My Balaur.ro real life test

Today I went on the Balaur.ro to see some options for a friend who's about to get jobless (independent of their competency, it's a business matter). What I first liked was the way the balaur greeted me with nice personal words, as if indeed it was the lil' dragon addressing to me. Pretty fancy and quite relaxing (not ugly formal), along the good guidelines set by the funky dragon, like, I'm about to change job, I'm stressed enough, it's cool to have a friend talking to me.



It's nice to see that kind of interface for a serious app in Romania, usually the friendly addressing is reserved to party/fun/social websites ("vino sa te distrezi cu noi!"), while the stuff that help you get the job done treat you like some sort of a grandpa ("Aici puteti sa va rezolvati toate problemele existentiale. Inscrieti-va acum!")

Since I had no CV and no interest in a long term experience (I just looked around to checkout the options), I went to the plain search:



I looked around, found a few nice things (as in nice jobs) and I liked the way the balaur showed duplicates so that I don't get emotioned twice for the same job.



Then, knowing that my friend is a bit demanding, I tried to filter by salary amount. I just loved the dragon letting me know that my filtering is messing it all up since very few of the jobs have salary level filled in.



I knew about the nice linkedIn references feature before (showing who are the people on linked in that specify that company as a workplace) but unfortunately I couldn't get it to work tonight...



Not really showcase-of-all-features kinda story, but it's really the first time I needed the balaur, and it does a pretty good job! I admit I never looked on the jobs sites to compare the experience but I like the aggregating balaur, and most specially it's semantic features (filtering, eliminating duplicates, basically helping me a lot with the search).

Great job guys!

Look, ma, no code!

I read the other days an article about a guy that devised a method to turn off the lights in his bedroom by tweeting about it. My mind immediately started flying towards writing Jabber protocol extensions for communicating with the fridge, the washing machine, the dvd player or the heating system. E.g. "coming home with a girl / guy" on the home group would trigger synchronized actions: heat a little up, cooling wine (only if it's white), start slow music, etc, etc. Since it works for Twitter it would definitely work for Jabber, on both ends: the sender and the home appliance implementation: it's just the same thing (same 80, same plain text, same openness). Jabber also feels more like the right way to implement it: its extension mechanism can allow from a simple text message (which you could actually send without extensions) to sophisticated any-purpose structured data, all thanks to XML almighty. Actually I start to wonder right now if that does not exist already, it seems so clean and cool and not even rocket science.

It was no earlier than today that I asked myself: ok, then WHY didn't the guy (or anybody) do it for Jabber? It's obviously a better choice. But it isn't as simple as Twitter. Jabber is a heavy protocol, although open and everything, there still are 2 (or 7, if you want to be strict) RFCs about it. Yeah, a lot of libraries come to save us from reading them but still, library? look, on Twitter I can only do it with a simple regexp! ("Look, ma, no code!"). It hit me that this might be the explanation for all the "twitter hysteria": not the need for social interaction (bla, bla), the need for microblogging in an ever time constrained world, the need of accessibility in the increasingly mobile world or whatever, just its simpleness. And it's no surprise, in the end: all the right things in life are simple.

Definitely something to remember, if we happened to forget it, for the next world changing application we design!

I got naked

Let me see you stripped! – Rammstein, Stripped

As proposed by the CSS Naked Day Initiative, I got naked today: my blog has (almost – because Blogger is a little shy when it comes to it) no styles, for the evening of April 9th and the following night!

Dare to get naked too!

Advertising...(reloaded?)

Yep, on stupid ads again (hmmm, is my blog becoming a repository of proofs of the existence of absolute stupidity on earth?)



Can you see the webpage?
No, because it's an ad on top of another ad on top of the page! :)
Can you see the close button?
No, because there isn't one!

Thanks to Stefan Ciobâcă for the print screen (see, he didn't have a close button at all so he could print it before he closed it :) )

Advertising...

I posted about annoying advertising some time ago, and now I must add one more to the row:


Can you see the close button?
Ok, it's the one in the top right corner of the big bubble.
Now that you see it, can you click it?
(trust me, no scaling was involved in the production of this image)

I must thank Dana for the print screen: the ad displays only the first time you access the page (no reload/refresh can get it back again) and I am just too absorbed by the fact that I must close it to remember that I'd better get a print screen first...

Here we go again...

Yes, I do stare at XML all day long


Just when I thought I saw everything...
Today, Yahoo! Tech!
First of all, there is a special reason for which the guys that designed microformats figured out a method of specifying uids for each of the microformats: when parsing the same page twice, we MUST have a way of testing microformats equality to realize that we already know the precious info one has to offer! So, yahoo tech guys, you might wanna add a rel='self' (or rel='bookmark' or anything that would mean 'id', with its most permissive interpretation) to the 'a' tag in the title of the review!

First-and-a-half of all, the 'description' of the yahoo tech review is its 'item fn' as well. (according to this, the text of the review and the formatted name of the item are semantically equivalent) Now what could that mean? Hmmm... Seemingly, that it's reviewing the "I bought this product 2 days ago and I think is really cool" item. Is this just because 'item' is required and some 'specification compliant' programmer thought he/she should stuff it in somehow?

Second of all (and this is the cool part – I tend to keep good things for the ending), the short review links to a 'longer', 'one-on-the-page' review, through that 'a' tag I mentioned. But guess what: NO hreview markup AT ALL on this new page. Nothing. Empty. Stupid simple html. Pleaaaase, have mercy!

Notice now how I am writing my post in a conversation-like manner: because Neil was so kind to react, I am probably expecting that to happen again (yeah, dream on!).

Now I decided that I REALLY should do something to prevent things like this in the future: and I will start by highlighting some 'tips on how not to screw up semantics' in my presentation on microformats. Even if it won't change anything, at least I will be sure I tried my best.

Summer <Web /> online

Since everybody is blogging and spreading the word about it (well, at least Sabin Buraga and Alina Mierluş) I thought I should contribute too: I started submitting the thing online, to "major" events websites: Eventful and Upcoming.
I had some fun with that tag in the title of the event, but the great discovery was that, as opposed to upcoming's policy on url classes, eventful just does not allow you to add an url (a class="url") for your event. At all. Whatever you do, wherever you add your link, it will not be THE url of the vevent. Their class="url" is for the permalink of the event on eventful. That is, still on their website. I wonder if this is marketing (all events homepages are on eventful) or just plain wrong applied semantics, AGAIN.

The happy end of this story is this.

For the upcoming story there is no happy-end: I couldn't add FCS as a venue on upcoming (I tried like 3-4 times):

and because you cannot add events without venues, summer <Web/> 2007 is not on Upcoming. Yet. I'll try again the next days, maybe this is only because of the changes they're going through now (merging upcoming accounts with yahoo accounts), though I can't see any connection.

Does anyone know if there is a Romanian events website? We should submit it there, too...

Oh, and I shouldn't forget to mention that I will be talking about microformats at Summer <Web/> 2007. See you there!

I wonder what does this button doo? (reloaded)

Well, I got it: the print-screens! Unfortunately, I'm pretty slow (in thoughts) and I couldn't get a print-screen of the progress bar...

1. The panel appeared: notice how it covers the text and its close button in the bottom-right corner:


2. I clicked the button. Notice how the advertisement disappeared but the panel didn't: the black thing is still covering the page!


The same webpage displays another advertisement, pretty much in the same way: a non-closing-panel on top of the text. But this was only the container: the actual ad was a smaller panel bouncing inside the container. And guess what: the close button was attached to the bouncing panel!!!! Sooo, in order to close it, I had to move around to catch it: of course, I missed twice so I got myself two popups opened by the stupid ad!

Finally, I had to reload the page until no ads were displayed at all (it seems it does such things besides changing the ad) in order to read something (a pretty interesting article after all).

This is to prove that reading newspapers online is one of the best things to do to "relax" -- it seems somehow that newspapers pick the most stupid programmers for their websites.

I wonder what does this button dooo?

Motto (from Cartoon Network ancient wisdom):

Deedee: I wonder what does this button doooo? Can I push it, Dexter, can I, can I?!?!?!
Dexter: No, Deedee, do NOT push that button!

Remember the pop-up advertisements that we all hated? Thanks God (or the popup blockers), they're history now!
But because creativity is a key component of a web developer, another invention invades our browsers: the javascript popup panels with advertisements. The blockers didn't get them, yet! :)

For those who haven't seen them yet, they are panels that open when you enter the page, covering parts of the page content, that show text and/or sounds to get your attention and make you buy whatever they want you to buy. Besides this classic version, there is a new variety of the ad: there is a regular ad panel but when you hover it, it gets laaaaarger and starts making sounds. Of course, this kind of hover-activated panels are 'strategically' placed in the page: you'd have to take a 700 pixels wide ellipse detour to avoid it. But, hey, that's their purpose, to annoy you until you buy!

There is no really big problem actually: they all have a close button, a mute button (not like the stupid beer that made sure all the office knows you read gsp), or whatever annihilation method.


I mean, that's what I thought until a few days ago, when I entered some online newspaper (I don't remember which one) and it popped:
millisecond 1: 'OK, I'll close it!'
millisecond 2: 'oooh, no close button...'
millisecond 2.5: 'oooh, it hasn't loaded yet (it's just a blank panel covering my web page), that's why...'
seconds 1 to 5: the ad's PROGRESS BAR saying: 'Loading, please wait...'
Whaaaaaat? NO, I will NOT wait for you to load an advertisement I don't want to see!!!!

So what do we do know? Should we stop visiting the annoying websites? Is it fair to avoid bad-designed websites or bad-programmed websites? What makes us come back to a website: the content or the design? (I sound like Carrie Bradshaw again!)
The publisher of the information is, frequently enough, not the one that designes/programmes the website. So, by not visiting it anymore, we actually hurt the publisher when it's the developer we should hit.
Of course, the publisher chooses the programmer so if it's stupid, he/she should pay. Yet again, frequently enough, the publisher has no idea about technical stuff, so he/she cannot evaluate properly the work of a programmer (I could bet that the online newspaper had no idea about the fact that a slow internet connection might cause an advertising to load for a few seconds and annoy me (the user)). Doubtless, the programmer will always blame the content if a website isn't visited enough.

So (to make it an awareness raising post): PUBLISHERS from all around the world, hire someone and pay him/her damn well to TEST your website's functionality in all the imaginable and non-imaginable ways because it's your image and your money we're talking about!