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Category: internet-explorer

Bystander Effect on Broken Blogs and Websites


Monday May 31, 2010

Reading Time: 8 minutes

Lately I have been thinking a lot about the bystander effect (syndrome) and how it can be applied to the Internet. I am not referring to the darker side of the Internet, I am talking about a typical website/blog that is designed for commercial e-commerce or business to business (B2B), personal/informational blog, news, government or a non-profit organization promotional site. Our society has been talking about the bystander effect for almost 50 years, and yes I know it is usually applied to life and death emergency situations, not unlike the Good Samaritan that died in New York City on April 18th.

But back to the Internet and the bystander effect. I started down this path about six weeks ago when I saw a tweet from Chris Brogan which said basically: “People of earth, I know my site has been hacked.” I think this was Chris’ urgent way of telling his 135,000+ Twitter followers to stop sending him messages. I am almost positive that Chris really appreciated the first few tweets or emails from his followers, because one might be a fluke but multiple messages validate the condition, and besides I think Chris would do the same if he came across something that was broken (my assumption, but his stated principle to “be helpful”). I think Chris is lucky that so many people want to help him. More often than not, a site viewer will see or come across something that is broken or obviously incorrect and yet they won’t take the time to tell the site owner, whose very livelihood might depend on this “head’s up.”

Let me give you two current examples, both involve $1,000,000:

  1. On May 21, Zappos.com announced that their sister site 6pm.com’s pricing engine capped all prices at $49.95 for six hours. It cost them a loss of $1.6 million dollars. Is it possible that over the course of six hours not one regular returning customer of 6pm.com took the time to send a message to say “Hey, something looks screwy on your site!”? I hope you will read the whole article, because you will see that it was a programming error that resulted from bad code. Read all the comments about pricing engines, 6pm.com took the high road, but I would love to know if they received that one email that alerted them. (I learned about this story from Jodi Henderson’s blog )
  2. On May 29th, I read a tweet from Jorja at Beyond the Pale that said: “RT the lonely world of blogging, comment anyone, anyone, buehler? comment, anyone?” and it linked to Savor the Ride (be sure to read all the eventual comments on this post, it will allow you to see how the story unfolded). I decided to see what this blog was all about. Guess what? The blogger, Ridgely Johnson, was offering $1,000,000 to the first commenter, as her last 20 blogs had received not one comment. A few tweets went back and forth between Jorja and me, finally I sent an email to Ridgely which said: “I happened over to your blog because @beyondpalegal (Jorja) tweeted about you. Not that I expected to win $1,000,000, but I cannot figure out how to leave a comment on any of your posts. I tried in IE8 and FF…no place to comment. Am I missing something, maybe this is why no one is commenting?”Today is Memorial Day. It is a solemn day, but I thought that maybe I could leave you with a scene from the wonderful 1986-1993 television series “Designing Women.” This YouTube video is dedicated to Dixie Carter (Julia) who passed away April 10, 2010. Julia asks the proverbial question: “Why didn’t somebody tell me?” Watch the whole episode, you won’t be disappointed.


Designing women season 3 episode 15 by Mixedseries12
If you are having trouble viewing Season 3, Episode 15 “Full Moon,” you can view it here.

Over this Memorial Day weekend, Chris Brogan and Julien Smith have been writing about “frames and assumptions.” The stand out message is this from Julien: “Always be testing. Never stop questioning things you think are true, no matter how solid they may seem.” This, of course, applies to all aspects of our lives, but particularly to our websites/blogs. Things happen, hacking occurs, links break, you hit a wrong button and you disable comments, no one tests your site in varied browsers (can look great on an Apple in Safari, and scream “Help” in IE8). Many bloggers are not technical and they cannot afford on-going technical assistance, so don’t assume they know about a problem with their site. Don’t be a bystander, speak up! Remember this is social media. Be social. Help a “friend.”

I would love to hear your thoughts about all of this.

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Surprised you. Didn’t I. Here it is Saturday morning and the title of my blog is almost technical. Facebook and Internet Explorer 8! I am going to try to make this post short and sweet. Here is what I experienced this week from a technical standpoint.

  1. For the past few weeks every time that I have opened IE 7 I have seen an invitation to download IE 8. Finally, I thought why not? So I did. It seemed to download efficiently and there were many new features to see and use.
  2. As a “member” of Facebook, I log on to Facebook about once or twice per day. I don’t really have time to be on Facebook all day long taking surveys, tests, etc. But on the day that I downloaded IE 8 I went to Facebook and what do you know…there was a message at the top of my Facebook home page that said: ALERT! You are trying to view FACEBOOK using IE 6, please update your browser to IE 7!
  3. Are you kidding me? I would have understood if this alert message had said “You are trying to view FACEBOOK with IE 8, but Facebook is not compatible with IE 8. Until we have updated FACEBOOK to be compatible with IE 8, please view in Firefox.”
  4. I let a few days go by and when I wanted to sign into FACEBOOK I did go to Firefox. But this became annoying.
  5. This morning I once again went to FACEBOOK on IE 8 and the strange warning message was gone, BUT the view was still screwed up (my technical term).
  6. Once again, on FACEBOOK I clicked on HELP and searched the phrase “Internet Explorer 8.” What do you know, someone actually posted the solution to my problem: “While you are on Facebook: Click on “Tools” then click on “Compatibility View Settings”. Facebook’s web site will appear in the “Add this Website” box. Click the “add” button and you will be all set. Facebook will now be viewable with all of its features in IE 8!”
  7. Now I ask you: According to Facebook’s Press Room, FACEBOOK has 200 million active users, don’t you think that with 200 million active users that FACEBOOK could make sure their software is compatible with IE 8 or at least they could post a message that made sense and gave IE 8 users instructions of how to correct the view?

What I have just described to you is one of the new features of IE 8. That is a Compatibility View. The first time you visit a web site using IE 8 you will see a little box to the left of the “refresh button”. Hover over this box and it says: “Compatibility View: Websites designed for older browsers will often look better, and problems such as out-of-place menus, images, or text will be corrected.” GREAT!!!! This makes IE 8 worth it to me. There are other new features like, “re-open closed tabs”, “InPrivate” and “Use an Accelerator.”

I am sure many of you are saying to yourself, why does Judy use Internet Explorer when she could use Firefox, Chrome, etc? Habit…yes, I happen to feel comfortable with IE, as do many other people. And the bottom line is this: Webconsuls is responsible for designing and upgrading our clients’ sites. As such, we are required to test new and upgraded sites in all browser types and versions.
Let me know what you think.

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Internet Explorer crashes Send Error Report! It seems like when I open IE, nine times out of ten it freezes upon opening; then I get a message asking if I would like to send an error report or not. I have installed and reinstalled IE several times, but to no avail. It makes me wonder what Microsoft does with all the error reports that I send them; it sure seems like those hundreds of error reports that I send to IE do very little.

How is it it that the browsers that are not as compatible as IE work so much better? If I could only use Google Chrome for all my Internet needs I would be very pleased. Unfortunately, I have to use Internet Explorer for particular tasks, even if it opens one time out of ten. Patience is truly a virtue when dealing with IE!

My hope is that as Google Chrome gets better, I will be able to use Internet Explorer less. With time I hope to eventually move away from IE for good. In many respects one can manage with using any of the available browsers; the question is how much frustration can be endured before you only want to use one browser? All I want, is that when I send off error reports to power houses like Microsoft, they could at least fix the problem.

Reading Time: 3 minutes

In a perfect world your website is available on the internet 24 hours a day, 7 days a week …

but things can happen.

  • You may accidentally let your domain expire. How could that happen? You may have signed up for your domain with an email you no longer use.
  • Hackers could break into the server where your site is hosted. This is not uncommon.
  • A script can exploit a widely used piece of software such as a content management system.

All of these can bring your site down. You may not find out as immediately as you would like and in the meantime opportunities are lost and leads move on.

Here is an easy way to check in on your website throughout your day.

Set the home page of the your internet browser to your website. Every time you open your browser your website will appear. This montoring can help catch problems that may arise as soon as possible.

Setting your browser to open to your website (Click on screen shots to enlarge.):

Internet Explorer

Tools > Internet Options > General Tab > type in your website into the “To create home page tabs”

If you type in more than one address your browser will open all the websites each in a different tab.

 

Firefox

Tools > Options >

 

Safari

Edit > Preferences >