Indistinguishable from Jesse

Jakob Nielsen, Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002:

1. No prices. No B2C ecommerce site would make this mistake, but it's rife in B2B, where most "enterprise solutions" are presented so that you can't tell whether they are suited for 100 people or 100,000 people.

I also thought no B2C site would make that mistake, until I tried to purchase an SBC phone line for my apartment. After I clicked "Residential customers", clicked "Local > New Phone Service", and entered my address, the site asked me for billing and credit information. At no time did I see a price or even a link labelled "prices".

I decided not to purchase a phone line.

For visitors who reach my site through Google searches, browser percentages vary widely depending on search terms. In general, geekier terms have a higher percentage of Mozilla users. I analyzed stats for 35 days in June and July 2004 using a hacky batch file.

Stats for some of these search terms are skewed toward Mozilla not because the search terms themselves are geeky but because "Firefox" or "Mozilla" appears in the title of the result page on my site. Searches for "good porn" and "best porn" lead to a page on my site titled Why Mozilla Firefox is the best porn browser. Searches for "how to get a gmail" lead to my blog entry titled Help make Firefox better and get a Gmail invitation!.

By the way, over 50% of total hits to my site are Mozilla :)

Kerry has an impressive PageRank 8 while Bush only has PageRank 7, like me. (Via curious on IRC.)

Kerry also beats Bush in a search for kerry | bush and even in a search for president.

<blake2> congratulations mconnor
<blake2> you just destroyed a legend!

Today Mike Connor replaced "Cookies are delicious delicacies." in Firefox's options with "Cookies are pieces of information stored by web pages on your computer. They are used to remember login information and other data."

Blake's famous placeholder text even appeared in a book, O'Reilly's Google: The Missing Manual:

As of this writing, Firefox is still in the testing, or beta, stage (version 0.8), which sounds dicey. But in fact, it's definitely far enough along that anyone can use it with confidence. The underlying technology is the same as Mozilla's, so problems tend to show up in things like the occasional misspelled menu item or a cookie setting that includes the observation, "Cookies are delicious delicacies," inserted by an engineer with a wacky sense of humor.

(O'Reilly sent me a free copy of the book because it dedicates several pages to my search bookmarklets. The authors of the book say several useful things about my bookmarklets that I didn't know!)

<blake2> how times have changed. I guess we really are shipping something.

mgaugusch's 70-person company not only prepared Firefox for network install, but it also used Squid to block Internet Explorer from accessing sites other than Windows Update and the company's own site. The company does not prevent employees from using other browsers, such as Opera, although Opera users may have to change their user-agent setting to make Opera stop making itself appear to be IE. (Via mgaugusch's post on MozillaZine.)

Using the Flash seek bar bookmarklet, I found two hidden segments at the end of Strong Bad e-mail 87: Mile. They can't be reached by the usual method of clicking on things at the end of the cartoon. Burning Horizon has instructions for getting to the first hidden segment but not the second.

The bookmarklet allowed me to read all of the signs in the desert in This Land.

A co-worker pointed out that you can use the bookmarklet to reach minigames in Frank's Adventure 3. You have to pause before using the slider for it to work correctly.

I wrote a bookmarklet that adds a seek bar to flash movies. It works in Mozilla and IE. Read the script or grab the bookmarklet.

• Keep your Jesus off my penis. Wow. NSFR.
• This Land (unframed). So funny, I didn't mind it letting Bush off easy.
• Bush in 41.2 seconds. Surprised me.
• Yet another edited State of the Union address. Not as good as the ones from previous years.