Sephy’s Platzish

One of the things I’ve been grumpy about a lot is the way that severe weather warnings are presented on local TV. Do they need to be presented? Yes, because it is a public service to inform the viewing audience of where storms are and if you need to take cover from said storms. That’s something we all can agree on. However, there are good ways and there are bad ways to handle informing the public of severe weather.

Let’s look at a bad way first, shall we?

This picture comes from just a couple of weeks ago, on the Sunday before Memorial Day, when we had some (as you can see on the radar picture) storms in the area. They weren’t severe (at the time), and there was just a watch issued for the area.

However, the fine folks at channel 12 decided to do what they do every time there’s a watch issued for the area - squeeze the picture so that it’s completely unwatchable and essentially waste about 1/8th of the screen with their graphic telling you that you’re watching channel 12’s weather bar. Of course, not to be outdone by the weather department, you also have the convenient reminder that you’re WATCHING CHANNEL 12 in the lower right hand corner. By the way, the reason for the black bars is that this was taken from their digital feed, and if it were not for the watch bar, the show would have been in HD, and the 12 logo would have been about 1/4 the size.

By the way if you think that channel 12 are the only ones who do this kind of thing, here’s what channel 58’s bar looks like (note that this is from September 2006, during which time they were running a promotion and squeezing the picture even further than they had already with their weather bar!)

Channels 4 and 6 at least use a bit of sense (though how much sense is questionable because it just happens that they wind up wasting more space by doing this) and just shrink the picture so that the aspect ratio isn’t messed up; only the picture is smaller.

Now, let’s take a look at how this kind of thing should be pursued (or, at least how it was pursued by the local stations in the past). First off, I should commend channel 12 on their old way of doing this - they would just put up text at the bottom of the screen that read, for example, "T-STORM WARNING ___ COUNTY". It was simple, didn’t interfere too much with the picture, and was a perfect solution to a complex problem.

However, what really got me going on this was the fact that I was able to pick up stations from out of the area yesterday (ahh, the old days of TVDX, you might say, and that’s true, and this was my first time doing some digital DXing, which made it that much cooler ). Thanks to the weather, a lot of the stations had their warnings up and showing for you to see.

On every single occasion, no station had squeezed, squished, crunched, or even re-sized a picture to accommodate the warning information. All they did was put a simple overlay of the affected counties, and text telling you what warnings were out (along with the counties affected). In another instance, an ABC affiliate broke into their programming (game 2 of the NBA finals), but did something that I think would give Milwaukee TV bosses heart attacks (well, except for channel 6 back in 2007) - they kept the game on in the bottom left and had the meteorologist in the upper right!

So, you may ask, what did warnings look like in the "olden days" of TV (i.e. anywhere but Milwaukee yesterday). Well, I could show you a picture I took of one station that is literally stuck in the early 90s with just showing a storm cloud in the lower left — which is what they used to do on local TV; sometimes with an S or a T to tell you what kind of warning it was. However, as it so happens, I have an old picture from channel 4, from a taped airing of "Days of Our Lives" circa I have no idea - maybe late 90s or early 2000s.

Look! A full-screen picture (though it wouldn’t be in HD because none of the major stations have the technology yet, but you’ve got the feeling it’s coming) with a simple overlay. Can anyone tell me why the TV stations can’t make such a simple step backward that would, in the end, be a huge step forward?

Oh, and by the way, I must also give kudos to the PBS broadcaster in the area - channels 10 & 36 - because they can do an HD overlay, and the size of it is very comfortable - it looks like a postage stamp on an envelope. When viewed on a 42-inch screen, I bet it’s the perfect size.

What I’m curious about is if Milwaukee is the only TV market that does this stupidity. I have this inkling that we are. That should be a lesson to them, but I don’t think they care to listen…

I was listening to the radio yesterday and I heard a name that I hadn’t heard before on the radio advertising one of the radio station’s features (their toll-free number that you can call from anywhere around the nation, world, or really anywhere). It was a company called Waterstone Bank. For a few seconds, I was confused about the name and had headed for the search box in Firefox before it hit me. This wasn’t a new bank, it was just another business which had changed its name to something that says almost nothing about what they are or where they do business. Somewhat (very tangentially) like when Phillip Morris changed its name to Altria. Uh, ok…

However, it isn’t the name that they chose to change to that gives me the shits, it’s the fact that they decided to change their name in the first place. Apparently, it isn’t good enough for a company to have the name of a particular city in their corporate image. Well, not any city (where would we be without New York Life or The Hartford or Atlanta Bread Company?) but apparently this one is taboo. What’s the name of this supposedly problematic name?

Wauwatosa.

Admittedly, it’s not the "sexiest" city name out there like Chicago, Atlanta, or anything foreign-sounding. However, some bright spark in a conference or board room, probably wearing the title of "image consultant" or something equally ridiculous, said that the word "Wauwatosa" was inappropriate for branding outside of that city itself. At least that’s the reason they used when announcing this change - it was a supposedly useful change because they’d built branches which are not within the city limits of Wauwatosa, thus they’ve outgrown the city and need a new name. Thus, it was done.

Now, if you think that this is the first business to do something similar, you’d be mistaken. 11 years ago or so, there used to be a realty company known as Wauwatosa Realty. They were a successful company on their own right (even if they were based in Brookfield, which is on the other side of the county line), but they decided that they needed to have some impetus to grow even further, so they decided to change their name as well. They went with the name Shorewest - at first it seemed to be ridiculous, but if you think about it, the name fits what they serve - the shore (of Lake Michigan) and out to the west.

On a somewhat unrelated note, there used to be a bank in this area that was quite successful while maintaining their city-based name - St. Francis Bank. They only changed their name when they got gobbled up by larger banks and had name changes put on them. Now, of course, they’re a part of a much larger chain that extends out to the nation, and now have a name of National City Bank.

Why St. Francis is a more acceptable name for a business than Wauwatosa is something that is beyond me. Could it be that Wauwatosa is hard to say for an "outsider", or that it has 4 syllables?

Come to think of it, the longer the name, the less likely it is that you’ll see a national company using it. Have you heard of anything with Oconomowoc in the name? Heck, can you say Oconomowoc?

I also haven’t seen any businesses using the name Wooloomooloo either…

With gasoline prices reaching new highs seemingly daily, and quite a few stations breaking through the $1/liter barrier on regular gas in this area. The average price of gas for today is at $3.683 per gallon (97.4c/L) - an increase of 80.3 cents over one year ago. Last night, I paid $3.599 per gallon to fill up the car, and that is one of the lowest prices you find in the area now. Nationally, it’s gotten up to 3.50, and there is no end in sight to these increases.

It can lead to people complaining that the oil companies are making way too much money.

However, I’m not complaining about that. They’re only the incidental beneficiaries of my target. My gripe is with all of those people who must have nothing better to do than to play games with the wallets of everyone around the world. Yes, the speculators who spend their time hunched down on the trading floors of commodities markets like the Chicago Board of Trade, the New York Mercantile Exchange and other similar trading houses around the world. It is this group of people, along with all the others who are requesting trades be made, who are forcing the prices of everything to go up.

Of course, you never see the heads of these trading houses being brought in to explain why they’ve forced the prices of crude oil, raw gasoline, and other commodities (which literally range from Bananas to Wheat - and everything in between, meats, vegetables, fruits, name it, there’s likely a commodity traded for it) to increase substantially over the last year or so.

However, it’s not sexy to see some financial analyst in front of Congress. Nope, it’s cool to have the oil executives in front of a Congressional committee facing ignorant questions from ignorant politicians about why they have such high profits. That isn’t to say that the oil companies don’t have some fault in this situation - for example, the last refinery in the US was built in 1976! The reason that they aren’t building them anymore is twofold - first off, apparently they’re not profitable for the oil companies, and of course, it seems that if you build just about anything nowadays, there’s the barrage of environmental complaints which come from it. And, believe you me, sometimes the extreme environmentalists can get quite annoying…I can name one in particular who still is around…

Another problem is the government, whose continuing insistence that corn-based ethanol will be a boon for making us more energy independent (of course all of those evil sheiks in the Middle East - the truth is that our biggest source of foreign oil is Canada, and possibly, if things come to fruition with the recent find there, Brazil) has caused the prices of food to skyrocket (remember when you could get a gallon of milk for $2.49 and it wasn’t a sale? I remember when a Wal-Mart opened locally, the price of milk was $1.68 per gallon - now, $3+.

So, what can we do about this? There isn’t much we can do about getting the price of oil lower, because at this point, it’s nearly cost prohibitive for anyone to buy a barrel of oil - and you can’t just go in and say "I want to buy one barrel of oil, for $25.00" - you’d get laughed at by some bigwig in his new Armani suit, paid for off of the backs of other speculators who, as far as I can tell, don’t give two shakes about the damage they’re doing to the economy.

The only practical thing that you can do is drive more efficiently - combine trips, use the shortest route, go the speed limit (or a few mph/kph over), keep your tyres inflated, and keep your car in good working order. With the economy the way it is right now for a lot of folks, buying a new hybrid car is probably out of the question, but if you can do that, and are comfortable with it, you should consider it.

One thing I should add, though, is that there is a good side effect to what has been happening to the price of gas - we’re using less of it now - with the amount used projected to decline by a small amount - not a lot, but it is less than in the past. Of course, China and India’s increase in oil usage will outstrip any decreases we have here in the US.

All I know is that I hope that the speculators are happy that they’ve made 3 airlines go into bankruptcy, along with a lot of other people needing to cut way back on their spending in order just to afford the basic supplies. And yes, in this modern society, fuel is a basic supply.

Admittedly, I haven’t been the most active with Entrecard dropping and getting my blog advertised on other blogs (in fact, I’ve got over 10,000 credits now just kinda sitting there at the moment). As I was browsing the site today, however, I noticed some new things - most of them good, but one of them quite confusing.

First, (somewhat like I did with WordPress), let’s go to the good stuff.

Drop Statistics

One of the new things you’ll see when you view the profile page of a blog on the site, you’ll see this new addition to the blog information -

That’s a pretty cool feature, because it lets you see if a potential advertiser has taken an interest in your site before they decided to commit their credits to advertising with you. For me, if I have a whole bunch of ads queued up in my queue, I can go through and see who’s had the most drops and kinda order them as to that, instead of trying to make a personal preference sort of thing…

Navigation in the Inbox

By far, this is the coolest new feature that they’ve added. You can now see everyone who has ever dropped their card on your widget in the inbox, instead of the “old” way of the last 70 or so. Also, to fix one of the more tricky problems of the old inbox, they’ve added a dropdown so that you can choose if you want to show the cards you have or the ones you haven’t dropped on yet today.

For both of these, I think the answer to “why” is fairly obvious - it’s something that there has been demand for in the past. However, something that I don’t understand the reasoning behind is something that kind of blindsided everyone - the new Ad pricing structure.

New Ad Pricing

As I was looking in my dashboard, I noticed that my price to advertised had almost halved itself from the around 200 that I’d been maintaining for quite some time now (thanks to averaging about 100 drops on my site per day, multiplied by 2), to 128 (or 2⁷).

The strange thing is that, if you look at the post announcing this change, there are some of the same generalities strewn about, somewhat like WordPress did. In my (and probably about 90% of Entrecard users), apparently this was discussed in the Forums, but like WordPress, the changes seem to have no bearing on what users have been used to - a system that (for the most part) worked.

Just as an explanation of how the old system worked - the price to advertise was based on the average number of cards dropped on your blog over the last 5 days, multiplied by 2. Now, it’s based on varying exponents of 2, with the number of ads determining the exponent used for 2. For example, if you have 1 ad in your queue, then it costs 2 credits, 2 means 4, 3 means 8, et cetera.

Now, all those cards dropped on your site? Well, that just means you and the dropper get a credit for it, along with positioning on the popularity rankings (which are now available in the Browser feature).

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In the end of it all, this (as they call it) Long-Awaited change to the pricing structure sounds to me a bit like WordPress 2.5 - a half-baked “fix” to something that really didn’t need fixing with little to no explanation as to why it was done. The old system was simple to figure out - you drop a card, that site’s price goes up by around 2/5th credit. Now, we have a system where if you want to advertise on even a moderately popular blog, you need to have a ton of credits bankrolled.

The only question, which for all intents and purposes is rhetorical, I have is “Why?”. Why, when you’ve made such good changes as the new features in the inbox and on the individual pages, did you drop the blog information from the Browse by Category page? Why did you drop the Nearby tab, which was useful for bloggers to connect to folks in their country? Lastly, why did you change your advertisement pricing from a stable one based completely upon merit to one that becomes based upon daily fluctuations in ads appearing or not appearing, with anyone with more than 7 or 8 ads in their queue (128 and 256 ec per ad respectively) having drastic jumps in the price of an ad?

Perhaps, a suggestion would be that beyond 8 ads in the queue, the next “level” of ads would be at a set separation - say, 128 or even 256, thus making a progression of 256, 512, 768, 1024, 1280, etc. (with the 128 progression being 256, 384, 512, 640, 768, etc.). That would eliminate the exponential growth problem that is natural with the exponential system in place, along with making the most popular blogs more accessible to everyone out there for advertising once again.

Just a note - if you’re looking for the week in walks, they’ll be up tomorrow, pictures and all. However, WordPress 2.5’s release is more recent news, and an issue that I believe is worth pushing my normal schedule back a day for.

I bit the bullet and installed WordPress 2.5 on my testing blog, and I’ve been playing with it for a few hours now, and my impression is that the number of things I don’t like far outweigh the number of things I do like. Before I get to my critique, however, I have a couple of important questions.

First, why was this released on a Saturday? Every other major release of software - free or not - has happened on a weekday. To have something as seemingly major as WordPress 2.5 released on Saturday suggests to me that the folks at Automattic almost wanted this release to be as low-key as possible, as most of the “major” web writers usually go at a more relaxed pace on the weekend.

The next question I have is pointed at everyone who is raving over the new interface - what specifically about it makes this particular version superior to the old interface? All I’ve seen are generalities. Something tells me that a lot of this is related to a disease known as “fanboyism” (which I know doesn’t exist, but is noted by the almost-fanatical praise heaped by certain people whenever something comes from one place, no matter how poor it is), and that is never a good thing as it allows hype to take over real substance.

The last question I have, and this is something that I’ll keep coming back to throughout my discussion of dislikes, is about this supposed research that they did. Who exactly did they ask for input? It seems like they’ve asked some quite inept people to get their suggestions when it comes to getting an opinion on the current dashboard’s so-called downfalls.

I’ll be reasonable, however, and let you in on the couple of things that I do like -

Things I like

First, is that in the Theme editor (under Presentation Design -> Theme Editor), they’ve split up the template and style files into their own groups. Actually, I’m surprised they didn’t try to prettify that and manage to totally screw it up in the process. Sure that’s a dumbed-down option that they did, but it’s quite useful when you consider that currently, all the files are listed in one big list.

Another thing that I like is the addition of a link to edit a newly-published post. Also, the fact that they did make the size of the fonts smaller wasn’t a bad idea either.

And that’s about where this ends.

Things I don’t like

Where do I start with this? There are a lot more things that I don’t like about the new admin panel, but let’s start with the most obvious one -

New-look menus

Instead of sticking with the normal set of menus, they decided to split the main toolbar into two parts - with the connections between them being loose at the best. Thankfully, it’s easy to hack the admin-header.php file to get the Plugins, Options Settings, and Users down with the rest of the menu items, it’s something that shouldn’t have to have been done in the first place (not to mention that cForms and Polls are now to the left of these other sections). Also, the dashboard is an integral part of the WordPress admin panel - why is the link to that relegated to a teeny-weeny link in the upper left that almost blends into the background?

Widget redesign

Pardon my French, but what the fuck were they thinking when they thought this one up? Actually, what the fuck were they smoking and/or drinking at the time? I’d like to have a sample.

Since I’ve been using WordPress, the Widget page has been a straight-forward drag-and-drop affair where you could take the available widgets (at the bottom of the page) and drag them up to either sidebar. You could also have multiple text widgets at your disposal, and if you wanted to take one away for a short while, all you had to do was drag it out of the sidebar and it’d be saved.

Now? Well, now you can only work on one sidebar at a time, and those saved text widgets you had off of the sidebar before you upgraded? Gone. Hope you saved the code to them.

Oh, by the way, if you remove a text widget from a sidebar - you can say goodbye to whatever text was in there before. It’s not saved. It was something important? Sorry, but it’s not OK to take text widgets away anymore; game over, you lose.

The other thing that is completely ass-backward is that they show you all available widgets, including those you already have activated. How useless is that?

Like whitespace?

If you’re a fan of completely wasted space on a webpage, then you’ll love a lot of the pages in WordPress 2.5! Why? Well, on most of them, there’s a maximum width of just less than 1000 pixels. It wouldn’t be so bad if it was centred on the page, but infinite wisdom was used to put it all aligned to the left. Fortunately, if you’re using Stylish, you can create a new style for your URL and put this in between the curly braces -

.wrap, .updated, .error {
max-width: 100% !important;
}
.narrow {
width: 100% !important;
}

That will fix one of the few things you can actually fix on your own.

Categories are dead. Long live tags.

Or that’s what they want you to believe when you look at the write screen. Instead of the current setup of having categories at the top of the right hand column, easily accessible, they put them at the bottom of the write screen (where you can’t move the elements anymore, like you used to), under tags. The message here is clear - categories are less important than tags.

Gaping security hole

One of the more ballyhooed new features in this new version is the ability to automatically upgrade plugins from your plugin page. On my site, I had tried out a different plugin that allowed me to do just that, but it didn’t work because of server permissions that there are.

However, WordPress have made a great decision to usurp any server’s security when it comes to running zip files by including its own unzipping program in the WordPress install - that’s got to be part of the reason why the zip file is 30% larger than it was previously. By doing this, anyone running a plugin has the potential of opening themselves up to a major problem with their server by upgrading to a new version of a plugin that has a malicious file in it.

The chances of this happening are slim, but it is not outside of the possible realm of things that can happen. Fortunately, there is a way to fix this and to break the plugin upgrade function - set the permissions of the wp-content/plugins folder to 555, thus making it read only, and forcing an error on the update page.

Lazy time

The last item I have on my list of dislikes is that they’ve changed the way you select your timezone - it used to be that you just typed in a number, say, -6 for Central Standard Time, like you would on a forum run by SMF. However, apparently in these supposed interviews, they discovered that people had a hard time typing in a simple combination of a plus or minus sign and a number between 0 and 14. It’s been replaced with a drop-down box with selections for timezones, with minor half-hour intervals.

Overall initial verdict

If I had to give a grade to their efforts in regards to what they did, I would give them a grade of about 60/100, or just barely a D-minus in school grading terms. The biggest thing that they lose points for is the rule of “don’t fix something that ain’t broke”. The Admin interface in previous iterations of WordPress worked perfectly, and were, after a bit of a learning curve, very intuitive.

However, doing patently stupid things like splitting the options panel into two distinct menus, making the dashboard into the least important thing in the dashboard (by the way, where can you see the stats for your blog? the stats sub-panel under the dashboard has gone missing.), and making everything fixed width only goes to hurt the cause further.

Unfortunately, it seems that the folks who are at the head of WordPress are only more concerned with glorifying their latest release, but don’t be surprised if there are urgent updates to 2.5 coming out as soon as a week from now, as it seems that they’ve gotten creative with the roadmap, making up nearly 30% of the overall progress in their planning within a week or two.

As far as my site is concerned, I’m going to stick with 2.3.x series WordPress releases for at least the near future. Maybe if someone comes out with an admin theme that looks like the old version, and maybe fix the widget issue (come on, they seriously fucked up there).

What do you all think about this release? More importantly, do you know anyone who was interviewed to help them out? I’m sure that there are a lot of people out there who would love to know how they came to the conclusion that this was “needed”.