I’ve been agonising over a particular usability issue for weeks, and in the absence of a focus group budget I decided to blog it. Perhaps you can help me form a better opinion on this.
It concerns the presentation and default behaviour of a ‘download’ link. The file could be of any type, but is generally implied to be large. My dilemma is whether to force the file to download, or let the browser handle it. Both seem to have their problems depending on the type of file, but worst of all people seem to be hugely divided over both their preference and their expectation of what will happen by default when they click it.
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Take a look at this screen shot from my Google Analytics dashboard.
These are all click-throughs from tweets. They are all referred by Twitter’s URL shortener (t.co). Unfortunately this data is fairly useless. I’d like to know who the influential tweeters are and what the tweets said. I could search Twitter for the full URLs, but Twitter search is – quite frankly – rubbish for this.
My initial reaction to this vague and seemingly obfuscated data was annoyance, but after doing some research I now see that this data is actually a bonus. That doesn’t mean it can’t be improved though.
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It had been quite some years since I last looked at the options for PDF generation in PHP, so when I needed to add PDF support to Brandfeed I did a bit of research. I ended up on this Stackoverflow thread which overall seems to recommend TCPDF with some fairly strong supporters for other libraries, including mPDF.
I wasn’t looking forward to trying them all out to decide which library to use, but as it turns out I didn’t have to. When I discovered wkhtmltopdf, my decision was made. (I know that sounds like a cheesy marketing testimonial, bear with me)
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We’re having a special Freelance Friday meetup on Dec 16th 2011. FFX is the ‘office’ Christmas party for freelancers.
It’s actually the 8th meetup, not the 10th which is a shame. But what the hell, it sounds good.
In line with the micro-sponsor model we ran for FF5, we’re inviting companies to sponsor a pint (or 10). Starting at £4, we’re placing their logo on our wall of sponsors. The bigger the pledge, the bigger the logo.
You can even embed the sponsor widget on your own blog, as I’m doing here. (Get the embed code).
So, if you’ve gone the extra mile for your clients this year (and not billed them for every minute of every phone call like a solicitor), then embed the widget, send them the link, and ask them kindly to buy you a pint.
Oh, and half the money raised will go to charity.
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I wrote in January about the faculty Facebook may possess for tracking your browsing history. I made brief mention of the fact that logging out of Facebook may not prevent further tracking. It’s this last point that caused a stir this week as Nik Cubrilovic’s post got picked up by the press.
His follow-up post describes Facebook’s response, but the ‘tracking’ cookie to which I was referring has not been removed. According to Nik’s post, Facebook admit this will remain after logout to track the browser, but for ‘safety and spam purposes’.
According to this WSJ article, ‘not all of the data is logged’. That’s good.
The bottom line for me is that Facebook are so powerful that they need to be as answerable to their populous as a government. That means a certain level of transparency and being clear about their intentions. If they go back on their word, who holds them accountable? Are our laws even adequate? Should Facebook be audited, or should we just trust them?
I don’t expect I’d be too happy about having my servers audited, but I’m not Facebook. When nearly half a billion people log into your site each day to give you their data, you have a serious amount of responsibility on your shoulders.
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