Marzhill Musings

My wireless company, whose name I won’t reveal, has a design problem on their site. I like the company overall and have no real complaints with their service. But they did make a rather serious mistake in their online bill pay. I’m not telling them who they are since I want to give them a chance to fix it before smearing their name all over the web. Who knows maybe they will fix now that I’ve complained.

Their customer service site doesn’t really support any browser other than IE. That means firefox, Safari, Konqeror, Opera, and others can’t be guaranteed to work. They know this. They didn’t however elect to tell me. Or any other user for that matter. What’s worse is that the site fails silently. Now this is a bad for most every application but it’s especially bad for online bill pay. If you go to pay a bill online and it gives no indication that the payment didn’t go through It has the potential to cause problems. Maybe even serious problems. So take note: when designing browser specific web apps make sure your users know the limitations. A notice, pop-up box, or even a cryptic error message in the page are all more desireable than silent failures.

I’m in the middle of designing an ecommerce site myself right now and I intend to make sure that when it comes to peoples money they know when something didn’t go right. Lessons learned from other peoples mistakes.

Over at A List Apart They are talking about custom DTD and Modular XHTML So I thought I’d dig up an old article I wrote on the subject and share it with you yet again. The Power of Modular XHTML

could email you when certain events happened? It has an eventlog why can’t it just email when it sees an event occur? Well I decided it was time to add just that functionality. So.. . I proudly present EventNotifierV2.pl. A script that checks your windows eventlog for events and emails you when it sees them. Surely someone else has a need for this.