I walked back home to get my husband’s help. When I got home I couldn’t  believe my eyes. He was in the bedroom with a neighbour lady making mad  passionate love to her. I am 32, my husband is 34 and we have been  married for twelve years. When I confronted him, he tried to make out that he went into the back yard and heard a lady scream, had come to her rescue but found her unconscious.

He’d carried the woman back to our house, laid her in bed, and began  CPR. When she awoke she immediately began thanking him and kissing him  and he was attempting to break free when I came back. But when I asked  him why neither of them had any clothes on, he broke down and admitted  that he’d been having an affair for the past six months.

I told him to stop or I would leave him. He was let go from his job six  months ago and he says he has been feeling increasingly depressed and  worthless. I love him very much, but ever since I gave him the ultimatum  he has become increasingly distant. I don’t feel I can get through to him anymore.

Can you please help?

Sincerely,
Suzy Fox

In Response:

Dear Suzy,

A car stalling after being driven a short distance can be caused by a variety of faults. Start by checking that there is no debris in the fuel filter. If it is clear, check the clips holding the vacuum lines onto the inlet manifold for air leaks. If none of these approaches solves the problem, it could be that the fuel pump itself is faulty, causing low  delivery pressure to the carburettor float chamber.

I hope this helps.

Good luck,
Ted

A found a good example of this recently where I was trying to find a specific attribute from a tag.

I used a regexp something like “(.+)” which works fine… until you end up getting more than one tag on the same line! The reason being that .+ is greedy…. it will keep going until it can’t find another “. This means it skips over the first closing ” and moves on to the next.

The solution was to make it lazy by using .+? instead!

Apologies for the fact this post seems slightly pointles, I’m actually testing a new plugin we’ve got for integrating wordpress in to swim.
]]> http://ok-cool.com/posts/read/149-sometimes-its-good-to-be-lazy/feed/ http://ok-cool.com/posts/read/147-getting-ready-for-swim-beta/ http://ok-cool.com/posts/read/147-getting-ready-for-swim-beta/#comments Fri, 04 Jul 2008 16:51:00 +0000 Mark http://ok-cool.com/posts/read/147-getting-ready-for-swim-beta/ Over the last few months we’ve been beavering away trying to solve a few client management problems.

We now have quite a few clients, each one has ftp details, email addresses, at least one website, a blog, a forum, contact forms, multiple domains, etc… The problem has become not only how to store and access all of this information, and make it available to clients efficiently, but also how do we make it easy for us and the client to monitor all of this web based information?

So we came up with Simple Web Management aka SWiM.

SWiM allows us to monitor all of our clients in one central place, it also allows them to login and get access to the information that we have stored on them, keep it up to date, and get an “activity stream” of everything that is going on with their online presence.

Tom has built in a rocking API so that SWiM is basically modular; applications can be added on a “reseller” level, client level and website level. As an example we are just finishing a Wordpress application that  allows you to monitor multiple blogs in different locations all in one place, along with contact form responses, Shopify sales, etc…

We ported over our current clients about two weeks ago and have noticed that the frequency of client interaction has gone up significantly. We now know which websites get updated the most, which ones sell the most products, which get the most contact form responses etc and best of all the clients get all of this too…

We are now getting ready to open up to other people to test so that we can improve and extend SWiM - head over to the beta sign up page to sign up, get a few screenshots and get involved.

I just enjoyed reading this web page on the subject: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/naps/

Perhaps we will have to move to a warmer climate where it’s more acceptable to doze off half way through the day.

As I’m away for a few days staying with Family (everyone seems to think I’m on Holiday anyway) I will give it a go and see if it improves my productivity.

One of our non-techie clients posted a message into Basecamp which broke the layout of the message page and truncated his message text; it turned out that he had pasted html from another source. When I contacted 37signals, they kindly edited the message to remove the layout problem… but I was left unsatisfied.

It appeared to me that this was actually a bug with the way Basecamp validated data input and I was keen to have it rectified to avoid further problems of this nature - after all, our client had no idea that he had done anything wrong.

I contacted 37signals again, to which they responded:

It’s not a bug, this user just entered Textile incorrectly. You may
want to ask your users not to use formatting in their messages.

It was this response that got me thinking about the user’s responsibility.

Essentially 37signals were telling me that the user was at fault, that they had used the system incorrectly. However, there was nothing to indicate this to the user - as far as they saw it they were inputing perfectly acceptable content.

Equally, most of our clients are non-technical and do not know what Textile is (and whilst it might be useful if they did, it’s not essential for the use of Basecamp) so it’s not fair to say that the user had input Textile incorrectly, the fault was actually that the system was unable to validate the data and protect itself from malfunction.

So it’s not the user that is at fault but rather the system.

And I believe this to be true across the board; if you are catering for non-technical users and offering a system that is easy enough to require little or no instruction, your system must be ready to deal with the varied ways in which a user may attempt to use it - whether that be with the proactive use of warnings or instructional notes, or the reactive use of validation.

Whilst I won’t deny that this is a dig at 37signals (as they advocate such things as the above), the encounter did actually serve to highlight the issue of where the responsibilities of the user and the system lie.

And as we all know, the customer is never wrong…

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Wufoo - Online Surveys

Wufoo, is neat. You can build a questionnaire and deploy it in minutes. We’ve used it for our “Client questionnaire”

Basecamp - Project management

Most of us know about Basecamp by now, and it’s no secret that I’m actually having a mildly passionate affair with it. The more projects we take on the more indispensable it becomes.

Freshbooks - Invoicing

Freshbooks pretty much changed our universe. Recurring payments for hosting, easy to manage invoices, a great interface and constantly being updated. They’ve just added taxes for expenses, soon we won’t need Sage at all (thank god).

Shopify - Hosted shopping solution

If you’re looking for an easy to use e-commerce solution then Shopify is great. Rapid setup and flexible layouts make this our first choice for most small shops.

Wordpress - Blogging platform

Not much to say really. Wordpress is pretty much the blogging platform of choice for most of us. Easy to use, easy to set up and massively customisable.

Vanilla - Forum

Wow. Vanilla is another new one to me, but already I love it. Highly extensible, solid and with an excellent array of options for getting it to do what you want.

Mailchimp - Broadcast email

So simple to use. If you need to send out an email to a few thousand people then Mailchimp really makes it easy. The support is great and the template editor really is a breeze.

The only problem with having so many disparate applications is there is no easy way to manage them from a central location, which isn’t too much of a problem for us but it is for our clients. Which is why we’ve come up with SWiM, a kind of aggregator for online applications… More of that later.

We’re now part of “The Web People“, there’s more of us, bigger offices and the same high quality output.

We’ve just finished our first site as the Web People, Allergy Test UK, which uses the simpleWebeditor and has an integrated Wordpress blog, it’s more of an update than a redesign, allowing easy manipulation of content.

We’ve got some big things in store for the the coming months, least of which is SWiM, our client management system…

“not sure, but the idea of Comcast owning my friends upsets me a lot. I just need a place for contacts that syncs everywhere?”

Literally 5 seconds later I get

“comcastscott @redeye FYI. re: Data security at Plaxo / Comcast http://blog.truste.org/?p=83“

How about that? A support mechanism that allows a company to fight fires before they begin. This is quite amazing really and a testament to how serious big companies are taking the new social influences (and influencers). Almost like the thought police… Ok, I’m more scared of Twitter now than Plaxo… lol.

The Bug

I noticed that when you submit page 1 of the checkout process with required fields left blank, the errors attached to each field break the layout.

The default checkout CSS is causing this as it adds a height of 415px to #addresses on line 285.

The Fix

Since you can upload your own checkout.css to your theme’s assets to add to and override the default checkout.css, you can fix this by adding height: auto !important; (or using parent selectors instead of !important).

I’ve tracked the bug with Shopify so hopefully they’ll fix the default CSS.

My next wish would be to be able to customise the markup of the checkout pages, and not just the CSS…