Here are the things I found within the first few hours of using the service:

• The website itself is littered with usability problems. For example, after I successfully log in and go to look at a review, I still see a large box in the middle of the page asking me to sign up or log in! When I go to add a comment to a review, it asks me to create a new identity, then drops me somewhere else completely and I have to hunt for the comment thread again in order to write the review I wanted to write in the first place. Basic stuff.
• The website has security issues. I was dismayed to see that the password I entered was promptly emailed to me. Standard best-practice is to never email out passwords, but only to allow the user to reset them if required.
• The content on the website can be a bit patchy in places. When looking at the review for one item I noticed that the photo didn’t match what it said in the ’specs’ section. Got the impression it had been automatically pulled in from some database and no-one had checked it.
• But far more serious than all that is that I don’t really believe they are giving a balanced judgement about what to buy. They highlight a series of scientific-type tests that give measurable results, and these are easy to communicate and look good. But they often seem to completely ignore other important considerations like quality of construction, how long things might last, and aesthetic appeal. So for instance a £700 range cooker might get a score of 66% based on tests like how long the oven takes to heat up, how easy it is to clean, and so on. This implies it is better overall than another, premium cooker costing £3000 that gets a score of 65%. Yes, oven performance and ease of use are important, but they don’t mention that the cheaper cooker might have cheap-looking plastic dials, for example, and be much less rugged in construction.

It probably is useful to look at resources like Which? when researching expensive items, but I wouldn’t take their ratings as definitive, and definitely go and see stuff yourself before you buy. And don’t use a valuable password if you register for their website!

Adobe Illustrator is a great tool, but it seems to have some real problems rendering anti-aliased text when using the ‘Save for web’ function. Text from very thin fonts is a particular problem. In these cases, the text looks fine while you are working on the file – I usually have the anti-aliasing set to ‘Sharp’ and it does look crisp and clear. However, as soon as you go to ’save for web’ the results are awful.

So here is what I see while working on some text (this is set in Museo 100). This image comes directly from a screenshot in Mac OSX:

And here is what Illustrator gives me when I select “Save for web & devices”:

The text is rendered very poorly.

As an experiment I created the same text in Photoshop and did “Save for web & devices” and it has no problems at all:

It’s a really annoying bug, and it’s been around since at least version CS4, as we can see from this post on the Adobe help forums.

I use Illustrator for nearly all my web work – it’s a great tool and very quick to work in, and ‘pixel preview’ mode and ’snap to pixel’ mean you can produce precise graphics for the web. However, it looks I might have to start using Photoshop more. Disappointing.

I started last week, and will spend roughly half my time working there, and the other half I will continue working on Jackfruit Design projects. I think that means I’ll have to work Saturdays…

Maybe I was driven by some deep-seated anxiety about the future. Maybe it was watching the Bourne Identity – Jason Bourne the web developer hauled out of the sea with nothing but a Textdrive username encoded in a chip on his neck. I was hooked on the promise of my own server space for life. So in February of this year I stumped up another $500 upgraded to the larger, ‘business class’ ’3 Martini Lunch’ lifetime account.

Things weren’t looking good. My shared hosting space was still horribly unrelible and the supposed upgrade to a ‘business level’ server was put on hold due to Textdrive (now rebranded as Joyent) plans to completely rebuild their entire architecture on Solaris. They promised us a much better future: distributed hosting based on virtual ‘accelerators’ that allowed for bursts of extra performance when needed. But those deadlines kept slipping. We would have them by March, they said… but the summer came and went and I was still on the old server, $500 poorer.

Then last week my patience paid off. An email from Joyent and my own shiny new Premier Joyent account: 50 websites, 20GB of space, on a super new Shared Accelerator. At a normal cost of $100 per month, this is mine forever, with nothing more to pay (and server specs guaranteed to keep growing inline with future technology). I know it says ‘lifetime’ account, but I’m thinking about handing this onto my children when I’m gone.

However, although I like working at the command line – it is powerful and flexible – it is a bit cumbersome having to remember all the upload paths for so many servers and refer constantly to a separate Excel file. So recently I invested in the excellent Mac FTP client Transmit and started to use ‘favourites’ to store all the associated information for each server. Transmit has a very slick interface and I’m able to upload or synchronise at the click of a button. I guess this is a very common way for webmasters to work, so nothing particularly new there.

However, I was surprised the other day when I went to upload an entire site with 5.2MB of files. Using Transmit the process took just over 10 minutes, during which I have to wait or do something else. I wasn’t used to waiting so long to upload files, so I did a test and tried uploading the same set of files using rsync. I was pretty amazed to find that it took only 11 seconds! Clearly rsync uses a massively superior system for compressing a file-structure. In contrast, I guess your standard FTP client has to preform hundreds of individual upload operations, one for each file. So for all its sophistication, Transmit is pretty backward in this area. Are there any GUI FTP clients out there that can use rsync?

For now I will probably keep on with a mixture of the 2 approaches, using Transmit for small site changes, and reverting to rsync for full server backups and transfers. I guess another option that I could look into would be to stay with the command line and do a bit of scripting to take out some of the donkey work. I suppose it shouldn’t be too hard to write a shell script so that I can just type in ‘siteupdate ’ to trigger the appropriate rsync command. Does anyone have a good system they have developed for handling all this stuff?

As expected, the nice new code causes some existing plugins to break. Unfortunately that includes the truly excellent plugin for the Structured Blogging Project, which lets you publish reviews, events and ads in machine-readable microformats. I just tested it and post writing is broken. There doesn’t appear to have been much activity in the SB project for a while now, so I’m not holding my breath for a plugin update. Looks like I’ll need to stay with the WordPress 2.0 branch for my machine-readable review site. The good news is that WordPress have committed to supporting the 2.0 branch with security and bug fixes until 2010.