July 15, 2003
Weblog Metadata for download
NITLE Blog Census is another metablog that find as many weblogs as they could, crawling and store them. They licensed their works under Creative Common licence. You could get their full database over here, as well as the URL and metadata of known weblogs.
This is nice and generous! It save months of hard work if you’re going to do some weblog analysis. They have crawled over 623,416 weblogs (across all languages), which should be good enough to be based for your topology study or any sort of discovery. Download the data, put your creative on it.
Moreover, based on the data, they have a statistic of market share of weblog tools. Market share of standalone tool like MT is way behind blog hosting service like blogspot.
PDF Usability
Jakob Nielsen has a rant of PDF usability on his latest AlertBox. These are the very true problems quoted from his article:
- Linear exposition. PDF files are typically converted from documents that were intended for print, so the authors wouldn’t have followed the guidelines for Web writing. The result? A long text that takes up many screens and is unpleasant and boring to read.
- Jarring user experience. PDF lives in its own environment with different commands and menus. Even simple things like printing or saving documents are difficult because standard browser commands don’t work.
- Crashes and software problems. While not as bad as in the past, you’re still more likely to crash users’ browsers or computers if you serve them a PDF file rather than an HTML page.
- Breaks flow. You have to wait for the special reader to start before you can see the content. Also, PDF files often take longer time to download because they tend to be stuffed with more fluff than plain Web pages.
- Orphaned location. Because the PDF file is not a Web page, it doesn’t show your standard navigation bars. Typically, users can’t even find a simple way to return to your site’s homepage.
- Content blob. Most PDF files are immense content chunks with no internal navigation. They also lack a decent search, aside from the extremely primitive ability to jump to a text string’s next literal match. If the user’s question is answered on page 75, there’s close to zero probability that he or she will locate it.
- Text fits the printed page, not a computer screen. PDF layouts are often optimized for a sheet of paper, which rarely matches the size of the user’s browser window. Bye-bye smooth scrolling. Hello tiny fonts.
I hate to view PDF file in a browser window. It’s slow to launch the reader, the navigate bar is confusing, and it’s crash-prone. Always remember to right click on the PDF link and save it, or configure your browser to save it instead of open it with Acrobat Reader. The other annoying thing is, everytime you open a PDF file, you got to adjust the font size if you gonna view it on screen, because it’s designed for PRINTING.
If PDF files are typically converted from documents that were intended for print, why there’re still a lot of publishers use PDF for ebooks in attached CDROM? Aren’t they encourage printing of the ebooks when readers already hold the dead-tree copy? I would prefer CHM, for the indexing and search (chm format got the font issue too.
Taxi Driver's comment
I was in this taxi, the driver speaks very good English. He said:
Tell you honestly, 9 out of 10 taxi pass by, that’s only one good taxi driver. But 99 out of 100 passengers are BAD CUSTOMERS! They are always picky on the direction you choose: “Hey, why you take this way…” That was once the charge was RM4.90. I told the guy I really don’t have any shilling at that time. He insist to get back his 10 cents! End up I have to give him back one ringgit, by losing 90 cents. All they want is money, money, money.…sigh…And those passengers wearing nice shirts, shining ties ROBBED me with a knife, twice!!
He went on to mention he has only 8 dollars in pocket, but the nice looking young guy robbed him. Well, the ridiculous city. 99% are bad? No, I am a reasonable passenger and not the only one. He didn’t hear my grunt though. It is pathetic. I’d seen some unreasonable passengers , who treat taxi drivers like an enemy (‘coz of mouth-to-mouth bad reputation); there are also quite a number of taxi drivers cheating on their meter, or took you to the wrong way. It’s just difficult to build trust between taxi drivers and passengers, especially in KL. Somehow if we do think a bit of each other, reminding ourselves that we’re both just people trying to survive in this big city, thing would go easier.
Relax, life is tough.
I'm Back
I have a break from blogging. I didn’t intend to do that though I like it :).
To put the recap: we drove to Ipoh for my sister’s father in law’s funeral. Coming back to KL, I brought my parent a 2 days KL trip. What others I did? Shopping, shopping and more shopping, watching T3 (hence the title), surveying digital camera, driving and more driving, all these exhausted activities distracted me from blogging/Internet.
While I was not blogging, I felt guilty of let the blog frontpage hanging for 4 days. And when I didn’t read blog, I am uncomfortable, feeling like I haven’t finished something I should have before going to bed.
All additive stuff is drug. So do Internet, so do blogging.
Meanwhile, Project Petaling Street v1.5 has officially launched! You could link to PPS if you are a Malaysian and you have a blog. More details here. I didn’t contribute much to the beta testing (shame on me), mostly because of my low spirit and personal events. The beta test is well done. Congrats, Aizuddin.