Tag: web

Gravedigg: What will die next?

Gravedigg is like Digg, but rather than voting for pictures of cute cats or top ten lists of stuff, you vote on what you think will die or fail next.  Companies, celebrities, technologies… whatever.  So maybe you think the Perl programming language is on it’s way out very soon, or that Iceland is on its last legs or that Steve Jobs is boned.

Louisa and I put this together in just a few days, me coding and Louisa designing. Was a fun little project to do.

Search interfaces

Ugh. I just did a search on streetmap.co.uk for a latitude and longitude reference and it didn’t recognise it. I spotted the radio button to tell it what kind of search I’m doing and clicked again. Still no luck. Removing the comma between the two numbers got me what I wanted.

It is not difficult to detect when someone is searching for a latitude and longitude. It is a pair of floating point numbers with 13 decimal places. Who lives on a street named with 13 decimal places? How many businesses are named with just numbers such that I would require 13 decimal places to tell them apart?

And then, after the user goes out of their way to tell your software what to expect, why not accept a few variations of the input (though one lousy comma would hardly count as a variation to me).

I’d be better off with a pencil sketch map and a divining rod. No wonder these services are losing all their business to services like Google maps.