frgdr.com Blog

Jerusalem is expecting significant snowfall this coming Tuesday evening, and so the director of the Naggar School of Art, a client of mine, has asked for my advice on how to instantly update the school website so that students will know if there will be any classes Wednesday morning.
Good thing Web 2.0 was around to help us out: the Internet in its current phase enables different services to interface, that is exchange data with each other, and that allowed me to make one school director very happy, as he is now able to text snow status updates from his cellphone, allowing the students to receive automatic updates by SMS, RSS, or by simply visiting the school website.

Here is a cool video explaining Web 2.0. You may need to watch it a couple of times to absorb all the information:

 
 
The CommonCraft Show has great videos explaining different aspects of Web 2.0 in plain English, so anyone (Yes, even your mother) can understand.

If you want to find Shahar Golan / frgdr.com around Web 2.0 you can read his FAQ here.

Warning, GEEKY POST! Move on, folks, nothing to see here!
Unlike my regular posts about life, liberty and the pursuit of decent hummus, this is a pretty rare post intended for the technically savvy only, so do not bore yourself if webmastering is not your cup of tea. Read some other stuff here.

Okay, now the fact that you can actually read this post means that I was successful in changing a hosting provider from Yahoo.com to GoDaddy.com and I will discuss my reasons here:

When I first registered my website on August 2005 I wanted to host it with a company that:
1. Is recognized and respected and would not vanish after a couple of months
2. Has a large clientele thus its customer support would be good.
3. Is located outside Israel for security reasons (both cyber-attacks and actual real-life attacks)
4. Would offer a good value for its price.
For all these reasons I chose Yahoo Hosting Starter plan: US$12/month. 5GB disk space, 200GB data transfer.

I gradually became disillusioned with Yahoo, but it took quite a bit of time. It seemed the more I knew of the company - the less I liked my decision to work with them. The reasons to leave Yahoo started piling up:
1. A couple of months after I launched my website, I wanted to configure .htaccess to stop unruly bots from accessing it. This is when I learned that Yahoo does not allow its customers to configure that, amongst many other advanced features disabled by Yahoo.
2. To get a straight ‘No, we don’t provide it’ answer about .htaccess took the Yahoo customer support no less than two days and three emails, as the offshore employees are forced to reply using scripted answers. I have posted the whole torture-through-emails correspondence as a follow-up to this post – make sure you read it as it is well worth your time.
3. Yahoo’s over-zealous cooperation with the Chinese government became clearer as the number of human rights violations facilitated by its branches grew.
4. In May 2007 I launched a blog, only to find out Yahoo provides a crippled and outdated version of WordPress, with no easy way to upgrade it.
5. I became acquainted with GoDaddy when a client of mine needed me to design a website for him and he had already had a GoDaddy account. When I needed some DNS-related help and emailed GoDaddy’s customer support department, I was amazed at how fast the reply came (just a couple of hours later), how human it sounded and how helpful and accurate it was. That got me thinking why the heck am I paying four times as much as the equivalent GoDaddy Economy Plan costs: US$4/month. 5GB disk space, 250GB data transfer.
A couple of months later when I inquired about transferring my own website to GoDaddy.com, the answers were just as fast, just as accurate.
6. The straw that broke the camel’s back was a recent event when for three weeks thousand of websites (including mine) were down, producing on-again-off-again Error 500s. The good people at Yahoo were gracious enough to tell me they are ‘aware of it’ – but did not elaborate on the cause for the incident or their estimated time to fix the problem. Also, once the problem was fixed no notification was sent from Yahoo and no restitution was offered.

So now frgdr.com is happily hosted here, and hopefully this is a beginning of a beautiful partnership. We have upgraded to the latest WordPress version, started using web2.0 folksonomy tags, and are in a good mood for further site improvements.

…And now back to your previously scheduled blogging.

You probably remember how addictive was rating girls on HotOrNot.com a while back. A recently launched NYC Jelly project compares website design by showing you a screen capture of two homepages at a time, and lets you pick the winner. It is the ultimate HotOrNot for geeks and it is called CommandShift3.

Besides being utterly addictive, it is a great way to check out the current Web2.0 trends. At this moment in time, these are the best and worst designed websites:

There is no way around it, when it comes to computers, I am old school. When I first laid my hands on a keyboard, I was about seven years old and all the letters were in English. It was an Apple II clone, there was no hard disk, instead of a mouse there was a joystick, and of course there was no Hebrew involved.
The grown-up world was still trying to make these business machines work, so making them work in Hebrew, a language used by a few million people, was unheard-of.
To this day whenever I get an annoying ‘my computer does not work’ phone call from one of my computer illiterate friends, the first thing I am trying to establish is what pretentious action was executed to make a popular software fail. One time it was Nero not being able to burn Hebrew-named files onto a CD. Another time it was a graphics editor that kept refusing to open photos from a Hebrew named folder.
This is why I consider myself old school, as I always try to make it work and never insist on making it work my way. My thinking is always: it worked for a couple billion users, what possibly could Dana from Jerusalem do to make it break down?

I am aware, though, that I am pretty much alone in this battle: while I consider Hebrew an added bonus within the IT world, most Israelis approach it with a sense of entitlement. ‘If it does not work in Hebrew – it does not work’ some say. Others confess to not even trying to read any English, pressing the [Yes] or [No] buttons arbitrarily or by gut instinct.
The number 1 movie database is in English? Let’s use database number 700 – it’s in Hebrew!
You Google for answers in Hebrew and get none? Chances are you stumbled upon one of those eternal unanswered mysteries of the universe!

This was pretty much the mentality around here, until MySpace and Facebook arrived. All of a sudden, Israelis found out they can read and write in English when they want to, and they started seeing the benefit in communicating worldwide using one universal language.
For all those people (some of which are my best friends) I hold the utmost disdain:
You who have frowned upon your (copied) software for not doing what you wanted it to do,
You who have allowed your personal computers to contract viruses, Trojan horses and venereal diseases because the warnings were in English,
You who have called your geeky friends in all hours of the day and night, horrified that your computer stopped working after clicking ‘Yes’ to an ‘Are you sure?’ message box you have not read,
All of you should be ashamed.

Only now did you discover you can actually put to use the second language your country made you learn from grade 4 to 12?