I love this video, one of the funniest comedians around.

This is a quick rant about some common annoyances I come across on websites…

• SnapShots – these are those annoying JavaScript popup windows which appear when you hover your mouse over a link. In theory they are supposed to help you by proving a thumbnail screenshot of the site being linked to, but in practice they are annoying and can’t be easily disabled. The option to disable the previews requires you to enable 3rd party cookies, which is a feature I always disable for security and privacy reasons. If you have SnapShots enabled on a site you run, please turn them off – you may think they make your site look flashy, but they are just annoying.
• No contact details – it never ceases to amaze me how many websites don’t provide any contact details or information on who is running the site, especially sites that are selling products. Why would you not want to say who runs your company on your website, are you trying to hide something? I immediately get suspicious of any website which doesn’t give out the names of the people behind the site. If you have an "About us" page on your website, please make sure you have information that lets me know who you are and where you’re based.
• JavaScript widgets – bloggers love widgets as they provide visitors with lots of cool information like Twitter updates, or recent visitors, or page stats, or feed subscribers, etc… But when these JavaScript widgets take so long to load that it prevents your main content from loading – then you have just failed. People visit your site to read your content first and foremost, make sure you place the widget’s code at the end of the page so even if one of the widgets isn’t working, your main content should still load OK. And while you’re at it, have a look at all your widgets and ask yourself if they are really adding value to your site – if not get rid of them.
• Email me my password – if your website has some sort of registration process and you are saving passwords in the database in clear text, then you really have no respect for security or users’ privacy. All passwords should be hashed and then stored in the database, that way only the user knows what their password is and nobody else. Hashing a password is a one-way encryption process – when a user logs in again, the password they entered is hashed again and compared to the hash in the database. There is no way to ‘unencrypt’ a hashed password apart from brute-force guessing. Any website that emails your password to you in clear text after you’ve clicked on one of those "I lost my password" links is a culprit of this and shouldn’t be trusted – there are no excuses.

I’ve just updated this blog to Wordpress 2.6 which was released today. Most notable feature is the built-in version control which makes Wordpress even more similar to other CMS systems than it already was. In fact, there’s probably more emphasis recently on turning Wordpress into a generic CMS rather than just blogging software.

The Wordpress admin site also has implemented Google Gears support, which downloads and syncs all of your admin related pages to help speed up access to the admin site. This is enabled by using the small ‘Turbo’ link in the top right corner of the screen. Not sure if this also enables offline access, will need to test further to find out.

UPDATE: Official pricing has now been released, read here for more info:

• http://stuart.amanzi.co.nz/2008/07/08/vodafone-have-well-and-truly-screwed-iphone-customers/

I’ll take a stab in the dark and say that Vodafone will offer an unlimited iPhone data package for $99 per month.

The reason for this is that Vodafone already offer a 3GB package for $69.99 on contract. There is no way that any iPhone user will be able to use 3GB in a month – that’s because there are currently no apps that need that much traffic in a month. Even the mobile iTunes store only works on WiFi at the moment. This may change with the iPhone 2.0 as new apps are released, but my understanding is that the SDK is very limiting as to what you can do over the 3G network, as Apple don’t want users to run out of battery too quick. Even so, 100MB per day is a lot of traffic for a mobile device.

Also, the current iPhone can’t be used as a modem (over Bluetooth or cable) and I haven’t seen anything that says the new version will be able to act as modem either. So there’s no way that you could connect your iPhone to your computer and download gigs of content through your unlimited plan.

So if Vodafone are smart (read: sneaky) they’ll know this, and will offer an unlimited plan at a premium over the 3GB plan. So customers will think that they are getting an awesome plan when 99% won’t ever come close to 1GB, let alone the 3GB plan that’s currently on offer.

(I posted this as a comment on Rod’s blog, but thought it was worthy of it’s own post here too.)