Author: Barry Parr

Jay Small has written a great newsletter on why you should learn HTML if you don’t know it already and should create your sites using “raw” HTML instead of a WYSIWYG editor like GoLive or Dreamweaver.

I created an early version of MediaSavvy using GoLive and it just made me miserable. Not only was the code it to created too complex, but the program itself was way too hard to use.

Now that I’ve gone back to hand-coding my pages using BBEdit, I know what’s going on under the hood, my pages are smaller and lighter, and it’s actually easier to tweak them when I need to.

Now that more users and designers are using templates and style sheets, it makes even more sense to use HTML. Once you start working with style sheets, you’ll find there’s a logic and flow to working in HTML that you didn’t have when you were doing your layouts with tables.

There’s something about editing raw HTML templates that requires you to keep things simple. I think that the result is better-looking pages that are actually less complex for the reader to understand.

I love the idea of micropayments, but they never caught on. Andrew Odlyzko’s The Case Against Micropayments summarizes the obstacles to micropayments. [PDF]

Clay Shirky also wrote an article called “The case against micropayments” about two years ago, which is what finally convinced me that micropayments are going nowhere.

If you’re fighting micropayments in your organization, these articles provide great ammunition. If you’re considering, or waiting for, micropayments, you might want to consider moving on.

CMS Watch has a great editorial about the proliferation of open-source content management systems.

I’m thinking about getting an open-source CMS, and I am indeed overwhelmed by the variety of choices. My guess is that it won’t be too long before the Darwinian process of adoption and abandonment selects the fittest of the projects and narrows it down to a few choices. In the meantime, we’re going to have to spend a little extra time sorting through this mess.

However, I don’t think this chaos gives a huge advantage to commercial CMS vendors, who haven’t addressed the rampant dissatisfaction with their “solutions”.

Shortly after i posted by rant about the lack of simplicity and quality in cell phones, I saw that T-Mobile has decided not to release a Microsoft “powered” phone.

That’s good news. But even if this phone was bug-free, the last thing I’d want in my cell phone would be Windows. We’ve become so used to used to the complexity of Microsoft’s products and so obsessed with compatibility with Windows that we’ve forgotten what we wanted them for in the first place.

Jupiter says that consumers spend $1.5 billion a year worldwide on ring-tones for their cell phones, exactly the same size as Jupiter’s (optimistic) estimate for online content, and three times what they’re spending on news and information online.

Meanwhile, AOL is charging $1.95 a month, or $9.95 a year, for its “AIM Expressions,” a product that lets AIM users skin their IM windows with art from movies or rock bands.

A few years ago the WSJ ran a story that said NASCAR jackets were becoming popular in the inner city, not because of any interest in the sport, but because they were covered with logos.

it’s old news that we beginning to define our identities by the corporations we choose to affiliate with. What’s new is that they’re starting to charge us for the privilege of wearing their colors.