1. Why Virgin Media is better than Sky (from a Sky customer)

    When I moved into my new house one of the first things I did was purchase myself a nice new Sky+ box. Boy, was that a big mistake.

    Virgin, please read the following and adapt your advertising appropriately:

    • You don’t own the box: Virgin don’t sell you a box, they let you rent it. Which means free repairs, free replacements and no extra £10-15 a month for a support plan just to get someone out to your house when your Sky box is dead. Virgin also offer remote support on the box where by they can fix some problems over the phone. Sky doesn’t offer this, unless you’re paying extra. Another benefit to this for Virgin’s customers is that your box also gets upgraded for free too.
    • Record two, watch one: With Virgin this literally means watch one program whilst recording two others. With Sky, this means record two programs and one watch of them. This is annoying as you more often than not end up watching parts of one of the programs you’ve got set to record. Another annoyance attached to this is that Sky disables all other features when two programs are recording, no information, no guide, nothing unless you cancel a recording.
    • Television, that isn’t on: anywhere. Sky has ‘catch up TV’ where by you have a selection of 15-20 great programs over the past week to watch through. The problem is, you require a subscription to the channels to watch them. With Virgin there’s this and a massive back catalogue including the BBC iPlayer, Channel 4’s 4-on-Demand and hundreds of other series for you to watch through. A massive, massive plus on Virgin’s side.

    Feel free to share your annoyances with Sky or Virgin Media in the comments below. I’d love to hear your opinions.

    21 Comments »

  2. Sign up to learn more

    “We love freelancers, to find out why, sign up for free to learn more”
    “We can offer you the best extreme ironing forum on the planet, sign up to learn more”
    “This service will rock your knickers off, sign up to learn more”

    Why do certain sites suggest you sign up to learn more about the service? In an age of open information and tour’s to anything that’s worth signing up for, it’s time all sites adapted these techniques to give power to their statements.

    I want an extreme ironing forum and you say your forum is the best, give me five reasons why to back up your statement and you’ve probably sold me. Tell me to sign up to learn why, and I’ve gone onto the next forum in the search results list.

    2 Comments »

  3. Oh Sky Sports, how I love your web team

    I’m looking at my RSS reader today and up pops up “Premier League live on Sky – Sky Sports have confirmed their first live Premier League games for the 2007-08 season.”

    Excited I go to read, only to see this:
    Sky Sports 1

    And the list of fixtures announced after a small gap:
    Sky Sports 2

    (Page link here)

    Copy goes in here, cope goes in here, copy goes in here. Copy goes in here, cope goes in here, copy goes in here.

    They know just how to make a web developer laugh. So here’s to Sky Sports, may you continue your excellent online coverage of sports!

    Update: More fixtures without names have appeared, whilst ‘copy goes in here’ appears another 10 more times too.

    1 Comment »

  4. Future of web apps feed has last years Kevin Rose

    The future of web apps podcast/RSS feed actually has last years presentation by Kevin Rose. It’s the 2006 presentation, not the 2007 presentation.

    Maybe if they made it possible to actually report bugs like this… maybe I’d be able to report it. What crafty campaigns can we come up with in order to bring this bug to light for the Carson family?

    p.s. There’s a reason why the people who had ten minutes only had ten minutes – they aren’t very good presenters, and seemingly lack passion when talking about their product. (They all sound like sales pitches)

    Discuss This Article »

  5. David Cameron just lost my vote because of his terrible website

    Would it be wrong of me to stop supporting David Cameron not because of his policies (which I largely agree with), but because of his terrible website. Which can be summed up in a list of two points:

    • Every single ‘web 2.0′ tutorial written by a 13 year old with no clue has been puked up all over the layout
    • David Cameron hired someone with no previous experience in web design to design a web site for him

    Now, with the budgets of the elections I expect so much better than this from (what I hope is) my future prime minister.

    I have to say it’s brilliant that Mr Cameron is taking the steps of a blogging online and podcasting. But with a design like that (and coding like that, I must add), it may as well not be online in it’s current state.

    If part of the aim is to appeal to younger voters (like myself) via the internet – then the way to go about it isn’t to publish the site using a layout that looks like that. Apart from the raw content and views expressed on the website I really can’t see how the older generation would like this website either.

    Edit:

    A scaled screenshot of the site, for archive purposes:
    Cameron Web screenshot

    16 Comments »

  6. Fubra, an example of a company that doesn’t care about Mac’s

    Editor’s note: This post was done a long, long time ago. Both myself and Fubra have grown up a lot since and Fubra now understand that Mac’s matter when it comes to developing websites.

    Today Fubra became the third official mirror for php.net. A contact of mine works there so I quickly visited the site, only to see the site completely and utterly messed up in Safari – with minor bugs in Firefox and Opera. Naturally I point these out, since this is a company wanting to build ‘web 3.0′ and if they do they need to approach web 2.0 properly by meeting web standards first.

    Here’s a view of what the site looks like in Safari at my normal browser size (which fits 1024×768 based sites with some extra padding either side):
    Fubra Screenshot

    So let’s get onto the vision:

    Fubra is a ‘new media’ company. It’s our goal to create and publish great content and then to monetise that content through advertiser relationships.

    We set ourselves apart from our competition by designing, building and managing our own infrastructure, which means the buck starts and stops here.

    We are passionate about enabling relevant connections between our advertisers and the people who use our web sites every day.
    - Brendan McLoughlin (Managing Director)

    And my problem with the actions I just experienced with my contact/the guy sitting next to him who coded the site.

    I mentioned the site bugs to which I received a ‘can we get a screenshot?’
    ’sure, ‘.
    A few seconds later.. ‘what version of Firefox is this in?’,
    ‘no that screenshot is in Safari’,
    ‘oh this is on a Mac then? Cause if it is, he doesn’t care’, (referring to the person next to him, who coded the site)
    ‘yeah it is, in Safari’,
    ‘Safari sucks ass’
    … and they go on to say they won’t fix it.

    The ‘contact’ of mine is now blocked from Instant Messaging as a stand off for web standards. And I’m disappointed to say that this continues through several of their websites.

    For the companies without Mac’s, here’s how your company can allow itself to be cross-browser compatible

    7 Comments »

  8. Taking down digg integration tool temporarily.. here’s why

    Dan from Tutorial-Center just told me that he can’t view the site without this password prompt popping up:

    Weird digg error
    (Click here to see the full screenshot)

    It prompts him for username and password for http://digg.com with the prompt ‘testing’. I have no idea why so I’ve taken the tool off the site for a while until I know it’s fixed.

    Edit: have sent this to the digg team.
    Sub-Edit: re-enabled, digg away.

    2 Comments »

  9. Hey Microsoft – can I install optional updates please?

    So I’m installing updates on an old PC of mine before handing it over to it’s new owner and I’m near the end of the 80 or so security updates since SP2 and I remember about the ‘optional’ updates Microsoft offers.

    10 optional software upgrades and 1 hardware upgrade available to download. So I click the links and guess what happens:

    Stupid MS
    (Click here to see the full sized image)

    What happened is that the link opened up inside the frame usually reserved for content, but opened up the entire website all over again. It happens in both IE6 and IE7 and since Microsoft only allows access to the site via Microsoft browsers – it’s now impossible for me to get at these updates.

    Automatic updates only allow high priority updates to be downloaded.. so the new PC owner is now without Windows Media Player 11, .net framework 2.0 and whatever hardware update which happened to be on that hidden page.

    8 Comments »

  10. Xing needs to concentrate on features rather than press releases

    I don’t rant often, but this one annoys the heck out of me.

    *Start rant*
    Xing (formally openBC – a much better name) is really starting to annoy me.

    And it’s not down to their annoying use of the word ‘articles’ instead of ‘threads’ or ‘posts’ on their discussion groups. Or the ridiculous amount of non-English content that gets into my view of the site even though I’ve chosen not to view anything other than English content.

    No ladies and gentlemen I have a far bigger beef with ‘Xing’ – they have no RSS feeds. Don’t get me wrong.. they have RSS feeds for their blog, their press releases and their podcast. But if you want something that’s actually on the site – it’s all up to the group owner.

    The group owner gets to decide (and they have to, it’s off by default) whether the users of the group can subscribe to their RSS feed in order to keep up to date with new posts. The group owner – the majority of which aren’t as active as you’d think, get to decide how usable their group is. To show you how bad it is, of my sixteen groups I am subscribed to – three have RSS feeds.

    Now – why RSS feeds you ask? Because with my subscription to sixteen of the most active groups on the site (and all them get at least 50-100 posts a day), what does Xing offer to keep up with this? A hard limit of 10 pages of latest posts to browse through… most of which aren’t even in English. Something that basically gets out dated every three to four hours.

    Another thing that annoys me is they show nothing towards developing or enhancing the site – but can post once a week (on the dot, it’s very obviously time tabled) on their blog about something that is never really news, but more of a ‘this is an entry from our help section’ update.

    Could it be that they hired someone to build the site as a ‘one off’ job? – of course it is.

    *End rant*

    Discuss This Article »