AydsBlog in Plain English

I was listening to the latest .Net Rocks! podcast and one of their guests mentioned some posts about public speaking on Josh Holmes's weblog. I decided that I was interested in reading them so I slapped his blog URL into Firefox.

I didn't find the posts i was in search of, however I did stumble across a post which told me about a great video explaining Twitter. It's fantastic! It's all done using animation and paper and it's all "in plain English". The best thing about these videos (apart from the fact I found them entertaining) was that despite it being something I think my Mum would be able to understand there were none of the factual errors which seem to plague most "plain English" descriptions of technology.

If you'd like to check them out ("Zombies in Plain English" is great fun) head over to http://www.commoncraft.com/show.

Ok, so I'm a geek - but...

I just wondered if you could, at first glance, tell me what is wrong with my username here?

So "aydsman" would be allowed but not "Aydsman". Huh? You can't simply make the username oh, I don't know, case insensitive just like every other username on the planet?

The second reason this message sucks is that they didn't have any text on the page letting me know about the username restrictions up front. It'd be great to know that I only had a limited character set to play with BEFORE I went to the trouble of typing in a username.

You know, perhaps I'm just getting old and grumpy but silly things like this in software just make me annoyed. Anyone else?

Today's Template Tinkering

So for no apparent reason I decided to alter my Blogger template. I changed all the containers so that they get their width as a percentage of the browser window. This means when you make your window bigger my blog will follow suit.

It always annoys me a little when a website author assumes I have a screen the width of a matchbox to view their content on. These sites always end up with huge expanses of barren, abandoned and unused screen real estate on either side of an impossibly thin column.

Of course, when I do have a screen the size of a matchbox (AKA my mobile) I also hate sites which don't accomodate that as well - but that's a rant for another day.