Alex Lambert's blog

Consider the context

2007-10-27T17:12:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite web sites is The Phrase Finder. It claims to have "the meanings and origins of over 1,200 English sayings." I've had fun on the site — there's a really cool a-ha feeling when you discover the origin of a phrase.

Browsing the site is an intellectual rush...but it's hard to monetize a site like this. (I tried to Monetize one of my unused domains a while back; I replaced the front page with a picture of The Japanese Footbridge. All I got was strained laughter.)

As it turns out, the author has found a creative way to turn a profit: a sister site, Phrase Thesaurus, "is a subscription service for professional writers." For $65 a year, you can search a database of "almost every phrase and saying in common use in English." The site will help you "generate ideas for headlines, advertising copy, song lyrics, poetry..."

I've found that my hometown newspaper has a penchant for awful headlines, like the double-take-inducing "Attorneys submit briefs in sex offenders case" or the downright bizarre "Vicious dog bill on tap today". At times, two reasonable headlines have created shocking juxtapositions: in May 2004, after American contractor Nick Berg was beheaded in Iraq, the front page showed his picture with a headline reading "Video shows grisly death." Across the page was an article about the local power company's tree-trimming operations. The headline? "Trim takes plenty off top."

Phrase Thesaurus has a few sample search results available. You can, for example, search for phrases related to "fish". It's interesting to see what the results leave out: there's usually no explanation of the phrase's meaning or of its typical context. That's unsettling for me, because it encourages writers to use a result without investigating its significance.

One of the results for "fish" is "the piece of cod that passeth all understanding." I could imagine a careless use of the expression offending a more conservative audience. A more subtle example: consider a journalist penning a story on his community's inmate work-release program. After searching Phrase Thesaurus, he might settle on the simple maxim "work brings freedom," unaware of its past associations.

I'm not saying that writers should be absolved of the responsibility of researching the Phrase Thesaurus's suggestions; I'm saying that these sanity-checks don't always happen. (My hometown paper has proven this.) I'm saying that Phrase Thesaurus could clearly do more to make that process easier — and, in doing so, make a subscription more valuable. The free Phrase Finder site has the history and meaning of many of the phrases that the commercial site suggests; I was surprised that there were no links to the free site in the sample search results.

UI by Smullyan

2007-10-26T04:56:00.000-05:00

I was trying to pay my power bill online a while back. I had to sign up for an account on Ameren's web site.

To this day, I'm still not sure how I should have answered one of their questions:

A sign-up page is not the place to put a logic puzzle.

Don't punish your customers

2007-10-26T04:47:00.001-05:00

I saw this earlier this week while browsing Campusfood:

Hey, Papa John's, guess what?

You're a business. Your customers are trying to give you money. If they order from the wrong store, call the other store and figure it out. It's not difficult.

Don't punish your customers for being your customers.

Consider your audience

2007-10-26T04:44:00.000-05:00

While I was browsing Blosxom's home page, I found a revealing omission.

The navigation bar on the left side has a menu like this:

documentation for users

overview

install

...

use cases^*

What does the asterisk mean? Scroll down a bit more:

^*coming soon

I think that this is representative of a lot of free software. Commercial vendors are motivated to consider their users: if they don't, their software won't sell.

It's easier for an open-source project to lose touch with the end-user. See Eric Raymond's CUPS horror story.

Why not WordPress?

2007-10-26T04:23:00.000-05:00

It took "XML-RPC for PHP" two critical vulnerabilities to learn that running eval() on user input is a Bad Idea.

I've never used WordPress, but it looks like it still has a ways to go in terms of security. So I didn't even consider it.

Picture the process

2007-10-26T03:44:00.000-05:00

When I'm hungry, I don't start off by thinking "I want IHOP". I'm usually thinking of some sort of food — "I want Mexican".

I'd like to see Campusfood list menu items by item type — regardless of the restaurant. I want to be able to search for, say, calzones and see results from every place serving them. I don't want to trudge through each of the restaurant's menus.

Campusfood modeled the process from their own perspective: their clients are businesses, so they've arranged the site based on that. But that doesn't necessarily make sense for the end-user...and their site exists to sell to the end-user.

"The perfect curmudgeon blogging system"

2007-10-25T04:34:00.000-05:00

A friend pointed me to Blosxom; he called it "the perfect curmudgeon blogging system".

So far, I'm inclined to agree. I unzipped the archive expecting a mess of scripts, documentation, and junk. Instead:

[me@alexlambertcom /home/htdocs/blog]$ unzip blosxom.zip
Archive:  blosxom.zip
  inflating: blosxom.cgi