Slightly Remarkable

Yea, long title, bite me.

So I signed up for orkut today, without knowing what it was. You might say “What? I thought you were all web 2.0-savvy” and such, but the truth is, a lot of stuff flies by the radar. The web moves too fast for me to consume all of the new stuff on a daily basis and keep my job.

Anyway, I read a Google blog entry from several days ago where they mentioned orkut. I have a tendency to Cmd+Click every link in a blog entry, and orkut was no exception. But when I swapped over to the orkut tab, I wasn’t on a “Welcome to orkut! Please sign up!” page. I was taken directly to the “Complete your registration!” page.

It got me thinking. At first, I was like “Oh, this is a Google thing,” so there was acknowledgment of credibility (but not brand — interesting, yes?). The site had the audacity to start asking me questions like my date of birth, and this wasn’t like an acquaintance asking you such a question — it was more like a stranger asking the question. I’d never, ever met orkut before to my knowledge. Why would I tell it my date of birth?

Well, as it turns out, I did sign up. I didn’t know what the service was, or what it did, but it wasn’t asking me if I wanted to sign up. It was telling me to. It didn’t say “Would you please,” it said “Come on!” I was captivated.

I wonder if this more direct, no-BS method of getting people involved is over-the-top or not. I don’t think it was intentional, because orkut automatically detected my Google cookies and knew my name/email address already, but if I had been taken to a “Hi, stranger! Sign up for this thing, please?” page, I wouldn’t have signed up.

So, recap. The most immediate approach to getting someone to sign up: tell them to sign up, immediately. I didn’t even know what the service was until after I registered. Of course, this comes with one caveat: if people don’t recognize you, your brand, or your affiliate(s), they will be disoriented, confused, or suspicious, so be advised that this may be the reason your introduction is important. I guess the balance is to make a landing page that says “Hi, we do this. Sign up,” although that still requires a person to be interested in what the product or service does.

Interestingly, I find that I’m drawn to sign up for Google services or products that I probably will never use, simply because I want to see what they’ve done. I think this is very similar to what Apple has done (sans the sleek cool factor, unless, of course, you’re a geek such as myself) with their products. Apple’s iPad sold twice the units they anticipated. I’m not even sure that the iPad is such a great product (although, after having played with my boss’s iPad, I have gotta say, it’s pretty cool!!) compared to other products, but I think that Apple sold the iPad over the years by making so many people uncontrollably curious about what the next Apple product can do, or what can be done with it, as the case may be.

This is a note to myself and anyone else encountering the following JavaScript error in IE6.

Could not get display property. Invalid argument.

This error applies specifically to jQuery when using the animate method. The animate method works only in steps, so you can’t toss in CSS commands sloppily (although other browsers will treat this okay). Instead, you have to specify the CSS separately.

In other words, your original function may look like this:

$("#myObject").animate({
      display : 'block',
      top: '+=10px'
});

But for it to work in IE6, you’ll need to revise it to the more verbose:

$("#myObject").css({
      display: 'block'
}).animate({
      top: '+=10px'
});

In some cases, you may get the old JavaScript error that IE throws whenever it gets confused:

Object doesn't support this property or method.

Always be careful not to use the animate method as short-hand for the css method, as doing so may cause IE6 to simply destroy all of your associated/caller functions and report that they don’t exist. There’s not really any simple way to debug this error, either, so just check for it whenever you can’t figure out what’s wrong.

Today, I upgraded to Wordpress 2.9.2, and in the process I decided to play with some CSS3. If you’re browsing with Firefox, you may notice a completely new look here. Expect it to change frequently. I’m not serving the CSS3 goodness to other browsers that support it (notably WebKit-based browsers and Opera) because of the sheer magnitude of non-standard CSS3 properties (I can’t just duplicate and copy vendor prefixes — the actual order of the properties changes).

So, if you are using Firefox, you’re going to see a new gray/brown/green theme that’s going on. Complete with shadows, rounded corners, and some interesting gradient combinations. I managed to procure some fairly complex gradients, but you may be surprised when you learn that the new look has absolutely no graphics whatsoever. All the gradients (even those ones that look like images) are CSS3. It’s beautiful, no?

I’m looking forward to the day when I can serve these kinds of styles to all browsers and have them behave as expected.

Oh, and for the record, the only thing that Firefox users get is the stylesheet — I’m not serving any different HTML or anything, despite how reorganized the content actually is presented.

So, enjoy! =)

Uh-oh, don’t look now, but a new A List Apart article on contrast on the Web, entitled “Contrast Is King” makes note of the GrayBit tool and its use. Developed by Mike Cherim and I several years ago, this tool has been up for awhile, but it seems like it’s finally catching on as a useful tool to add to the Web developer’s arsenal. I’m excited to have been part of something that contributed to the future of the Web, in its quality and accessibility.