Yes folks! That’s right. I need your input!

For a while now, it keeps annoying me no end that the front page of sneaker.org is so cluttered and hard to read. I myself have trouble keeping I straigt sometimes! And a couple of good people have been kind enough to offer positive criticism about it too. So Iknow the issues, but I don’t have a good solution. So I’m just going to lay out the issues here and request that some of you who are more design/html proficient than I will have some good suggestions I could use to improve the usability of this site.

So here is the list of issues/considerations:

1) The front page is cluttered with too much information.

The front page is currently a syndicated blog of the four main blogs I maintain: whatsnew (What’s new @ sneaker.org), writings (Thought — caught in the act!), quotes (Eavesdropped!) and reviews (Rants and Raves). The reaosn for this is that I update all four blogs relaively often and I would like people to see all of them as opposed to only seeing the one that is on the front page.

One proposed solution is to pick only one and show that on the opening page and put *new* images next to the others in the navigation when there is new content, but I’m still thinking about that.

2) The front page takes a long time to load.

This is a function of the above as well as the fact that the current script o count the number of comments is just very inefficient because of it’s use of Perl and having to open each comment file o get a count each time. Now I could just move to aspcomments and fix that, but that would mean building the box with Windoze and opening up to all kinds of security issues. The Linux box has been working great with minimal problems thus far (this is NOT an open invitation to the hackers reading this… please leave my box alone! 🙂 )

3) The blog archives are not linkable which makes them unsearchable.

This is my personal pet peeve with the site. I’m using Frames in order to show the blog archives because that way I have the entire site automated using SSI (Serve Side Includes) and Blogger, so I don’t have to muck around too much (not that I mind mucking around, but the less time I spend mucking around, he more ime I spend writing… so…). But what the use of Frames does is that I cannot provide direct links to the blog entries. And that seems to be becoming increasingly important. Also, google et al, index the page and I can see people searching for specific things which were there on a previous date, but since google brings them to the frame index page, they can’t really find what they are looking for since it’s moved deeper into the mess of frames and archives.

I guess if I stop syndicating the 4 blogs on the front page and leave only the whatsnew then I could just use Blogger to generate the shtml files which would do everything right… but that would mean that the front page doesn’t have some of the funnier stuff and people may not read it… what a dilemma.

4) Link colors and subheading colors are the same.

This IMHO is bad style. Since the hyperlinks are green and the subheadings are green as well, does that cause any confusion about what is clickable or not?

There’s my list of issues with the site. And while I can go ahead and putz around to fix it, I’d like getting yout input first! So please leave me some comments attached to this entry or email me. Thanks!

For over a week no sneaker.org has been pretty static. Which for me translates into boring. It all started with that stupid Wingdings crap. I happened to post it on the Net and it kind of blew itself out of proportion. Recently, judging from the level of activity in my web logs (traffic was up atleast 6 if not 10 times more than usual because of it) I think it is finally dying down. It was fun initially, but by now I’m so sick of it, that I think it is a good idea to move sneaker.org along and not get caught up in this rut. Even spending time writing about crazy shit like this is a waste of time, effort and bandwidth.

But before I put this topic to bed off of sneaker.org I figured I would thank all of those people who came here, visited the site and took the time to leave their comments, sign the guestbook or even email me or IM me. Thanks to ALL of you. I had several interesting conversations with many of you and talking to some of you and watching the activity on the site was a pleasant reprieve from what was otherwise a harrowing week or ten days (because of multiple allnighters in order to meet some deadlines…). You comments and reaction has definitely run the gamut from praise and gratitude to contempt and disdain. But all of them are welcome 🙂 The one which made me laugh the most is one that was sent to me by email. I’m quoting it below, but will refrain from posting the email address of the sender.

Subject: [sneaker.org/whatsnew]: blog response

Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2001 18:34:11 -0500

From:”Thomas Bodtke” <email suppressed>

To: <sneaker@sneaker.org>

You know, it must nice to be so damn smart in a world of idiots.

Did you ever think that some of us ‘idiots care, and would, in

a heart beat, pass on whatever we could to help this insane situation,

that we all face. Why don’t you consider getting a life, you weed!

You really are an ass! Someday you will realize it.

A Caring Person

Now, I responded to most of the emails I received, but I didn’t respond directly to my dear “caring person” since if he really thinks that spreading competely baseless and unfounded rumors in any way helps the cause of the victims and the families affected by the events on Spetember 11th, then there is little more I can think of saying to this person other than: “Your hearts in the right place, but I can’t say the same about your head.”

In fact for that matter I have a lot of respect for Congresswoman Barbara Lee who in the midst of crisis maintained her ability to think for herself and the conviction to stand alone in support of her opinion.

Anyhow, folks, again, thank you and time to move on from the psychic font or the psychedelic font or whatever the heck you wish to call it today (Where to you want to go today…).

Well folks it’s been over 24 hours now that sneaker.org has been getting bombarded by people searching for Q33NY and Wingdings. Things are holding up pretty well… but can’t say the same about my opinion that there are an even number of rational people and irrational people in the world. Some of the comments people have left on the site and even more so the emails or instant messages I have received on this topic have definitely made for a fun-filled, hilarious day. Crazy. People, don’t you get it? I think my friend karenika put it best… it’s a F*ING FONT people!!

This has gotten SO out of hand now that the lead story in the Wired News email this evening was MS Denies Wingding Thing, Again. Now, my skepticism, doesn’t preclude me from putting it beyond some Microsoft developer from planting such an easter-egg. That’s still possible. But I still stand firm that the whole Q33NY thing related to the tragedy at the WTC is completely bogus, completely fabricated and utter bullshit. (Anyhow, for those of you who still don’t get it read on below for yesterday (in What’s New) and day before’s (in Thought – caught in the act!) posts.)

The following comment by one of the visitors to the site definitely merits being highlighted…

Len (lgjohnson@adelphia.net)

US tail numbers start with “N”. An alpha character is not allowed following the N. According to “Landings”, no tail number like Q33NY or N-Q33Ny or N-33NY has ever been assigned. My tail number, N-637PS, is typical. The other explanation for why Q33NY is a hoax is also bunk. Flight numbers refer to a route, not an individual airplane. Airplanes are temporarily assigned a flight number when they fly the corresponding route. It is never the same as a tail number, which is assigned by the FAA permanently to an individual airplane.

09-22-2001 21:23

Yesterday, I wrote about how some gullible people are going on about some baloney that is being circulated via email (some crap about the flight number – which in itself may or may not be true – for one of the NYC flights having some hidden meaning when you enter it into Microsoft Word and change the font to wingdings). Well, turns out there must be lots or people who are trying to search for this since my sites been getting tons of hits off of google all searching for Q33NY.

So I figured I’d let people know why sneaker.org may be a little slow today and also for those of you who came here looking for the Q33NY thing… scroll down and read my blog note on it in Thought – caught in the act!. Bottomline is that all this stuff is made up. Wingdings is a funky font. In fact, even if you type in “NYC” in Word and change the fonts to either webdings or wingdings you get weird results (thanks to Brandon for demonstrating this to me; I’m not going to put up an image of this. You can go try it yourself) . One can make up all kinds of stuff like this. Anyone who believes that these is some hidden meaning in stuff like this… needs to get a clue and needs to visit snopes.com: Wingdings Urban Legend and for good measure also go read CSICOP Hoaxwatch.

aspcomments got a link off of the front page of www.blogger.com thanks to Ev and so the number of hits on poor little basset (that’s my really old linux box’s name) have increased. Hopefully it will hold up okay 🙂 It’s a good little pup. But turns out that Version 1.1.1 had my email address left in it by mistake, so I started getting all kinds of random email while people were trying to set it up! Anyhow, so now I’ve put out Version 1.1.2 with a notification to change the email addresses in there first and a minor typo-bug fix.

Been busy with work lately and so haven’t had the time to actually update the site with at least about half a dozen things I planned to write about (reviews of the 3-4 books I finished recently and a few chosen pictures from my roadtrip). Will get to it once things settle down a bit.

Still amazed by all the stories about the terrorist attack in NYC… (see below or more on that)…