ohryan.ca

A Web Developer in Winnipeg

  • Canadian Policty Party Websites Report Card

    in ,

    With the looming Canadian federal election, I thought I’d take a look at the federal party websites. I’ll be rating them on 5 characteristics, on a 5 point scale:

    • Design: How much I like the look and feel.
    • User Interface: How well does the site layout work
    • Candidate Info: How good is the info on the candidate in my riding. 
    • Web 2.0: How well are they pimping themselves on the social networks, are they including a lot of media, etc. 
    • Ease of contributing: Online donations have been a major part of the current US Presidential election. I took a quick look at their contribution processes to see if there were any obvious problems. I didn’t actually donate.

     

    NDP – 92%

    • Design: 5. My favorite site. Nice and tidy, good use of orange. Cute icons.
    • UI: 4.5. The index page is really well organized. The drop down menus are a little redundant, since most of them only contain 1 elements. The use of flash on the for the candidate finder is unfortunate that page should really be accessible to everyone.
    • Candidate Info: 4.5. The bio is a little sparse.
    • Web2.0: 4. Twitter, facebook. Their site looks the most web 2.0.
    • Donation: 5. The most straightforward process of them all.

     

    Conservatives – 90%

    • Design: 4. Decent overall. Some weird layout and graphic choices. 
    • UI: 4.5. Dropdown menus are familiar, nice series of quicklinks on the right nav. 
    • Candidate Info: 4.5. Has everything I could want except for his mailing address.
    • Web2.0: 5. They’re on the ball, flickr account, friend feed, twitter, myspace, facebook. And all their ads are online. 
    • Contributions: 4.5. Giant donation buttons everywhere. They’re already required to collect a lot of info already, they could have at least made it a one step process. 

     

    Green – 76%

    • Design: 4. Pretty good. Albeit a little uninspired and sloppy. Probably designed by a volunteer.
    • UI: 4.5. Bonus marks for using a drilldown information structure and NOT using dropdown menus.
    • Candidate Info: 4. Long Bio. No mailing address.
    • Web2.0: 2.5. They have blogs and a youtube channel.
    • Contributions: 4. Nice and easy.

     

    Liberal – 52%

    • Design: 3.5. Simple. Just a little too simple. Too much white. 
    • UI: 3. Use of flash on the index for something that could’ve been easily done in javascript was a bad choice. Other than that, it’s pretty run of the mill. 
    • Candidate Info: 0! No picture! No personal contact info! No permalink. Unacceptable. 
    • Web2.0: 3.5. Facebook, youtube, some video and pictures. Seems like an afterthought. 
    • Contributions: 3. The page is quite cluttered and a little confusing. The page contains elements outside of the secured site, causing a certificate error that will probably scare of some potential contributors. 

     

    Bloc Québécois – 47.5%

    • Design: 2.5. Looks like puke, but it could be worse.
    • UI: 3. Mediocre. 
    • Candidate Info: N/A. They only run candidates in Quebec.
    • Web2.0: 1. They have a “blogue” I guess that’s worth something.
    • Contributions: 3. The online form is only available in french (isn’t that against some law?!). It appears to be pretty straightforward.

     

    Libertarian – 23%

    • Design: 0. My 7 month old son could design a better site. 
    • UI: 3. It’s oldschool, but effective.
    • Candidate Info: N/A. None in my riding.
    • Web2.0: 0.5. They have a forum *shrug*.
    • Contributions: N/A. I think they’re still too small to be accepting donations on a large scale. 

     
    There you have it, if you want to vote based on my opinion of the party’s website, you’ll have to vote NDP.
    I took a look at the rest of the minor parties for any standouts. The Canadian Action Party has a surprisingly good website. The West Block Party‘s site is easily the worst, it has an under construction diggerman.

  • Low-Tech Todo List

    in

    I’ve been trying to find a good todo list keeping method for years. I’ve tried online services like tadalist, i’ve tried using a moleskine. Nothing seems to work for me.

    Internet Super Mom bought me this combination mouse-pad, todo list about a week ago. So far it seems to have solved my todo list woes. 

  • Google Chrome: I’m In L-O-V-E

    in ,

    I’m sure these sentiments will be echoed around the around the blogosphere (including 4 posts on GigaOm…seriously) over the next couple of days, but I just can’t contain myself. I think I now know what it feels like to be an Apple fanboy when Steve Jobs announces one more thing. I haven’t been this excited about a browser since NCSA Mosaic. 

    Hearts 

    • It’s fast! Really fast! I haven’t bother running any benchmarks, it’s not necessary. This browser is quite obviously insanely faster than any other browser I’ve ever tried. Pages load instantly. Any and all javascript elements load and react noticably faster. 
    • The striped down UI is a nice change from the odd UI choices in IE 7&8 and what now seems like an extremely bloated FF 3. The tab animations are nice and smooth. The ability to detach tabs is a great addition. 
    • Site search. Chrome remembers when you used the search inside a site and then allows you to use the search from the “omni bar.” So, if I type “wik+tab” it will bring up a “Search Wikipedia search:” labe, then any keywords I type get routed to wikipedia’s search engine. This works with amazon, ebay, blogs, anywhere Chrome can recognize a site search field. 
    • Developer tools! Chrome includes tools similar to Firefox’s firebug plugin, including an HTML/CSS element inspector, javascript debugger and a native, colour-coded, line-numbered HTML viewer. 
    • The default start page is innovative. In addition to showing my 9 most visited sites, it also shows my top site searches, recent bookmarks and recently closed tabs. In theory, this is super useful, but it’s one of those features that takes some getting use to. It would be kind of neat to pull RSS feeds or other widgets into this. 
    • Ability to resize textboxes. It’s minor, but useful. 

     

    Hates 

    • Doesn’t resize properly on my second monitor.
    • Opening and closing tabs is sometime sluggish – especially when there is a large flash element on the page being opened or closed. When this happens it actually causes the entire browser to be unusable. 
    • Flash sometimes loads noticably slower than the rest of the page – even on youtube. This could be due to my older cpu. 
    • Browser become slow when I’ve got 10+ tabs open. Again, could be due to my machine. 
    • The task manager is a GREAT idea. I haven’t had to use it yet. But, if a tab or a pluggin is ever so slow that it’s affecting my ability to browse, my machine is probably going to be too bogged down to actually use Chrome’s task manager. So it might actually be useless. Now, each tab does still appear as a seperate windows task, so I should still be able to close them that way. We’ll see. 
    • Missing extensions. It’d be nice if Chrome included an implementation of XUL and directly import Firefox exentions. 

    Bits & Bobs

    • ctrl+k brings you directly to a search in the OmniBar – using your default search engine. 
    • Matt Cutts has a blog post addressing some privacy concerns: Link
    • It’s interesting that every major browser except Firefox now has a private browsing mode.
    • The options menu is divided in a really clever way, 3 tabs: basic, minor tweaks, under the hood
    • There’s a “stats for nerds” button

    Suffice it to say. Chrome is my primary browser. I’ll still use Firefox when I need the web dev toolbar or some other extension. Mozilla and Microsoft have some serious catching up to do.