Survival by Design

Well it’s finally happened, Microsoft is now being run by the enemy and their mission in life is to destroy the fabric of life by continually tampering with our software.

After an exhausting 24 hour marathon to clear down my PC (see ‘MS update kills Outlook Express’) in the aftermath of the Microsoft security update at the beginning of May I was again attacked on the 9th of May in the same way. This is a turning point for me. Those of you who know me will know that I have always defended Microsoft because ultimately they make the best product in the marketplace in almost every software niche they pursue. This time however they’ve messed with me one time too many. I have finally turned my Auto Updates OFF. 

Even more seriously I’m about to set up my new office and seriously considering not installing Windows at all.

I should stress that I speak with many web developers on a daily basis and have now heard so many disaster stories that I am furious about it.

After the first attack at the beginning of May I contacted Microsoft UK to find out what the hell was in the update that wasn’t in their published list and have still not received a response from them but here a couple of unpublished inclusions that I do know about from personal experience: Both of the latest Security Downloads reactivate Windows Explorer if you have it turned off; the main effect of this is that windows explorer, internet explorer, outlook, outlook express and a whole load of other MS programs slow down because they are communicating with messenger all the time. A neat little side issue to this is that if you have had messenger turned off you won’t know anything about any of the nasty trojans that you have on your computer corrupting messenger because they don’t affect you …. until Messenger turns on and they all trigger simultaneously (This is what killed my machine the first time). The second addition to the security update and one that I have unwittingly fallen foul of is the new MS registration verifier. This nifty little bit of kit checks to see if your using pirate software, Ah, not me of course, but the software didn’t know that because I only bothered to unwrap one set of discs when I set up my computers so they all have the same registration number and all the other lisences were still in their cellophane wrappers.

Personally I am more than a bit miffed that a software company like MS or anyone else whos software people/businesses rely so heavily on can simply retro-fit an already purchased product without the consent or even knowledge of the owner. I am fairly sure that this constitutes a breach of civil rights in most 1st world countries, I mean it’s like buying a pair of jeans, you try them on in the shop, you take them to the counter, you pay for them and they put them in a nice bag for you but when you get home and take them out they have swapped them for a skirt! It may be better for some people, it may make no difference to others but to me it’s useless, it’s not what I ordered or bought, if this senario happened on a regular basis there would be an investigation and probably fraud charges but for Software manufacturers it’s just a great big grey area they can and do exploit.

The moral of this story is: make sure you know whos security is being updated before you allow it!

I am a designer rather than an SEO expert but I obviously have to optimize my customers websites on a regular basis so I routinely cycle thorugh my ratings with each of the major search engines about once a week. I have just done this and found that my main design site (linked below) is doing fairly well for many design oriented searches on nearly every engine. The exception to the rule is Google, I’m still on the first page for my most important searches but for some reason I can’t quite fathom my site has dropped from PR7 to PR3 in the space of a couple of weeks.

I have heard many theories about backend links and linking to higher PR sites but the simple truth is that my domain is almost completely devoid of outgoing links and always has been. I have always relied on incoming links as a measure of popularity and this has served me very well but something in the new Google equasion has upset the applecart.

I have no intention of changing what I do and if Google’s PR has nothing to do with either popularity or position in relevant searches I can only assume it is a combination of being a designer, having a name that starts with ‘K’ and having Hazel eyes that has caused them to drop my rating. Would that qualify as descrimination? Do we have any readers who work for the European Parliament who could fight my corner and win me a few million? I could certainly do with the extra cash for a new project!

This little screw-up doesn’t just take the biscuit, it takes the whole tray then asks for more!

Microsoft faced legal action about 3 years ago because other browsers got together to complain about IE having all these lovely 3rd party bits onboard. OK so you already know about that! - what you don’t know is that last weeks auto-update of everyone’s Windows XP included a nasty little bit of coding that effectively turned Flash content into an ‘optional’ part of a web page! - That’s right, users not get a static image and are asked to ‘press SPACE or RETURN to activate this function’. This immediately makes Flash websites really annoying to browse!

If you have a website with Flash in it then it’s not exactly a piece of cake fixing it either. I have spent today working with the various work-arounds being submitted and so far there is a winner. This option loads a new extension into Flash so that it creates a Javascript envelope for any flash content. If you get into trouble with it then ask, I’ve just completed a mamoth 280 fixes across my sites with this.

Download the fix from here

However we may plan to avoid working on 3 or 4 projects at the same time our clients seem to do everything they can to put us in difficult and stressful situations. My solution has taken many years to evolve and getting to this point has almost made me give up on design 3 times.

In the bad old days a prospective customer would ask me to design something for them, in my haste I would take it home and work on it through the night and give it back to the client finished the next day. I quickly learned however that this is a cardinal sin, not because it makes everyone else look bad (as I thought when I was young) but because it makes the project look simple and overpriced to the client, he or she feels that they were short changed.

There are 2 reasons for this feeling, firstly the client almost certainly has delusions that he or she can designs and therefore they want to have some ‘input’, completing the job too fast makes this difficult so they will automatically look for some reason why it can be sent back for an alteration that they can point as as their influence on the finished project. The second reason is that you have probably worked a 15 hour day to get that job done whereas your client has worked about 4 hours since instructing you, His assumption therefore is that you did it in 4 hours!

So here’s the answer to this minefield, it’s not exactly easy to do but it resolves many of these issues: At any given time I have 3 jobs going. Job 1 is at the snagging/adjustment stage, job 2 is under construction & job 3 is being sketched, discussed and conceived.

You will notice that Jobs 1 & 3 are stop-start jobs where you are completing small amounts of work which keep going off to the client for approval while job 2 is a continuous, monotinous job. It is therefore possible to progress all 3 jobs at about half your normal speed when working on only one.

This solves the clients ‘value for money’ issue and provides you with a little light relief when in the middle of your construction stage. An added side effect is that you will likely complete 3 jobs in the time it would have taken to do 2 jobs because the client will value your service higher and will be less inclined to alter it.