Years 2009-2012 Breningstall.com

Upcoming changes to Breningstall.com

Sometime next week I will be making an adjustment in one of the URLs used to reach this blog. Breningstall.com and breningstall.typepad.com will still reach the blog directly and http://feeds.feedburner.com/BreningstallOnTypepad will remain the blog feed. So many visitors may not notice a difference. However, the breningstall.typepad.com/breningstall-on-typepad/ sub-domain will no longer be updated beyond this week (though it will remain valid). Instead, new updates will be taking place at breningstall.typepad.com/blog. Just a small word cleanup, that's all. The blog is beginning to attract a lot more traffic and I thought it would be better to make this jump sooner rather than later. The Fall 2009-March 2012 archives will remain at the old site, breningstall.typepad.com/breningstall-on-typepad, for the foreseeable future but I will make efforts to maintain navigational links between the two sections. Happy Reading.

Accidental Chinese Hipsters: a fashion revolution

Technorati Interview: Bruce Polderman, Product Manager, Google

Technorati Interview: Bruce Polderman, Product Manager, Google

(an extended marketing effort at trying to convince people to sign up for Google Plus and hasten Google's path to taking over the world)

Pennsylvania the latest state to be boycotted by online retail affiliate programs

Pennsylvania has become the latest state to institute sales tax on online companies with affiliates inside their borders, which has resulted in the cancellation of website affiliate programs in that state by B&H and possibly Amazon (if they follow past practice).

Thom Hogan has written a rant about this on his website. While I am sympathetic to Hogan and other website managers effected by retailers' affiliate boycotts in states like Illinois, I am going to state that I unequivocally disagree. There is absolutely no reason why online retailers should not be collecting sales tax, particularly when state budgets are suffering such significant woes. While retail behemoths have been successful at boycotting (or threatening to boycott) some states in retaliation, they can't boycott them all and Amazon's delay in pulling out of Pennsylvania indicates that they see the writing looming on the wall: yes, online businesses will too someday have to pay full sales tax.

Brick and mortar businesses serve a valuable service to their community. They provide local jobs and in the case of establishments like bookstores, local centers of community. Why should they be forced to collect tax when online retailers are not? Furthermore, the law is clear- sales tax is intended for all purchases in a state, whether made online or not. States have just been slow about enforcing the law.

Igniting Social Media: Interview with Jeff Reine, General Manager of Typepad (Say Media)

 Igniting Social Media: Interview with Jeff Reine, General Manager of Typepad (Say Media), Part One (part two after the jump)

Google Forms: Unworkable, unreadable

I tried using Google Forms today on the recommendation of the Typepad Knowledge base. That was a mistake. Google Forms, part of the Google Docs cloud computing software program, is a real mess. I tried Google Docs once two years ago and have avoided it since because it creates a similar set of problems: to summarize, you're locked into formats that any user should see don't function properly within ten minutes. For a set of smart cookies, the people at Google can be really dumb sometimes.

 

Here are the problems I've encountered in Google Forms within the first two hours of use:

 

1) It is impossible to get a results sheet. In the "edit form" page, you're offered two choices: summary or spreadsheet view. Summery view is a pie chart, as if you're taking a poll and not trying to obtain particular information from specific users (I had been hoping to use Google Forms to create an estimate template for my photo business). Spreadsheet is an Excel-style page that is totally unreadable. First of all, the questions are displayed in no particular order. Second, the spreadsheet includes questions that have been deleted from the form, i.e., questions that will never contain any data because they are not there. Third, the columns are so small that a paragraph answer could spread down for one or two dozen rows, making it very difficult to read. Fourth, there is no notification system for finding out if anyone has submitted a form.

2) The background templates are very difficult to manage. Out of the 97 that are offered, I had a lot of difficulty finding one that fit correctly in the 800 pixel space on the Typepad page where the form was to be inserted. Many templates were either too narrow (thus leaving awkward huge blocks of space) or too wide (leaving the text to run off the page). Google should make the template margins flexible, or at least leave a way to edit them in HTML.

3) It is impossible to mix choice answers (e.g., "Yes," "10," etc.) with paragraph answers. Thus, if there is an answer choice requiring additional details submitted by the user, the only way to allow for it is to bounce users to a second page to fill in the additional details.  This must be done for all answers in block, even if I don't need additional information for some of them.

4) There is no reasonable way to organize, split, or delete entries. Thus, if I did go on using this form, it would collect on one spreadsheet all the entries that have been submitted until the end of time. At the very least, this would require creating a new form every time I wanted a new results sheet. Additionally, deleted entries do not disappear from the summary page.

I don't think the way I was using the software was outside the boundaries of what Google intended it for. On their help page, Google says that forms can be used to collect information, give quizzes to students or plan events. It would not work well for any of these purposes because of the problems I've mentioned. Nor is their "collect and view responses" page helpful in responding to any of the issues I've outlined.

Granted, Google states that all parts of the spreadsheet may not work in Firefox- they suggest using it in Chrome. Well, I haven't tried Chrome yet but I have tried Safari, and it didn't work any better there. I don't think I should need to open a new browser to see some survey results.

I've wasted two hours of my time and now I'll need to find another site and start from scratch. Will update this entry with some better alternatives.

Update: I went to Jotform.com. It took about 20 minutes to set up and it works! The only catch is if my business becomes too popular I will have to pay for the service. The submissions come in directly to my email box directly.

Video tutorial description: This tutorial goes over how to use Google Forms in Google Docs. We show you how an insurance agency would collect testimonials from existing clients to use for marketing. [bert0313]

Chinese firewall blues

It may seem like I'm beating a dead horse but I've made it a mantra to report on individual annoying incidents of web censorship as I experience them, as a way of articulating just exactly how impossible it is to use the web as a tool for anything in China. Last night I was reading advice blogs on selecting camera lenses to photograph professional diving competition. I made the mistake of clicking on a photo blog with Blogspot as a host. What happens when you click on a Blogspot link in China? You get sent to the penalty box. Your whole internet connection is cut off for what probably only amounts to two minutes but which is an exceedingly aggravating two minutes. Seriously Net Nanny, what the fuck? I ended up closing down my wireless connection and re-opening it in order to continue surfing- using websites that those great denizens in Beijing deemed suitably safe.

Chinese internet meme of the day: party officials head from Huili to the moon

First a contingent of officials in Huili, Sichuan were captured in that staple of the Chinese press: the Photoshopped government inspection photo-in this case the men were supposed to be discussing some presumably important matters on-site at a road construction project.

Only something went awry in the propaganda department. Instead of showing them on site, the picture published has the officials inspecting the road from a vantage point that has their feet well above the ground... as in maybe 8-12 inches above the ground (Xinhua offers a bit of a tortured explanation in Chinese for how this photo came about). I don't think the message of this government PR shoot was supposed to be that people in Huili County can defy gravity.

Taking the theme to heart, netizens on Weibo have been busy Photoshopping the same officials into other scenes. Some examples can be seen below, beginning with the original.

Note the carefully done shadows:

On flood watch: