Kevin Blake's Blog

I recently read “The Inmates are Running the Asylum” by the father of VB, Alan Cooper. He spends quite a while arguing the case against obnoxious interfaces that make life difficult for your users. Quite right too. I highly recommend the read if you’re involved in any kind of user interface. Actually, I highly recommend it anyway – empower yourself with the knowledge that things don’t have to be this way.

Anyway, my small part towards eliminating frustration and annoyance was to try and create the perfect 404 page. And I know what you’re going to say… If you desire perfection, why would anyone ever even see your 404 page. Well you’re quite right, but it doesn’t hurt to be defensive about these sort of things. Accidents happen and believe it or not, not all of them are entirely my fault. Sometimes.

I’m not going to link to it here, because my 404 page automatically emails me whenever there’s a broken internal link. Frankly I could do without the hassle. That’s step one, and here are some more.

• Tell the user what’s wrong. If they’ve come from another site (do this by checking the referrer URL), let them know which site, and that the link was broken at that end. If they haven’t – chances are it’s a bookmark / favourite. Tell the user that. The term ’404′ is not helpful – telling the user what happened, is.
• Recent Posts. It’s a blog. If you’re here, you’re most likely reading one of the latest five posts. If you’re applying this to your own non-blog site, list your most changed popular pages.
• Search. If you’re looking for something and I’ve already failed to find it, searching seems more appropriate than to keep doing what you’re doing.
• Possible matches. You’ve got a URL – use it. So I try to guess at what the user was hoping to find based on what’s in the URL. If you’ve got some decent SEO going on, chances are this will do better than you think.
• Other helpful links. The homepage is generally a good starting point, and well, I don’t have a site map. But if I did – this would be another good thing to include.
• Google Cache – Google maintains a cache, so why not make some use of it and point your visitors at it to hunt for your missing URL. This might not be exactly what you want for your site, but they could find it on their own anyway so stop being difficult.
• Tags. All my posts are tagged, and provide a nice overview of what the posts are about, so let’s include those.

Turn your 404 page into a jump-board rather than a brick wall – or your readers are just going to find something better to do.

It was a year ago today that I signed up to Facebook, so I felt I should commemorate that fact with a post like that one. At the time, I worried about the fact that a huge number of groups across the world were gaining more and more data about me – and that I was freely giving it away. Beacon, ‘stalkers’, a million new users each week, uncloseable accounts, email 2.0, evil universities down with the kids, the never-ending list goes on… Actually, that particular list ends at 233,000,000 – but my point is that Facebook’s had more than its fair share of publicity.

So with all that new information out there, companies are struggling to keep up. Poor marketing agencies across the world are inundated with too much data to cope with, and their servers are smoking with every 150,000 new users every day. My heart goes out to them.

So I’ll make it easier, with a year of Facebook in summary…

• 127 foolish people have decided or agreed to call me their friend. 59 recognised as people from or at my current company, 9 from university, and 14 fellow college alcoholics.
• Added 116 photos across 8 albums, 8 of which include me. A further 22 pictures of me have been added by other people.
• I’ve developed two applications both for my own use on my own profile, one of which remarkably still maintains 58 users, 1 fan, and a total install count of 129. I can only imagine it’s even remotely usable by about 10.
• Received 88 private messages.
• Written 64 notes (imported and otherwise… This will make it 65).
• Joined 18 different groups, including “that punch the slow walkers” one.
• Updated my status 15 times in the past 3 months.
• A total count of 27 events, 3 created by me including one that unknowingly spawned into 320 mostly unknown invitees.
• I’ve played 20 games of scrabble on-line, completed 14 and won 11, with a top score of ‘utopias’ for 65.

So if you’re on Facebook – all that information and a whole more will be out there too (as well as all the specifics). Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Now, where’s that tin hat?

A local suspected Banksy was sold on ebay for £2,150, today. I say local because it was just around the corner from the office, in one our many new touristy building sites.

Bargain. Let’s just hope it’s real, eh?