John August

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Why does anyone still use Internet Explorer?

Geek Alert, Rant

One benefit of switching my new webhost, TextDrive, is that they have a much cooler statistics program called Urchin. With it, I can see a lot of information about who’s visiting the site, and what articles they’re reading. Plus, I can learn what browsers they’re using. Here are the current percentages:


26% Internet Explorer
22% Firefox
 5% Safari
 3% Opera

(The numbers don’t add up to 100%, because I’m omitting RSS readers, robots and specialty browsers, such as those on mobile phones.)

I’m genuinely curious to find out why anyone is still using Internet Explorer, when there are much better options. Firefox is available for both Windows and Mac, and is superior on just about every level. It’s faster; it blocks pop-ups; it offers modern tabbed browsing. It even automatically imports all your old bookmarks.

If you haven’t at least tried it, stop reading and get it.

One thing the official site doesn’t explain is that it actually makes web pages look much better. That’s because it properly supports modern standards like CSS and .png graphics. For instance, compare the brad icon in the upper left right corner:

brad comparison

Currently website developers have two choices. They can make their sites compatible with published standards (and support Firefox, Safari and Opera), or they can support Internet Explorer. Increasingly, they’re simply giving up on Internet Explorer, which hasn’t been properly updated in a long time.

That’s what I’ve chosen to do. With a day or two of work, I could probably get johnaugust.com looking better with IE, but I’m convinced it’s not worth the bother.

Archives section (temporarily) broken

News

As someone pointed out — and many others have discovered — the Archives link on the right is broken. Click it and you’ll get a bunch of MySQL gibberish, which is actually the result of a few PHP commands that aren’t doing what they’re supposed to.

The move from the old web host to the new one went remarkably smoothly, but this one section didn’t make the transition. I’m working on it, but it could be a few days. Or weeks. I’ll let you know when it’s back up and running.

Other interests and hobbies

First Person, QandA

Do you play guitar, or do some other type of hobby in order to get inspiration for your writing?

— Jesse Leal

I don’t play guitar, though I’ve always wanted to learn. I tried to teach myself on my father’s guitar, but never even mastered tuning it, which made the rest of the process painful to the ears.

I can read music, and play piano and clarinet on a grade-school level. But I wouldn’t say either of them inspire my writing. So, for the truly curious, here’s a quick run-down of John’s Other Interests:

  • Gadgets Treo 650? Check. TiVo? Check. (Early Adopter points: I got my first digital video recorder in 1998.) Toyota Prius? Check. (We have two in the family.) Wireless Weather Forecaster? Check.
  • Languages
    I like to travel, but my interest in languages is borderline obsessive; I spent six weeks learning Japanese in preparation for a 72-hour visit to Tokyo. I’ve spoken Spanish since grade school, and French since high school. I’m fascinated by the evolution of languages, particularly how English lost its Germanic declensions and re-imported so much of its vocabulary from French (which resulted in having both ‘regal’ and ‘royal’).
  • Warcraft My name is John, and I have Warcraft problem. Kudos to the good folks at Blizzard for their digital crack.
  • Reality Television If I only watched The Amazing Race, no one would question my taste. But my TiVo also holds Big Brother, The Real World, and The Real World/Road Rules Challenge.
  • Home improvement I’ve renovated two houses in four years, by which I mean telling a contractor what I wanted and blissfully ignoring the actual labor involved.
  • Information architecture
    Beyond the work I do designing and running this website, I also love to keep up on XML, RSS and other emerging standards.
  • D.C. heroes I know there’s a lot of love out there for the Marvel pantheon, but I’ve always been a D.C. guy. Ever since I watched Superfriends as a kid, Superman and his brethren were my gods on Mount Olympus. I was never much of a comics reader, but somehow I learned all of the heroes’ mythology.

Cover page artwork

Formatting, QandA

Is artwork that only appears on the title page of a screenplay frowned upon?

— Darryl McD

Yeah, that’s kind of cheesy. If I had to choose between two scripts in front of me, I’d probably pick the one without the artwork.

That said, if you look in the Downloads section, you’ll see that I used a circle around ‘Go’, largely because the word itself is so small. And the cover page for Prince of Persia has the title in the logo font, but since it’s based on a hugely popular videogame, there’s a good reason for it.

For the other 20 or so scripts I’ve worked on, there hasn’t been any artwork on the cover. I’ll occasionally use a font other than 12pt Courier for title itself, but always something simple.

Discover the basics of title page formatting here!