During my blog hiatus, I was ruminating on a potential post about what I don’t like about Facebook. Now I don’t really need to as Fake Steve Jobs summed it up perfectly: The problem with Facebook.

Facebook seems to have missed their window of opportunity. They were on the verge of expanding beyond their main college demographic, the API was released to a bunch of bloghead fanfare, they were one of the first to create an excellent iphone version, and then came the tidal wave of crap werewolf-zombie-pirate attacks and superdumbwalls. They failed to create or encourage any form of usefulness in their product.

Frankly, I also find their site design is clean but really boring looking — kinda the opposite of myspace, busy and annoying but exciting in a way.

I’ll probably keep my account on the site — hell I still have an account on friendster, I think.

I gotta agree with Eric Meyer. The Opera lawsuit is stupid. The only reason that people don’t install things besides IE these days is laziness, ignorance, and poor marketing on the part of the other browsers.

Not the mention, I like Eric Meyer got no beef with IE7. It ain’t half bad — if only the adoption process was better IE6 is still about 14% for CatCubed and a whopping 50% for the UCSF Fetal Treatment Center.

Um wow, just wow. What the hell were they thinking.

Microsoft’s new promotional site for MacOffice2008 was launched today (thanks to Daring Fireball for the heads up). Go ahead and visit. All you’ll see is a blank black page with a small footer bar.

“Why is there no content?” you might ask. Well cause the idiots built the entire thing in flash and didn’t bother to include any loading bars. But it worse than that: after the interface finally loads, the first page requires a 4+ MB download and then whenever you click any of the navigation along the top it also has an additional download of 3-11MBs per tab.

It’s the first day and most likely the site is getting slammed, and with those gigantor flash files that’s not a good thing for their poor server. My browser took over 10 minutes to load the damned thing. And now checking back, it’s completely hosed and none of the content is loading. I can’t even look at the pages I’ve seen before because the flash files are too huge for Firefox to bother keeping in it’s cache.

Correction: Oh hey that download crapout might actually my connection here at work. They recently lamely started throttling youtube traffic, and I just realized that it probably actually applies to all large flash files. As a result, the macoffice site doesn’t load for me. This doesn’t change the fact that an all flash informational site this size is still stupid.

It’s the worst example of a bloated Flash site I’ve ever seen. I can’t get exact figures since I can’t even reach it at the moment, but I’m guessing it all total it’s at least 50MBs — the size of a small application or an HD movie trailer.

Been a bit dry here lately as I’ve been busy busy revamping NifNaks. My revision 2 design was cute but the navigation just wasn’t flexible enough. Also I had been struggling with a couple of issues with CubeCart, my ecommerce engine, for a while.

So I decided to take a leap and try revamping the entire backend with Joomla/Virtuemart. Thankfully this leap paid off in spades. It was still a lot of work, with a couple late late nights, but it all pulled together faster than I thought, and I gotta say I like the admin of Joomla way better than CubeCart. There were a couple struggles getting the credit card processing working and couple other things, but I got most of it fixed.

With just a little fanfare, I happily announce the…

Grand Reopening of NifNaks.com!

It works, it’s got products, it accepts credit cards, and I’m happy with the design. Yay!

Still to do: transfer over all the old blog content and set up url redirects; help Nifer add more products; fix those little picayune things that still bother me aesthetically.

Internet Explorer 7 came upon the scene with uproar for us web developers. Oh Nooz! What will happen to our precious site designs!?!

Frankly however, it didn’t really effect many people as long as they designed for standards, avoided messy css hacks, and didn’t use Active X. Ok admittedly there were probably several web managers who had to overhaul their active x css hack-job of a site. Luckily, I was not one of them.

Instead, I was hoping that IE7 smash like a meteor wiping out almost all instances of crappy IE6. I so dearly wanted to never have to code for IE’s bugs ever again.

I watched my UCSF web stats and at first it seemed promising, but then it hit around 30% and has just stagnated there for the past 6 months. Firefox’s browser share is around 10-12% on and Safari around 3.5%. (on CatCubed Firefox use is around 68% and Safari 11%).

Ugh it seems like I’ll be stuck designing for IE6 for a quite a while.

I noticed yesterday that iPhone safari is making my top image bar go all wonky. The rest of the page looks fine just the header is messed up (the background image appears stretched strangely). It works fine on the desktop safari (and firefox, and IE, etc) so I don’t know what’s causing it.

Before I begin to dig into the problem does anyone out there in the intertubes have any idea why it’s doing this?