It’s a disaster.

And I don’t say that lightly. See for yourself:

Firstly, the loading times are shocking. Then, the design is a mess. Everything is out of proportion, difficult to use, claustrophobic, element clashes abound - there isn’t even a coherent color scheme.

It’s a table-based layout, and there’s plenty of markup that was simply commented out. They’re using a proprietary CMS (Vignette), when there’s plenty of local web dev talent. They tried the customise-blocks-on-homepage thing, but it requires registration, and isn’t nearly as user-friendly as the BBC Homepage (which might be what they’re trying to emulate).

I did mention it’s slow, right? They also have yet to discover the magic behind actually meta-tag linking to their RSS feeds from the relevant sections of the site.

I’d love to know how they ended up with, firstly, the company that did this revamp (if it wasn’t internal), and secondly, the people responsible. Who were they, and do they know that we’re in the 21st century, where things like cross-browser compatibility, accessibility, speed and design aesthetics actually count?

I’ve seen better free Wordpress themes. Oh, snap, how’s that for a brilliant idea? It doesn’t take forever and an arm and a leg to put together a decent news theme, and it’s not as if Wordpress blogs can’t be multi-author, or collaborative, or secure. Heck, they could have gotten up and running in less than a month with a budget of less than US$10′000, but I somehow suspect there’s more to this than simple value-for-money.

It’s almost as if they’re going back in time - keeping an ever-increasing gap between the forefront of web design, and the sites they eventually turn out. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if they (or at least the same company) was responsible for the disaster that is WeatherSA.

Personally, I’m a little embarassed. The forefront of journalism on the African continent ends up with a site like this? Something is seriously wrong.

Tonight it all happened in a nicely hidden (read, second-story, hard to find) lounge called “Alba”, which I must say, is a really cool venue. The whole thing was put together by Sue (from The Forge), and kudos to her for pulling it off so nicely :)

When I got there, Walter Pike was already waiting, and slowly but surely, the rest of the crowd trickled in. I’m probably going to miss someone (a lot of someones), but Andre was there, phr0ggi, Catherine Luckhoff (who stopped in for a drink before heading out again - something about slipping away from a birthday? lol), Chris M, Saul Kropman, Pam Sykes, Bev Merriman (who we all know as FeistyFemale ;), the awesomeness of Eric (albeit briefly), and even Bergen Larsen stopped by eventually.

Pam and I ended up chatting about how cool the Internet really is, her new Macbook, IRC chatrooms, Web 2.0 startups, and Chrome’s V8 Javascript engine (not necessarily in that order). Pam, the link I owed you is “Go2Web20.net” (something about “early adopter” comes to mind there…).

It was also great to finally meet Andre (the guy with the photo album book), and to help demystify the disintermediation discombobulation that is Google SA’s certification programme. He also pointed out 280slides (I think), and I was telling him about a.viary.com.

Then there was the food, which, although excellent, I ended up having too much of :(. I have that nasty feeling that I’m going to wake up with a faint cramp and a whole lot of bloat…

I ended up taking a taxi home tonight, which (shock and horror), cost over R500 for a one-way trip from Capetown to Somerset West. I thought there was a law against things like that? Man…

Drastic fares and alcohol aside (yes, cluckhoff, I had some more to drink after you left ;), something that really struck me tonight is what an odd group we were. Not “odd” in a bad way, but through the Internet and social media, I’ve met people that I never (not in a million years) would have met otherwise, and I’m thankful for it.

Right, then, off to bed, in the vain hopes of recovering some energy for the week ahead…

I wonder why it hasn’t been replaced yet? And I also wonder, if the SAPS is paying for that billboard (in a very high commuter traffic area), how much its cost them (and hence, us taxpayers) to advertise a deadline that’s 3.5 years out of date?

I think people are blowing the Google SA Certification thing way, way, WAY out of proportion.

[source]

Google SA is planning on “certifying” 5 agencies in the local online market - basically, something like a stamp of approval. This is being done to ward off the chancers in the industry - the shady companies that make huge promises, charge huge amounts of money, and then fail to deliver:

“They go in, they bill clients incorrectly. There is fraud happening. What really peeves me, is they say: ‘Give us R100 000 and we’ll sort it out… trust me’. They will not disclose to clients what their Google campaigns entail.”

[source]

Personally, I’m all for it. SA is stuck in the 21st-century digital dark age - many companies want to get online, but there’s no clear definition about what the best practices are, how these things work, and who to go to to get the best service.

By certifiying agencies as “trustworthy”, Google SA will be taking a step in the right direction. It’s not the only thing they’ll have to do, though, and it appears that Massie understands this:

Stafford: We are not only going to work with these agencies only, we won’t be a cartel… The certification will cost nothing. People get us wrong. This is not about making money – this is to ensure that we will build “reference” agencies – so there is a model in the industry that people can follow. We will have experts out there to enable various Google tools… we will provide training on all the tools. We want to broadly empower the industry.

[source] [emphasis added]

Of couse, the moment Google makes any move about approving/certifying anything, people immediately slap the “anti-trust”, “cartel”, “regulation”, and “evil” stamps on it:

Ahhh, the almighty Go(d)ogle :( Somehow they found a way to even f#ck up my perception of them. From love to hate. Oh well. [stii]

Google and certified agencies? Excellent idea, but I smell market bias and unfair practice. Why only 5 agencies? [EveD]

@shawnjooste @stii http://tinyurl.com/6h9rtr Pretty much speaks to a monopoly trying to regulate a free market by exercising control. [MandyLdeWaal]

Personally, I believe this to be a good move. Not the best, move, but a good one. It would have been better if an independent marketing body would do the certifications - which begs the question of why it wasn’t done sooner.

Maybe Google SA’s trying to make up for the Entelligence debacle. Either way, once it’s clear who to trust in this online space, maybe the industry will move forward?

Then the proverbial pawpaw hit the proverbial fan, and suddenly the auction wasn’t going so well. Just today, Naspers decided to close the auction for MWEB, and sell off 75% of the shares to Telkom.

This just after Telkom agreed to sell 15% of their holdings in Vodacom. I think it’s evident how Telkom’s looking to position themselves - as a landline broadband provider. What will give this play an interesting outcome, however, is the fact that Africa is a very strong mobile market.

Broadband penetration is sitting at under 15%, while mobile penetration is well over 80% at this point. And we’re not just talking Nokia 1110s here - we’re talking WAP-enabled devices, and in recent times, 3G-enabled smartphones.

The culture and the market here in SA are very different, which is what’s making me think that companies like Vodafone and Neotel are going to have more success - their offerings can move. And generally, they’re faster, cheaper, and more easily accessible.

Entry into mobile connectivity is a lot cheaper than entry into landline connectivity. For instance, if you have a modern phone, chances are it has a modem, and can hook up to a PC. That’s how I got online up until the beginning of this year. R389 for 2GB of mobile data isn’t that much of a pocket-burner.

Compare that to getting landline DSL. There are installation fees for the phone line, conversion costs for ADSL compatibility, the router, monthly subscription costs for both the line and the ADSL connectivity, and then the data/speed packages on top of that.

We’re still struggling to get people into houses here in SA - is it any wonder landline ADSL is failing? I think Telkom is grasping at straws here, trying to consolidate their position in a market that won’t reach its full potential. Maybe that’s just me :)

And my results?

English Genius

You scored 93% Beginner, 93% Intermediate, 100% Advanced, and 93% Expert!

[source]

You can find the test here, on HelloQuizzy.com.

It’s not 100% complete yet, but it’s close - overall, I’m just happy that I’m running a theme that I built myself, instead of relying on someone else’s thought process ;)

I’m hoping that this new design - which places a far greater emphasis on content (and shows up just how little I’ve blogged since starting a few months ago) will encourage me to post more often, and on a wider variety of topics.

So what do you think? I’d love to hear some feedback, especially since the one thing I’m not is a graphic designer, lol.

I summed up my first experiences over Twitter, as I browsed through the interface:

• Tag and Category interface pages rock - the way they’re organized makes MUCH more sense
• Just about every page has a Screen Options tab, which allows you to turn off unused widgets. Another sensible feature.
• The 1st beta still has a lot of design inconsistencies - pages copied straight from WP2.6, like Themes, Widgets, Editor…
• They’ve implemented Automatic Upgrades! Thank God - that’ll save many, many headaches.
• Custom Date/Time formats - no more theme hacking.
• Quick inline post editing - change everything except post content right on the Edit Posts page.
• And those are the interesting bits. The rest is standard Wordpress. Can’t wait for the RC!

The thing with 2.7 is that while its still a lot of the same old Wordpress technology, it’s laid out in a way that makes it easily accessible, and an absolute pleasure to use - especially, I’d imagine, for the power users :)

Possibly my favorite feature out of all the new ones is the core-level implementation of Automatic Upgrade. What this basically means is that you’ll (hopefully) never need to download another copy of Wordpress again - everything is push-button, just like the publishing :)

They’ve still got a bit of work cut out for them. A few of the pages were copied straight out of 2.6, and there’s a considerable amount of layout and functionality glitches (uploading something from the Media tab just made it vanish). However they’re expecting a release of this new version sometime in November.

You can get the current Beta from the Development Blog [click here].

Somewhere along the line I heard of Ubuntu, and it must have been 2006/2007 when I installed it for the first time. Definitely a major improvement, but I had trouble getting my phone to connect as a modem (figured it out eventually, though). And so, back to Windows.

In fact, in the last 3 years, I’ve probably uninstalled Windows and installed Linux (both as single OSes and as dualboots) at least 10 times. There are just times when Windows drives me nuts and sends me to Linux, and times when I need a functionality (like gaming) that only Windows can provide.

Hence, I’ve sort of given up trying to stick to one OS. And right now, I’m in the process of moving my stuff off my 80gb HDD to my 500gb black hole of a Seagate FreeAgent, in preparation for a complete format and a fresh install of Kubuntu 8.04.1 - aka Heron.

I’ve been waiting a long time for the release of Ibex, so that I could try out Heron. Yes, I know they’re different, but when it comes to opensource software, I’ve found that the best way (ie, way with least headaches) to approach it is to stay one major release behind.

That way, all the pioneers and geeks and trolls sink their teeth into the latest versions, run into thousands of problems, work up patches and cures that can be installed by a mechanism as simple as apt-get (in most cases), write hundreds of pages of documentation, blog posts and forum threads, and by the time they move on to the next version, every single possible bug, problem or question I have can be answered via a Google search.

And so, this morning, downloaded my 8.04.1 ISO, burnt it, and tried out the Live CD version. It’s pretty much the same as 7.10, but for one major difference - speed. I’m also hoping that it’ll be easier to get my E220 modem hooked up and running using the same methods as before.

I’m also curious to see if Wine has improved at all. I’m looking at getting a new PC soon, and if Wine can run at least two of my Windows games, I might make the switch to Linux on a less seasonal basis. Time will tell…

I’ve been using 3G all this time, mostly because of its zero-installation nature. It works great, but after a few months of intensive usage, the modem’s starting throw little fits. It’ll just drop and die with no reason, reject the SIM card, and occasionally tell the PC its connected when, in fact, its not. Frustrating when you’re waiting on a download…

So today I sort of decided to “stuff it”, call Telkom, and sort out a phone line. In a sick twist of humor, their 10219 call center isn’t toll-free, which meant that I was talking (from my cellphone) on borrowed time.

Went sort of OK, they figured out that my residence was indeed in an area with phone lines (ie, in the middle of a suburb), and we went through the details process. Name, surname, residence, ID number, credit check all OK, order confirmed as analog residential line, I’d have to pay a deposit, no problem, sir, your order reference number is 1, 2, 6, BEEP.

Bye bye Telkom. So I hung up and waited for them to call back. Nothing. About ten minutes later I logged on to FNB, reloaded my phone, and placed a call to Neotel (since their online ordering system was offline).

Full marks for customer service on that one, even though we spent the first 25 minutes of the call trying to figure out exactly where on the coverage map I was. Neotel, upgrade that thing? Sweet.

Eventually we confirmed that yes, excellent coverage on NeoConnect Lite (which basically gets me a phone with SMS functions and a really, really slow modem). No problem there - slow is a “guaranteed” 156kbps line, which when it comes right down to it, is 3 times cheaper than 3G, and would be prone to those all-day all-night constantly-downloading routines.

Credit check? Just a second … no, sorry, you don’t clear.

That’s the part that sort of confused me. Telkom had no problem, but then again, they were huge and slow and probably had internal blacklists for these things. So what now? Refer to an external credit agency, they’ll check and call you back.

It’s been about 7 hours with no word from them, and I’ve been forced to return my 072 SIM to my modem - my 071 number apparently wasn’t accepted by their systems (err, right). Which means that when they find out I can actually afford R299/month (which, given the information I submitted, should be DUH obvious), they’ll have to email me - something I’m not particularly counting on.

Telkom didn’t call, though, and I’m sort of not expecting anything from Neotel - I just guessed they’d have sorted it out by now. And so I’m back to 3G. I don’t even want to know what the airtime cost of that meaningless venture was.

Did anyone bother to mention that it’s the 21st century? Just checking.