Categories
Site News

Lifehacker Hulu Hack Coverage

Lifehacker reposted my Hulu Hack a few days ago. Over 130,000 views to date!

The instructions are a little more straight-forward if you’re on a Mac.

Categories
Google

Canada Finally On Google Street View

Sort of.

Looks like Google has added just about every major Interstate and small town to Street View. This means you can now see the Canadian border in many different locations.

Here’s the link

Categories
Review Websites

Canadian Policty Party Websites Report Card

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.