You are causing thousands or tens of thousands of users to be led into an ugly 404 Not Found screen.A great way to do this is to get a URL published in a magazine. I had the URL http://www.interlog.com/~john13/vcoach/vcoach.htm published and about 10% of the readers typed it in wrong (including some very creative spellings). Makes you realize how important it is to make URLs pronounceable and easily spellable.
John
-- John Russell, April 12, 1999
tipjar.com is designed to be a way to bypass the publishing industry, based on the ideas in Snow Crash pretty much. Muchos Gracias to Nina Paley who suggested I read Snow Crash shortly before her bout with CTS
-- david nicol, April 19, 1999
One little tip that I learned the hard way, with my (shameless plug) dslreports site, was that assigning users password automatically (to ensure they have a real email address) is a lot harder than I had imagined..
First, I tried random combinations of letters and numbers. Easy! but I got emails complaining they couldnt login, so looking more closely, I found people were not seeing the difference between "l" and "1", so I took those letters out.
But the complaints continued... this time it was "0" and "O".. so I took those out.
Then people would type "1" instead of "i".
So I took "i" out.
Then i found people started using copy-paste, and they would include accidently, a leading or trailing space from my this-is-your-password email.. so I allowed spaces.
This just left a few, real hard core dummies, who didnt feel that upper and lower case were important.
So I made passwords case-insensitive, and shortened them to almost cash machine PIN sized.
Finally, my mailbox is quiet, but not after annoying quite a few users along the way....
Its this type of thing that they never taught me in computer science..
-- Justin Beech, July 13, 1999
I don't entirely see why the amusing anecdote about changing icons that are linked to by another site, *is* amusing. (Actually I do, but I'm concerned with the principle.) If someone deep links to an image on your page, don't you owe them as much responsibility as to someone who links to your text? If not, why not?Philip usually favours the idea that people can deep link to text and that readers are entitled not to be "led by the nose" according to the site owner's intention. How come it's different for pictures?
-- philip jones, April 18, 2000
If someone deep links to an image on your page, don't you owe them as much responsibility as to someone who links to your text? If not, why not?
The point was not the deep linking to pictures, but the use of images, icons etc, uncredited, as part of another site. Say if I found a nice image saying 'home', I can use it in my site design by using an <IMG SRC="http://their.site.com/home_icon.gif"> instead of saving the image locally on my server. This then costs their.site.com the bandwidth. It may not be much in many cases, but the principle is always wrong. Either link with an <A HREF> tag, or save the image on your own server.
-- Michael Jemmeson, April 19, 2000
All things being equal, I think a site is much more easily managed by confining persistent elements (not only graphics, but text as well) to the local structure of the site. I have enough trouble maintaining the various links that are supposed to be there, not to mention links that (IMHO) shouldn't... BTW, I have noticed that visitors enjoy (too much I think) the opportunity to point out _any and all_ mistakes, broken links, etc., and I get too much hatemail already to risk linking my menu or bullet graphics directly from another site. I recall stories of webmasters replacing linked photos of generic content with explicit content, which is a little over the top, but if you choose to link to someone's stuff without notifying them, I guess it's your own fault. The deciding factor for me in this case is that she asked them several times via email to stop linking to her images, but they just ignored her... I mean how much trouble is it really to answer an email?
-- Deke Conine, August 3, 2001