

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The problem is…

I don’t think they were really ready to go. I tried out some searches when they first launched and got overly confused when all the SERPS had the same photos of unrealted people and random objects. Each page I clicked on came up with the same photos. It took me a few seconds to figure out the links next to the photos were actually different than the previous page. What’s up with that?

I’ve gone back today, however, and it appears Cuil.com has tweaked their search results. (For instance seobook.com comes now if you search for SEO).  But things still aren’t quite right. A search for Zebra comes up with some strange results (2,268 to be exact, compared to 57,100,000 Google results). Nothing on the main results page is related to the animal. A second click is needed to get to any results about actual Zebra. Aparently Zebra printers are more relevant than Zebra animals. Should I be ashamed I’ve never heard of them?

I’m also thrown off by the fact that there sometimes appears to be a bar at the top of the page and a box to the right with more possible results. The box on the right is marked “Explore by Category”.Except in my Zebra example, the categories don’t appear to coincide with the main results page. The main results page is technology oriented. The Explore by Category box has links to Zebras, National Parks of South Africa, Fauna of Nambia, Fauna of Angoloa, and “Automatic Identification and Data Capture”

The top bar references “Zebra Printers”. “Zebra Technologies”. “Zebra Print”, “More”

If I try to find a “how to use” guide for their search results, I may find out the difference between the top bar and the “Explore by Category” box. But if you ask me, the UI should be more straight forward. I don’t want to read a manual to decipher the results.

The other engines just give you a list. It’s pretty easy to weed through the results, but can be a pain if 5 out of 10 results aren’t relevant to what you’re looking for.

My suggestion to Cuil…

Would be to make the results immediately understandable. For instance, there’s room currently for 3 columns. Why not make each column the most relevant categories, with a “more” option, or other categories available in the top bar. Then some one can scroll through the results in the column that they are most interested in.

I would seriously work on making the photos more relevant, too.

Anyway, they should have done a bit more beta testing before launching to the world. You only get to make a first impression once. Let’s see what they do to bounce back.

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1. Wordpress – easy to install, design, expand blogging platform. Everybody uses it…come on, give it a shot, you know you’ll like it.
2. Magento – A new eCommerce platfomr. A little confusing, but man, they’re are building everything you need into this puppy, and it looks great (but could use more templates)! Currently in version 1.1, but very deep. I see great things on the horizon.
3. Drupal/Joomla – both very nice Content Management Systems for creating dynamic sites. Like Wordpress, but on steroids. Both have their pluses and minuses. Drupal seems more flexible, with a more “professional” community, but Joomla has more templates and a larger community.
4. Notepad++ – I love this little text editor.
5. WinMerge – This is a file comparison tool that isn’t just for the web. I don’t use it that often, but when I do, it saves me a lot of hasstle – mainly when I’m upgrading particular eCommerce websites from one version of software to another. It allows you to compare two files, and shows you what’s differernt and what’s the same so I don’t end up overwriting the custom coding I spent hours on previously.
6. FireFox – Superior Web Browser for two reasons 1) it is more standards compliant than IE5,6,7 and 2) because of the nice web geek plugins out there like FireBug,  Web Developer Toolbar, SeoBook.com’s SEO plugin, IE Tab (eliminates need for IE!), Screengrab (for the portfolio sots), and a ton more. -  3.0 was just released like 2 weeks ago (at the time of this posting)
7. lipsum.com – This isn’t exactly open source I guess, but I thought I’d include it. I pretty much always go here to get filler text for design projects. I’ve been to a few other sites that may be better (maybe), but this one is always the one I always remember, and it’s got a text generator where you can specify how much text you want.

What are your favorites?

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This is a huge deal from an SEO and design standpoint. Flash has been conscidered “Accessible” by screen readers for some time now (starting with the release of Flash Player 6 in 2002), but the serch engines have been slow to develop a way to search and index flash content (don’t ask me why).  This is one of the major factors keeping Flash from completely taking over the web (that, and the fact that Flash is not very intuitive).

If you had a website that was 100% flash, chances are people wouldn’t be finding you through a web search. This is OK if you have the $$ to back it up with a media blitz, but terrible if you depend on organic/natural traffic.

Flash still can be a bit trickey if the whole site is in one file, because Google still doesn’t have a way to link directly to a relevent page (as far as I can tell). But if the site is HTML with Flash embeleshments, or entirely flash, but with seperate html files for each embeded page, then the results Google gives us will be more accurate.

From a fontahollic standpoint this anoncement from Adobe is cool because designers can now use flash to embed sections of accessible fancy text (like headlines,etc) that will appear the same on all computers with the Flash plugin (98% of computers on internet), and wont sacrifice their Search Engine Friendlienes (SEF).

This has been able to be done for a few years now using a sneaky, and surprisingly not very widely used method (correct me if I’m wrong) called sIFR, which uses Flash, JavaScript and CSS all mashed up together with a pinch of Oregano and a sprig of mint. Needless to say, just making a little Flash file and dropping it in will be nice.

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