This Site Best Viewed By… March 29, 2006
Posted by ptvGuy. Comments: add a comment
…means that someone was too lazy to do their job properly…
It only takes a little looking around the web (even among public television station websites) to find the words "This site best viewed by…" emblazoned somewhere for all to see (as if it were something to be proud of.) My Google search shows over 259 million results. This particularly abhorrent practice is a major pet peeve of mine. It means that someone was too lazy to do their job properly and probably got paid for it anyway. That's just wrong.
There's also the implication that any site visitor not using the specific browser, browser version, or screen resolution listed as "acceptable" by this particular wannabe webmaster (or better yet, "webfailure") just deserves whatever garbage comes out on their screens. You'd think that no one else had ever heard the story of The Emperor's New Clothes.
…This parking lot best used by Toyota Camrys, 1995 or later, 2-door, not 4-door…
I keep trying to imagine what day to day life would be like if this practice were adopted by any other industry. Can you imagine a television station that advertised the best brand of television on which to watch their broadcast and was unconcerned by the fact that their signal was blurry or unwatchable on any other brand? Can you imagine a sign outside your local grocery store that said, "This parking lot best used by Toyota Camrys, 1995 or later, 2-door, not 4-door." Tell me you wouldn't want to stick some massive, old RV across 14 of those parking spaces and dare anyone to say a word.
People, the time has come to end this practice once and for all! There have been efforts and all-out campaigns to do this before, but they've had very little success. I have a plan that I think could be pretty effective. I call it my "Many Happy Returns Plan." It goes like this:
Everyone starts contacting the real owners of these sites and telling them to get their money back. It's clear that the person they paid to do this was either too incompetent to do it properly or too lazy to finish the job. They should get their money back to pay someone else who knows what the heck they're doing. It's only fair. I think that a few well-publicized lawsuits would end this particular trend in laziness.
It really comes down to this, the only time that you should see the words "This site best viewed by…" on a website is if they're followed by the words "…anyone in any browser they prefer." If you don't know how to do this, ask, search the web, learn, find out. Don't just stick some piece of garbage site up and charge a client for it. In the immortal words of Captain Jean-Luc Picard, "Make it so."
Local Station Promotion of PBS Online-Only Content March 23, 2006
Posted by ptvGuy. Comments: 8 commentsA little project of mine a few months back started out as just a bit of filler-content for Southern Oregon Public Television's homepage and has steadily begun outgrowing the sidebar where it was born. I'm speaking of a section that I not so brilliantly called "Online Xtras" which was really just a place to put a link to PBS's then new online "TV" show, NerdTV. I also filled it out with links to the PBS RSS page along with their podcasts page and figured I was done. Right?
…the granddaddy of all PBS web-original projects, American Field Guide…
Well, you probably guessed what happened next… Along came Mediashift. You know I couldn't leave that out. Then, of course, I discovered POV: Borders followed closely by Independent Lens: Off The Map and just as I'm thinking how cool all of this stuff is, it occurs to me that I've left off the granddaddy of all PBS web-original projects, American Field Guide, a vast and underused resource if ever there was one. Then I'm feeling really stupid…
American Field Guide is an Oregon Public Broadcasting project that grew–in collaboration with PBS–out of the original Oregon Field Guide under Steve Amen. Here I am promoting PBS online-only content on Southern Oregon Public Television's website and AFG is the last thing that occurs to me. Oh well, I corrected that and went on. Done, right? Well not quite…
…growing PBS trend in creating web-original content…
My "Online Xtras" section (which desperately needs a better name) has already far exceeded the space I had originally planned for it. The growing PBS trend in creating web-original content is bound to expand it even further. Besides that, I have plans to create an SOPTV-original RSS feed of their monthly program highlights that will have to be clearly distinguished from the general PBS feeds. All of this has led me to the conclusion that this entire section of web-only and web-original content needs its own page–perhaps with more extensive write-ups of each item's content and a way cooler name.
Tah-dum… Thus have I led you through the humble beginnings of a small piece of original station web content. You're thrilled, right? Hey, somewhere out there right now someone is applauding something, and you know what? That's close enough for me. Thank you, everyone, and good night.
Norton's Ad Hoc Ad Blocking March 19, 2006
Posted by ptvGuy. Comments: add a comment…Norton blocks document writes from outside sources…
One of the major battles I've been involved with over the course of the last year is trying to get important station site content past Norton Internet Security. It seems that the default settings for Norton (which covers about 99% of its users) include the automatic blocking of various page elements that it considers advertising or ad-like or has the potential to be used as ads or perhaps in the presence of a full moon might become an ad. I don't know. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't have to. They're Norton.
Norton's answer to ad blocking is to make sure it never even reaches your browser. Brilliant, right? The problem is that they went for the easiest solution at the expense of blocking loads of valid content. They block images of specific ad-like or banner-like sizes (thus killing various logos and program highlights) or with certain keywords like "ad" or "sponsor." (I had to change the name of one of my image subfolders from "/sponsors/" to "/underwriters/".) These problems were fairly easy to bypass and work around, but that's not the worst of it…
Norton blocks document writes from outside sources.
…it expunges the content directly from the source code before it ever reaches a user's browser…
You're probably wondering why I wrote that last sentence as if it should be accompanied by ominous background music. The answer is that PBS uses just such outside document writes to provide some very important content to station websites. The program search function that allows users to search through the upcoming program schedules by keyword, title, or subject as well as the TeacherSource Activity Search function that allows teachers to search for lesson plans, classroom activities, and games tied to local programming are both blocked by Norton. Again, that's not the worst of it…
The worst problem with Norton Internet Security is that it expunges the content directly from the source code before it ever reaches a user's browser. [That's MY code. I'm an anal coder. Don't ever do that.] That means that users with this software installed see my pages with no content, missing content, or outright holes in the pages as if I had no idea what I was doing in creating that page. Norton leaves it that way, too. They don't take credit for helping to save that user from my horrible attempt to educate them. Heck no, they like to hide out in the system tray all unobtrusive as if they were just minding their own business and had no clue what was going on.
…users with this software installed see my pages with missing content…
If this were some low-end, hardly used software with a handful of users, I wouldn't care. But this is Norton, and, depending on whose statistics you believe, it's currently shipping preinstalled with all it preset defaults on something between 50% and 80% of all new store-bought computers. That's a major chunk of my current and future users. How many schools does that include?
The most important content, the one thing that I believe transforms a local public television station website from a glorified brochure into a major educational resource is the ability to deliver already finished, professionally-developed lesson plans and classroom activities to the busy local teachers and homeschoolers who need them most. That's what Norton's ad hoc approach to ad blocking is preventing, not advertising, just valid content. I can slip an advertisement through Norton without any problem.
