Roughly 2 years ago we started an international User Experience network in Capgemini. And everybody aggreed that we should have a blog. After a short period of time, the blog became stale and I have not visited it since then. A colleague of mine wrote me today and that reminded me of that old, stale […]
Saturday the 15th is Spam Filter Free Day here at justaddwater.dk. Why would we ever want to do something like that you ask? Well up until recently we received about 2-3000 spam comments each day so we thought we would draw attention to the wasted bandwidth, time and energy that all these spam comments consume. […]
It’s no secret that we will keep this blog spam filter free on December 15th. For some strange reason we only had 127 spam comments in the last 27 hours. This is a drop to just above 100 a day (as opposed to the previous level 2,000-3,000 per day), which translates to a 95% drop […]
Note that our spam experiment scheduled for December 15th got mentioned by the Akismet Blog, Blogherald, and many other blogs. Akismet Blog: Letting Spam In For A Day Blogherald: Will you turn off Akismet? Follow along in Technorati blog reactions for Justaddwater.dk Also to answer some of the comments we got: Binh Nguyen: How about […]
Get ready for a suicide mission: On this blog, we will remove our spam filter completely for one day, December 15th. Today we got our spam comment number 500,000. Pretty scary to think how much energy, computer power, network traffic is wasted on a completely useless activity: To spoil the content with irrelevant comments. Currently […]
Today is a great day. At least if you ask Jesper and my self. I just got a call from Jesper who was out shopping with his family, wishing me a happy birthday. Today it’s exactly two years ago that we postet our first post on Justaddwater.dk and we are still going strong. We would […]
When asking a user about personal details you should also tell what you are going to use it for. Basically it’s always good practice to have a privacy policy available on your website so users can see what data is being collected about them, how it is uses etc. Many cooperate websites have privacy policies. […]
Imagine the amount of collective brainpower idiotic spammers waste on creative ideas for new ways to get past spam filters. This one was caught in the moderation queue (and would probably be caught with Akismet otherwise). For entertainment purposes, here is the text I recieved: Anikrichard | anlikivanna.80@mail.ru | wwwwww.com | IP: 72.9.235.218 hello , […]
I am back from vacation and saw that Akismet has caught more than 22,000 spam comments over a two week period. That is roughly one spam comment every minute (65 comments each hour). Since February when we passed 100,000 spam comments, we have now passed a quarter million spam comments. (277,421 when I made the […]
We just got a trackback link from a spam blog linking to Thomas’ latest blog post. At first sight, the trackback looked fairly real. Se screenshot below. Just one thing caught my eye: Who’s Jeremy? I went to the site — it looked reasonable at a glance. A look at the categories (oh, it’s called […]
Today justaddwater.dk got spam comment number 100,000. But actually the real number is much higher since we have incorporated a couple of measures to catch the spam even before it reaches WordPress or Akismet. We have for example been blocking certain keywords that we found where common in spam that slipped through Akismet, or we […]
As long as Jesper and I have written this blog we have both been working for Capgemini in Denmark. Personally I’ve been here for over two and a half years now – some very good years! It has actually been some of my most interesting and educational years ever. So it is with great sadness […]
At Justaddwater, we’re introducing a new category: “Best of Justaddwater“. Alexander, the Chief Happiness Officer, came up with a “best of”-category, that I think any blog could benefit from. Absolutely a brilliant idea. At the moment, we want this to completely replace our experiment with a wordpress plugin for measuring popular posts. (Popularity Contest has […]
“Make this page my home page” Do you remember this from the pre-bubble era? Lots of websites had a link like this. Who used it by the way? I didn’t! Here’s Altavista homepage from February 2000. Image from Internet Archive Now it has gotten even worse on blogs. From Matt over at 37Signals, “It’s the […]
Today is World Usability Day. Here on Justaddwater.dk, we have celebrated with finally scrapping our blog archive. Instead we are now just showing the latest 50 articles on the front page, followed by a link to the previous 50. Those are in turn followed by a similar link and so on. The concept of archives […]
Part of our “blog usability” series. IBM’s frontpage focus on blogging inspired me to dig into their blogging policy and guidelines (created by the bloggers in an internal forum): Guidelines for IBM bloggers: executive summary Know and follow IBM’s Business Conduct Guidelines. Blogs, wikis and other forms of online discourse are individual interactions, not corporate […]
Via Keith Instone I learned that IBM’s US frontpage story today is about blogs. There are several points here worth noting: Blogs are an important factor of IBM’s public face. Blogs give a human face to the big company Focus on participating and sharing insight with clients Screenshot of the landing page: Also worth mentioning […]
Today is our anniversary! One year ago, on this day, Jesper and I sat down in the office to chat. It was Friday and we quickly started talking about our favorite subject: What could we do to raise awareness of usability and web standards inside Capgemini? We discussed the ups and downs of newsletters, meetings, […]
Today, ten months ago, Thomas and I started Justaddwater.dk. Our purpose then was to share our thoughts about usability and web standards. It’s time to review our profile after ten months with 135 posts, 420 comments (not to mention 10,000 spam comments) and over 500 links from 250 websites (according to Technorati). Here is our […]
According to Jakob Nielsen’s top ten design mistakes on weblogs the 7th worst thing is irregular publishing frequency. So with no further ado I would just like to thank you guys for keep reading our blog while Jesper and I have been on vacation (Jesper still is by the way). I’ve been totally disconnected for […]
WordPress uses /wp-comments-post.php as the receiving URL when posting new comments. Spammers exploit this and automatically send their spam directly to that URL (without actually filling out the comment form on the blog).
Here I explain how to deal with this kind of spam attacs.
Since yesterday, the volume of spam comments has gone up even more. Now we get 150 spam comments every 12 hours. (Yesterday it was 21 hours). I promised to tell about what countermeasures we have taken against spam comments. What has that to do with usability? Well, in my opinion, irrelevant comments removes focus from […]
The last days, we’ve experienced a lot more spam comments than usual. For some months now, we have removed about 50 spam comments each day here at Justaddwater.dk. Now, that number has more than tripled. We removed 150 spam comments just in the last 21 hours. Thanks to Akismet (wordpress plugin to remove spam comments), […]
After reading “Pick a Format (Any Format)” by Nick Bradbury (tip by: Jeremy Voorhis on Octoblog) we must say that we totally agree. The point in the post is simple: I keep running across sites that offer the same exact content as an RSS feed and an Atom feed. What’s the point of this? Making […]
This morning we’re speaking in about corporate weblogs in Copenhagen, Denmark. It’s hosted by the Danish IT Industry Association, and We’ll be speaking on the experiences with this blog and how it relates to our jobs at Capgemini. The presentation is in Danish. More info on previous blog post “Speaking on Corporate Weblogging event“. Powerpoint […]
Earlier I wrote about Pogosticking and why it should be avoided. I mentioned that pogosticking is: Unnecessary navigation and extra clicks that occurs because pages do not match the information users need to find what they are looking for. Then I’m reading this book from 1999. It’s a classic: Web Site Usability (a designer’s guide) […]
From a former colleague I just learned that Capgemini started our first official corporate weblog: CTO Blog by corporate CTO Andy Mulholland and Northern Europe Asia Pacific CTO Ron Tolido. There are two things I think are really excellent: Their biographies — extremely well written, and that the weblog has a corporate commenting policy Example […]
Just realized that the most popular blog on Technorati’s top 100 list is the Chinese 老徐 徐静蕾 新浪BLOG. With links from almost 30,000 websites, that’s an amazing achievement. When did that happen? Who’s linking to this? From Technorati’s own weblog: Only a third of blog posts are in English; today more people post in Japanese […]
Blog linking can be painful. Sometimes it’s the one thing that takes most time when I’m writing for this weblog. I just saw a brilliant example from the new Alistapart article by Joe Clark.
June 13, Thomas and I are invited to speak at an event about corporate weblogs in Copenhagen, Denmark. It’s hosted by the Danish IT Industry Association, and We’ll be speaking on the experiences with this blog and how it relates to our jobs at Capgemini. Also, there will be a chance to hear Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, […]
Syndicated feeds in form of RSS or Atom is the hot way of getting news from around the world delivered instantly and dynamically to your desktop. Previously a user could only do so by registering for an e-mail newsletter. Believe it or not some people don’t have a news aggregator installed. They might not even […]
In case you wanted to know what’s popular on Justaddwater.dk right now:
Last week Max Kiesler wrote “Round-up of 30 AJAX tutorials” where he included our article “Live search explained”. Max’s post has been mentioned everywhere on the internet, which also means that our blog gets visited a lot. Ajaxian.com (that has previously driven a lot of traffic at us) has also mentioned his AJAX round-up.
If you are a frequent reader and take a look at the front page sometimes, you might have noticed that we updated the layout quite a bit. The new layout is the first of many steps we will take to make the life easier for blog readers.
Technorati is for blogs what Google is for the rest of the web: The #1 place to go when searching for a topic of interest. One of its most powerful features is the ability to use tags – the so called Technorati Tags. Technorati Tags are small linked words situated somewhere inside your post (in […]
To follow up on Thomas’ post from yesterday about how to improve usability on out-of-the-box wordpress blog, we decided to prioritize the 23 20 point list that we’ll work on. (Three items are already done since we started the list).
We prioritize improvements so that we get the low hanging fruit done right away.
Many blogs today use common blogging software like WordPress or Movable Type. Tools like these are very easy to set up and you will probably get your blog up and running with the default design within 10-15 minutes. This speed comes at a price though… Very bad usability. Help us fix the birth defects.
In the previous “Mullet-style blog layout and complete archive page” we had a look on the Mullet-style blog page that makes more content available on the fronpage, and also argued for replacing monthly archives with a single archive page.Danish “brugervenligeblogs.dk” pointed me to a research document from July 2005: Blog Mainstream Market Penetration Likely Limited […]
I like Wordpress Dashboard. The name suggests that it’s an overview of whats relevant to your blog. What’s happening. What’s popular. Who comments. What important updates are available. The Dashboard should work like in a car. The most important and relevant information should be visible at a glance. Lets have a brief look at the dashboard.
I suggest you only take a brief look to judge for your self whether you think the main objectives of the Dashboard page are met.
Click on the screenshot above for and look for 5 seconds only. Then ask yourself what you could remember from the page. Yup you just tried a 5 second usability test.
Blog frontpage that increases user experience and improves findability of content. The key is the mullet. The idea is to have a long tail of many older entries that represent previous content.
I’ve been a bit irritated with WordPress for a while now (our blogging software for justaddwarer.dk). For some reason most of our trackbacks from other blogs seem to use ugly styled permalinks. But I found a solution…
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