Okay, once in a while I get to rant about something that may seem a bit silly to some people and quite obvious to some people but I’m going to do it anyway.
Today when I was updating some links on my resource pages and the Safe Schools Coalition resource pages I found that many people didn’t put an automatic forward on an old page to a new url.
Or they did forward it, but only to someplace like their homepage. In either case I had to spend precious time searching for the document.
Yes my time is precious. So is yours.
Sometimes I found the moved or renamed resource, and sometimes I gave up and deleted the information and the link.
Oh well. I may have lost some good resources because of that.
And some of the changes were to new ridiculously long urls. Yikes! I don’t understand. Yeah I know some people may be using database generated web pages or something else that names these things but please consider doing something different.
There are two problems I have with these convoluted mish-mash urls. If someone actually has to eyeball the thing and manually type out the mixture of mostly nonsense letters numbers and symbols – rather than click on a text link or an image map link – then it is asking for more patience and accuracy than I possess to get it right so they find the page. Or if it is pasted into an email and the link is broken into more than one line as frequently happens, it very often becomes unusable and you lose them.
There are services online that will make short urls out of long ones and redirect for you.
But much of the time the reason for all the extra code seems to be for some tracking purpose so they know where you clicked from.
I am not amused. To me this is sloppy web design and I hope those who use it will consider cleaning up their acts! Please!
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And now for something a bit more fun.
When I met Alec in New York all those years ago he was doing little crayon drawings and giving them away. I still have mine.
Check out this List of Crayola crayon colors from Wikipedia.
If you scroll down you will get the colors in alphabetical order with names like Tumbleweed, Shadow, Outer Space, Mauvelous, Macaroni and Cheese, Inch Worm, Best Friends, and Atomic Tangerine – and HTML color codes included for you designers.