"We did not expect our users to use non-latin characters"

Michael Studman — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 00:00:00 -0400

I have a personal policy of poisoning the coffee of any developer in my team or in my general vicinity who utters this sentiment. I wish the tech lead(s) of a certain leading non-mainstream social networking site did too.

From their customer support department:

We are aware of the problems which you mentioned in your e-mail. However, unfortunately, we are currently not supporting non-latin characters on our website I am afraid.

This is simply because when **** was first designed, we did not expect our users to use non-latin characters. That is why there are not enough spaces in [Profile] section.

We are currently planning to translate **** into Japanese, as the first non-European language, and it hopefully will go live later this year.

Adding some level of i18n support to an application from the ground up just makes sense - even if you have no plans to localise anytime soon your customers are loathe to de-localise their names or their sentiments (ie anglicise) that they wish to store in your application.

One bag of ratsack is in the post.

The Sydney Morning Herald just doesn't get RSS

Michael Studman — Tue, 21 Dec 2004 00:00:00 -0500

It seems like some dumbfuckards at the Sydney Morning Herald don’t like the hoi polloi syndicating their Really Simple Syndication feeds.

So I thought I’d add the SMH RSS feed to my bloglines.com account since it’s far more friendly than the HTML mess fairfax choose to vomit up every day. It seems that in doing so I may cause bloglines to violate SMH’s terms of use:

http://www.smh.com.au/rsschannels/
These channels are for personal use and only in news reader applications. You may not publish headlines from these channels to a web page.

And if you thought little old you could easily licence their headlines you’re out of luck:

http://news.f2.com.au/cgi-bin/SynApp.cgi?sy=smh&ac=initial
Please Note: Sites with less than 2,000 monthly unique users and intranets accessed by less than 100 employees will not be eligible.

A spot check at The Guardian shows a similar policy.

Of course, completely free RSS feeds directly challenge the existing syndication and advertising model of newspapers. And we know how much established players hate having their business models challenged. A unique group of 2000 monthly users (typically clustered around a topic) is a great source of targeted advertising as is a group of 100 employees or more. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course, it’s just that this ugly love child of technological bandwagonism and business model protectionism ought not to bear the RSS acronym when it is so blatantly at odds with the spirit of that technology.

And while I’m on my soap box, SMH would you please turn that auto refresh off your front page. I’ll refresh when I feel like it!

full fathom five: Tag web

"We did not expect our users to use non-latin characters"

The Sydney Morning Herald just doesn't get RSS