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Category Archives: Web design

Is Bell.ca the best commercial website in Quebec?

May 16, 2008 – 4:08 am | Also posted in Opinion

Some consulting firm we’ve never heard of has released its rankings of the top 25 consumer-oriented commercial websites in Quebec. At the top of the list:

  1. Bell.ca, which doesn’t work with Safari.
  2. Radio-Canada.ca, whose address they got wrong, and which opens audio content in strange 1px-by-1px pop-up windows.
  3. Desjardins.com, which won’t let you me log into electronic banking with Firefox, and whose top-notch security includes such impossible-for-anyone-else-to-guess questions as “what high school did you graduate from?”
  4. Videotron.com, which admittedly I haven’t had issues with, even if their cable and Internet service has much room for improvement.
  5. Metro.ca, which uses Javascript needlessly, has a badly-designed site map page (the stupid web 2.0 sharing buttons hides some of the text) and shows 0 stores in Montreal with delivery service available.

Of course, when you judge websites through a mathematical formula that suggests quality of a website is directly proportional to the size of the organization running it, this is what you get.

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I don’t need your help, Cyberpresse

May 2, 2008 – 5:14 pm | Also posted in Media

Like every other OMGWEB2.0WE’RE S000K001!!!111 media website around, Cyberpresse has added those dreaded share links to the bottom of every story. You know, the ones you click on and, through the magic of URL variables brings you directly to a del.icio.us bookmark-save page, Fark submission page or prefabricated Facebook post.

These things really annoy me for a few reasons:

  1. They’re entirely unnecessary. I already have a bookmarklet to save pages to del.icio.us. For any other purpose, it’s simple to copy the URL and paste it where needed.
  2. There are far too many of these. Del.icio.us, Digg, Fark, Slashdot, MySpace, Facebook, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Furl, etc. There are so many, in fact, that other services have been created to be the middleman and make sure they’re all supported. If you’re not using one of the top three services, you’re not going to find those links on all pages, and so you have to find an alternative, and so #1 comes back into play.
  3. They’re ugly.

This unnecessary help doesn’t end there. Cyberpresse, like many of its bretheren, also has plenty of other buttons and links that pointlessly duplicate existing browser functions, badly.

  • Text size: Toggles between only three sizes (the default is the smallest). Changes only the article text, not the text of other type on the page.
  • Print: Normally, you’d expect this to provide a specially-formatted print-friendly version of the article. No, instead it just calls the print function through Javascript. Oh, and there is no specially-formatted print-friendly version, so you get the background image, navigation, headers and footers, and all the ads.

It’s all just a waste of HTML, much like everything else on the page that’s not the article I want to read.

Meanwhile, their entirely Flash-based video site provides no way whatsoever to share links to individual videos. I can’t bookmark them, send them as emails, save them to social networking sites, or post them to blogs.

Maybe you should start working on that instead?

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Mix 96’s solid news judgment

April 10, 2008 – 10:07 pm | Also posted in Canadiens, Radio

Top sports story on Mix 96’s website tonight: “Sharapova beats Garrigues to advance at Bausch & Lomb Championships”

It’s not like anything more important happened or anything.

(I realize nobody’s going to go to Mix 96’s website as their source for news, which just makes me ask why they bother subscribing to Associated Press in the first place)

UPDATE: For good measure, the Team 990’s website’s current top sports story: “Jets agree to long-term deal with Rhodes” (and I can’t find out more details because their website is misconfigured)

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Claire Danes haunts my dreams

April 5, 2008 – 3:17 am | Also posted in Media

Macleans Newsmakers

Dear Macleans,

I’m not a very frequent visitor to your website, but even I’ve begun to be disturbed by this photo of Claire Danes, which has appeared on every article page for over six months now. It draws attention to the fact that your “weekly newsmakers” photo gallery hasn’t been updated since August.

More importantly though, she’s starting to really creep me out. It’s kind of a mindless expression in the first place, as if she was just turned into a zombie or something, but with none of those rotting scabs and messed-up hairdos they all have.

If you don’t intend to update it (Nissan not paying the bills any more?), could you delete it from your template, along with all the other stuff that’s gathering dust on a virtual shelf somewhere?

Thank you.

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WestIslandGazette.com launches

March 27, 2008 – 4:33 am | Also posted in Media, West Island

WestIslandGazette.com, The Gazette’s “hyper-local” website serving West Island and western off-island communities, officially launches today. Page A2 in today’s paper has an article from editor-in-chief Andrew Phillips discussing the new site.

The site is pretty well unchanged since last time I mentioned it, except it has fewer bugs and more updated stories. (No changes based on Craig Silverman’s comments, for example.)

Phillips’s article also mentions upcoming changes to the editorial page, which will reduce space given to editorials and increase space given to letters to the editor (a change I think most people will welcome). There will also be more web-only opinion content, and Phillips’s blog, which I mentioned last week. The changes all go live on Monday.

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Bus schedules formatted for cellphones

March 24, 2008 – 2:03 am | Also posted in Montreal, On the Net, Public transit

Here’s an interesting little website: busmob.com. It scrapes the STM’s website for bus departure times and reformats them in an easy-to-read-on-mobile-phones page.

It’s not perfect (it doesn’t do holidays and other special situations, for example), and in many cases it’s probably easier to call the AUTOBUS number and get the automated voice to tell you departure times. But if for some reason the STM’s website is too cumbersome for your cell, this site might just be useful for you.

UPDATE: And here’s a website that acts as a Google Maps frontend for the STM’s Tous Azimuts service.

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Sur le Web: Get a clue

March 13, 2008 – 2:56 pm | Also posted in Blogosphere, Media, Opinion

RadCan’s Sur le Web, a blog-style page with links to interesting things online, has added the ability for users to comment, except with a strange rule: No links. Period.

Sur le Web is a very strange animal in the local blogosphere:

  • Each post is paired with a tiny video of the blogger’s talking head explaining what we’ve just read.
  • Permalinks are created with page anchors as opposed to individual pages, meaning they become useless after a couple of days.
  • The site’s RSS feed has no text for its posts

Now this. I’m seriously tempted to unsubscribe as a protest, and would have done so long ago had the site been any less useful for information. But the fact that it seems to intentionally make it as difficult as possible to use annoys me to no end.

I couldn’t care less about comments. Fix everything else first.

But the fact that a blog about links to stuff online doesn’t allow links in its comments? That’s insane.

Among some of RadCan’s other draconian rules:

  • No comments in languages other than French
  • No anonymous or pseudonymous comments
  • No more than three comments per person per discussion

If similar rules had been put in place at CBC.ca, we’d be hearing about it. Maybe we need a Radio-Canada version of Inside the CBC?

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Gazette creating West Island hyper-local website

March 5, 2008 – 2:19 am | Also posted in Media, On the Net, West Island

I was sworn to secrecy, but Roberto let the cat out of the bag so he can take the flack if it’s still supposed to be a secret.

West Island Plus

The Gazette has been working on a West Island portal (called “West Island +” though its address is westislandgazette.com), a mix of newspaper stories and user-submitted content that pretty much fits that “hyper-local” mold that everyone’s talking about these days.

Its key feature is that stories are categorized based on location, allowing you to search for all things that take place in Pierrefonds (for example). The locations fall pretty well along the same borders as the former municipalities (though the 40 people who live in Ile Dorval might get ticked off at being lumped in with the bigger city). It also includes Ile Perrot and Vaudreuil-Dorion/St. Lazare/Hudson, which are also included in the Gazette’s West Island delivery area.

The site is still not quite ready for its official launch, which is expected later this month.

Thoughts?

I think there are a lot of good things about it, and a lot that can be improved (it’s a bit wide for me, forcing a horizontal scroll bar for those dozen or so pixels off the side).

The big question, of course, is whether user-generated content will turn this into the online destination for thousands of West Islanders, or whether the signal-to-noise ratio will be too low for people to wade through it all.

There’s only one way to find out.

UPDATE: Craig Silverman, a freelancer and blogger, takes issue with the terms of service, which he accuses of “bad faith” because it demands you waive moral rights (i.e. the right not to have your work distorted to say the opposite of what you mean, or the right to not have your name and image used to endorse a product without your permission), it demands free reign to publish and sell your content to others (”in perpetuity throughout the world”) and it demands that you waive the right to sue them for defamation or anything else no matter what they do to you.

It’s the kind of clauses you’ll find on just about any big corporate website, whose administrators throw it on there without thinking about it (or even probably reading it). But that doesn’t make it right.

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Media != celebrity, CBC

February 28, 2008 – 3:57 pm | Also posted in Media, Opinion

Dear CBC,

I subscribe to your “media news” feed, because I have a keen interest in journalism and the media.

I do not, however, have any interest in Britney Spears or Michael Jackson. What do celebrity gossip stories have to do with the media, other than showing us that non-paparazzi outlets will stoop to this level too?

Please separate your celebrity gossip from your media-related stories.

Thank you.

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LCN/Canoe needs to learn HTML 2.0

January 19, 2008 – 9:22 pm | Also posted in Media, Opinion

One of the recurring elements of my criticisms of big media websites is that you have to learn Web 1.0 before you try at Web 2.0. Uploaded stories from newspapers still don’t have clickable links, URLs are way too long, related stories aren’t linked to each other, etc.

Another example of this comes courtesy of Quebecor’s Canoe.ca website, which is presenting a “survey” with Quebecor-owned TVA/LCN, Quebecor-owned Journal de Montréal and Corus-owned Énergie 98.5 FM. The survey asks people questions in order to track down differences between Baby Boomers and younger generations (or more precisely, find out what the generations think of each other). Certainly no surprise for the Journal, which prefers to create divisive scandals rather than report on news that’s already out there.

But the version of the survey published online is ludicrously low-tech. Rather than have visitors fill out a web form (a technology that we’ve only had for about 12 years), it presents the options in barely-formatted paragraphs and then asks readers to cut and paste their answers into an email (that they format themselves).

How about I save everyone some time: Young people think Baby Boomers are old, boring, intolerant, stubborn and out of touch. Baby Boomers think young people are impulsive, irresponsible, weird, stupid and disrespectful.

Now where’s my Pulitzer?

UPDATE (Jan. 20): The first results are in, and ranking of priorities shows no real difference between the age groups (though I’m sure they’ll try to find one). Continuing the we-don’t-know-this-technology-stuff motif, the full results are a PDF focument of a scan of what looks like a bad photocopy of a fax of printed sheets of computer-generated charts. Have these people never heard of email?

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My 2008 media website wishlist

January 12, 2008 – 11:37 pm | Also posted in Media

Lots of people are talking about what changes we’re going to see for big media news websites in 2008:

Having been a consumer of online journalism for quite a while now, I’ve become an expert — no, a god — in how these websites should be run. So below, in no particular order, are some of my suggestions to newspaper and other big media news websites on how to improve for 2008:

Read More »

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On the improtance of copy editing

January 9, 2008 – 2:23 am | Also posted in Movies, On the Net

From the website for an awesome-sounding new movie:

Fimratings!

Dear Newline Cinema,

I’m available to proofread your websites in the future.

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Cyberpresse putting up 360 photos

December 19, 2007 – 1:46 am | Also posted in Media, Montreal

Cyberpresse (which just started playing music on my laptop without permission) is putting up 360-degree photos on its website: already one of a snowy Gilford St. shovelling on de Mentana St., and a truck accident on Cremazie Blvd.

It’s just another example of how big media companies like Cyberpresse understand the Internet and are prepared to use cutting-edge 1994 technology* to bring things that are cool but uninformative to users. (The last picture is particularly apt at showing the weaknesses of the technology: a truck accident is shown from only one angle — it’s great that I can see out in different directions, but I can’t see the other side of the truck.)

*Actually, it’s a Flash-based emulator of cutting-edge 1994 technology, but otherwise indistinguishable from Quicktime VR (right down to the unintuitive navigation).

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Sit through e-greeting, donate to charity

December 16, 2007 – 7:44 pm | Also posted in The Gazette

Bleublancrouge, the advertising company behind The Gazette’s “Words Matter” campaign (including those TV commercials), is helping the newspaper with an interesting twist to its annual Christmas Fund campaign: The paper is donating 10 cents to its own charity fund every time someone sends an e-greeting card through its new e-greeting-card website.

Here’s one I’ve created especially for Fagstein visitors. You’re welcome.

Unfortunately, the design of the site (and the e-cards) is painfully annoying. In the same way that Bleublancrouge (and every other advertising company on the planet) has a Flash-only site that’s hard to navigate, this e-card site is also Flash-only. It features a 30-second piano rendition of Deck the Halls on infinite repeat, and the “sound off” button doesn’t appear until after you’ve already hit the mute button on your computer. It also appears to not have been sufficiently tested in Firefox on the Mac, because I have to scroll up and down to see anything. When you get to the card itself, it takes a full minute and a half to animate the 10-word message.

In other words, Patrick Tanguay, don’t click on that link.

That said, 10 cents to help a down-and-out Montreal family is worth a little annoyance. And if you don’t think so, feel free to donate to the fund itself via this page whose URL and design make it look a lot like a phishing page ready for your credit card information. (It’s not, of course, and you can donate by phone or in person.)

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Media websites all Flash, no accessibility

December 9, 2007 – 7:57 pm | Also posted in Media, Montreal, On the Net, Opinion

Last week, a group called AccessibilitéWeb released a report that evaluated major websites for accessibility to the disabled. The Gazette described it as “scathing” for its exposure of the very poor performance of certain websites.

Canadian government websites, unsurprisingly, rated very high.

The other end of the scale will come as no surprise for those who read this blog regularly:

Media websites scored the worst, with an average rating of 5.48.

Later, the article explains one of the reasons for this:

To François Aubin, an expert at usability and ergonomics firm Cognitive Group, the numbers are not surprising. He goes as far to say that half of websites aren’t even accessible to able-bodied people.

Many times the text is too small for normal standards and the information is badly organized, he said.

“There’s a big paradox in Web accessibility,” he said. “Sometimes you make sites accessible, but not for the everyman.” As an example, the city of Montreal created a good accessible version of its portal, but the regular site remains confusing for the layperson.

“You can follow all the technical norms, but it’s more important for people to find info they’re looking for,” Aubin said.

Their table listing the top 200 websites accessible to Quebecers gives some more details on how the sites ranked. Only government websites received their top rating.

Here’s how the mainstream Canadian media sites did:

Radio-Canada

  • Ranked: 27th (C or “good”)
  • Accessibility problems: An over-reliance on JavaScript, missing or redundant/useless ALT text, unnecessary Flash, text in images, and a fixed, graphical-based layout.
  • My pet peeve: They have plenty of audio and video clips online, but make it almost impossible to link to them directly, assuming trying to view them doesn’t crash my browser.

Cyberpresse

  • Ranked: 109th (E or “very poor”)
  • Accessibility problems: Missing ALT text, links with the same text, tables used for layout, pop-up windows
  • My pet peeve: Archaic pixel-measured three-column layout. 275 links on the homepage is way too much. And is that MS Comic Sans as the photo caption font?

TQS

  • Ranked: 141st (E or “very poor”)
  • Accessibility problems: Over-reliance on Flash and JavaScript, broken links, missing ALT text, linkes with the same text, pop-up windows, tables used for layout
  • My pet peeve: The only thing worse than an 800-pixel fixed layout is a 1024-pixel fixed layout. Homepage is a mess, and almost completely unusable without its style sheet. Over 300 links on the homepage.

Canoe

  • Ranked: 146th (E or “very poor”)
  • Accessibility problems: Navigation by JavaScript, broken links, too much Flash
  • My pet peeve: Videos that play without you asking them to, >300 links, 1024-pixel fixed-width messy layout similar to TQS, text is way too small.

CTV.ca

  • Ranked: 155th (E or “very poor”)
  • Accessibility problems: Navigation by JavaScript, tables used or layout, very difficult to navigate without stylesheets, iframes, missing ALT text
  • My pet peeve: Links open in new window, lots of images, video requires Windows Media Player

Toronto Star

  • Ranked: 158th (E or “very poor”)
  • Accessibility problems: Missing ALT text, tables used for layout, lots of JavaScript
  • My pet peeve: Fixed-pixel layout, bottom half of homepage is a complete mess, can’t make heads or tails without stylesheet

Global TV

  • Ranked: 169th (E or “very poor”)
  • Accessibility problems: Missing ALT text, tables used for layout
  • My pet peeve: Video plays (with audio) without permission, a lot of things that should be links aren’t

If you’re thinking this list is incomplete, you’re not the only one. Le Devoir and The Gazette are notably absent. The list is based on the top 200 websites in Quebec according to ComScore, which I guess is an unbiased enough criteria. But you’d think exceptions could be made. Tetesaclaques.tv and Heavy.com are on there. Do we really care about those more than two major media sources in Montreal?

The other problem I have with the survey is its methodology: It seems to rely on a quantitative measure of the number of errors in the code rather than putting someone in front of a computer and seeing how well they cope finding information with each site. They just ran an online accessibility checker they created on each site and summarized the results.

I can live with that, even though it provides an inaccurate accounting of how accessible each site really is, but I’m not going to pay $500 for each site’s report. The only people who are going to do that are the owners of the largest sites, who can scan the report and make some recommendations to their code lackeys like “we should have ALT text for all images” that they should already know.

They’re still not learning

Automatically-playing audio, distracting animation, overcrowded homepages and bad JavaScript links are problems that have existed since the dawn of the WWW in one form or another. It’s shocking that these problems still exist.

But as Patrick Tanguay points out, the people who evaluate websites look at the wow factor rather than the ability to find information you’re looking for. Winners of the Infopresse Boomerang prizes show this very obviously: They’re all Flash-based, very inaccessible, and turn navigation into a frustrating game rather than an intuitive process.

One of their grand prize winners, Montréal en 12 lieux, is a perfect example. It has a lot of great content. Videos, pictures, stories. It’s really cool. But it’s also unnecessarily difficult to navigate. One level of navigation actually involves chasing after pictures that are spinning around at variable speeds. I had to stop watching the videos at one point because the strain on my poor computer’s CPU and memory became too much to bear.

At some point, people are going to have to learn that “cool” and “good-looking” aren’t synonyms for “good” when dealing with web design. Craigslist and Google should have proven that by now.

UPDATE (Dec. 12): A defence of the Boomerangs (basically about how they’ve honoured non-Flash sites in the past, which is a rather silly argument), and an idea for a competing competition, decided by users. And Patrick responds to responses of his criticisms of the awards.

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Canoe.tv: Clueless

November 29, 2007 – 4:09 am | Also posted in Media, Opinion, Video

For the first time ever, a Canadian company is going to be broadcasting videos on the Internet.

At least that’s what Quebecor would have us believe. They’re calling their new service Canoe.tv Canada’s first Internet broadcaster. In its newspapers, it clarifies that it’s the first Canadian web broadcaster “to feature specially commissioned programs in English and French“, whatever that’s supposed to mean.

The service, available in French and English, is basically a YouTube clone, only without any of that user-generated content junk that nobody wants. It also includes live content from networks like LCN, though the live feeds use Windows Media instead of Flash like the rest of the site.

On the French side, its content includes Prenez garde aux chiens, as well as interviews from Larocque-Lapierre, Denis Lévesque and others. Curiously, no Vlog despite the fact that Quebecor Media owns the show and the show is about online video.

The English side is even stranger. There’s more content from CBC (Just for Laughs, Rick Mercer, Peter Mansbridge, etc.) than there is from Sun Media’s crappy SUN TV. There are, however, plenty of Sunshine Girl videos.

But aside from their arrogance proclaiming to be the first to do something everyone else is already doing (in fact, the entire site was designed by a company called Feed Room), here’s why I don’t like the site:

  1. There’s no way to embed individual videos in blogs
  2. There’s no way to comment on videos
  3. Videos are referred to as “stories” in the “bookmark” page (that’s how you find out how to link to individual videos), and have 81-character URLs (just long enough to get cut in emails — YouTube’s URLs are half that length, and they have a lot more videos)
  4. Navigation uses some sort of proprietary Flash/JavaScript system which breaks just about every tool my browser has (opening links in new windows, the back button, scrolling)
  5. Videos are undated (probably deliberately, since most of them are old)

If I wanted to design a web video portal that was doomed to failure, it would look something like this. It might get some traffic, thanks to exclusive video (though anything worth watching is available straight from the source), but it’s not going to take off.

In short: FAIL.

UPDATE (Nov. 29/30): Some more reaction from the blogosphere:

InfoPresse points out that the site has virtually no fiction content, because of licensing issues. Le Devoir also has an article with detail about the problem.

UPDATE (Nov. 30): Pierre-Karl Péladeau does a very awkward-sounding presentation of Canoe.tv. In it, he says it’s a “totally Canadian” site, which is laughable because it was designed by an American company.

He also says that Sun Media can do a better job than the Canadian Television Fund at producing Canadian programming. The CTF funds things like Degrassi: TNG, The Rick Mercer Report, Slings and Arrows, ReGenesis, Intelligence and Little Mosque on the Prairie, all of which won Gemini awards this year. Sun Media funds sucker-generated-content show CANOE Live and … uhh … that’s about it.

Also, the Sun Family blog points out that 24 Hours Toronto didn’t even bother to rewrite the press release announcing the network so it conforms to its style.

UPDATE (Dec. 6): CBC tech guy Bruno Guglielminetti (whose name I can spell without looking it up first) interviews Peladeau for an article in Le Devoir.

UPDATE (Dec. 11): Intruders.tv has an interview with Dominique-Sébastien Forest, who has some long title at Canoe.tv. In the overly long interview that sounds more like a press release until the last few minutes, he notes:

  • They’re working on getting a real-time Flash encoder for live feeds, which are currently displayed through Windows Media.
  • Quebecor doesn’t consider CBC as competition online. They’re just another content provider who will share in the revenues.
  • The site is focused on professional content only (you know, like the Sunshine Girls I mentioned above).
  • It doesn’t offer embedding because their content license agreements don’t permit them to.
  • Nobody apparently noticed that there are no dates on the videos.
  • They’re working on adding comments to videos, like Espace Canoë has
  • He’s confirmed that Vlog will be coming back as a web-only show on Canoe.tv.
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Don’t tase me, ho ho ho

November 27, 2007 – 4:55 pm | Also posted in Ads, In the news, Irony, On the Net

Sorry for the headline, but it’s all I could think of after seeing this ad (via Muddy Hill Post) from the Taser folks:

Santa’s Taser ad

The ad is for the Taser C2, which comes in different colours and is apparently marketed as a form of self-defence mechanism for infants when they’re separated from their mothers.

It’s also “police proven”, as shown from the great Taser-saves-lives stories we’ve seen in the news lately. It’s a track record to be proud of.

For those of you unfamiliar with the cultural reference, Wired educates.

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Ann Bourget using YouTube in Quebec City race

November 24, 2007 – 9:55 pm | Also posted in Video

Ann Bourget, the leader of the renouveau municipal de Québec party and front-runner in the race for Quebec City mayor (a special election was called to replace Andrée Boucher, who died in office in August), is using a blog and YouTube videos as part of her campaign.

Using the Internet isn’t new for Bourget, who has had an online presence since at least 2005, but she’s still kind of getting used to the YouTube thing (she giggles quite a bit in her latest video).

The Internet presence is a huge improvement over the boring party website and she spends time tackling real issues by answering real questions from her website’s visitors. It’s a lesson for people who want to run a local campaign.

Her latest video, which answers a bunch of questions, starts off with the most important one: Will you bring the Nordiques back?

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Rogers not above outright spam

November 19, 2007 – 12:00 am | Also posted in Business, Opinion

Going through my spam folder again today, I noticed an email from Rogers, my wireless provider. It was a promotional message (as opposed to the one I get every month telling me my bill is ready) announcing, and I kid you not folks, that they redesigned their website.

Rogers spam

(Email sent Nov. 13, 2007. Click to embiggen)

Since I’m not a fan of spam, especially from large companies that should know better like Chapters/Indigo and CIBC (the latter — a bank — has still not responded to my request for an explanation beyond assigning it a support ticket number), I couldn’t let this one go without mentioning it as well.

The big difference here is that I am a Rogers customer, so they didn’t harvest my email or take it from an old form gathering dust in their basement. But I call it spam because I never asked for it and it’s purely promotional in nature.

Also problematic:

  • The email is not personalized, even with my name, violating one of Rogers’s own anti-fraud policies. Further complicating matters is that I’m invited to click on image links that bring me to addresses that start with http://mailtrack.rnm.ca… (which redirects me to a Rogers website).
  • The message is HTML only, with no plain-text version
  • Clicking on links to visit the “new” Rogers.com brings me to this horribly-designed web page which asks me to choose my province (and language). Don’t they already know this information? They provide me wireless service after all.
  • Like a lot of these messages I see, there’s a tiny link at the bottom for people who want to “opt-out of future email communications” (which I can assume implies I never opted-in in the first place). That link brings me to a login page. Once I login, I’m brought to the standard homepage with no clue given on where I should go to opt out of emails. I’ve looked around for about 10 minutes now and still haven’t found it.
  • I’ve had to login three times browsing the site. And now they’ve just suspended my account for 24 hours because the password I used 5 minutes ago is no longer the right one. Oh wait, it hasn’t. My previous login is now still valid. Top-notch security there, Rogers.
  • There’s no difference between the “new” Rogers website and the old one, except for a few trivial changes. It looks exactly the same. The entire purpose of the email is put into question.

I’ve filled out an “abuse” form and emailed the sender of the email message asking for an explanation of how I got this email. I’ll update if I get one.

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Habs Inside/Out redesigned

November 10, 2007 – 5:08 pm | Also posted in Blogosphere, Canadiens, Montreal, The Gazette

The Gazette’s Habs Inside/Out blog (which is liveblogging the game going on right now) has undergone an overhaul, switching from Movable Type to Drupal. Among the sweet stuff coming in as a result are user registration, comment threading, comment rating, avatars, comment preview, and those annoying social bookmarking links on each post.

The design still needs some ironing out, so expect the look to change slightly (hopefully including getting rid of that awful sea-green). I also noted that “associate blogger” Kevin Mio has been promoted to having his picture on the homepage again.

The backend of the site, administered by techies John MacFarlane and Dru Oja Jay, is separate from the CanWest online canada.com nightmare, and that’s a good part of why it’s so successful.

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