Dan G

Goodbye Opera, hello Firefox

2008-12-28T11:12:00.004+00:00

Use the best tool for the job. That's a motto of mine. So I find myself back to using Firefox, this time version 3, in preference to Opera after several years with the Norwegian browser.

Why? The latest update to Opera--9.63--introduced so many bugs with Google products as to make them unuseable. Google Mail wouldn't accept any clicks to the UI, and Google Maps simply stalled on loading with the offer to switch to a "basic" html version. No thanks.

Simple truth is that many javascript-heavy apps, including Facebook which I use heavily, run much faster under Firefox than they do in Opera (at least at the moment). I don't know why for sure, but I suspect that the developers of these apps optimise them more for Firefox than for Opera due to the former's larger market share. There's no doubt that Opera has good competitive performance, including in javascript benchmarks, but it just doesn't hack it on the real web.

At the same time Firefox has come a long way with version 3. Memory usage finally seems reasonable and performance doesn't degrade to a crawl after a day or two, as was the case with version 2. Firefox 3 also requires fewer add-ons to bring the UI up to the standard of Opera--I'm only using Tab Mix Plus to get back to Opera's (much smarter) default behaviour for opening and closing tabs, plus Speed Dial to bring back one of Opera's best features. The Speed Dial add-on is nowhere near as polished as Opera's built-in implementation, with far more complex and confusing "options" to wade through and a rather ugly UI, but it gets the job done.

All is not plain sailing though--Firefox 3's bookmarks manager is just dumb. Add a new bookmark and it vanishes into a "recent bookmarks" folder. I just want a simple list when I click "Bookmarks" in the toolbar! Worse, if you use the bookmarks manager to create a new folder to organise some bookmarks and drag them from the recent bookmarks list to the new folder, the bookmarks are then duplicated in recent bookmarks list--madness! If you want to delete the duplicate, you can't tell which is in the recent bookmarks folder and which is in your new folder. Cue much frustration and loss of bookmarks. Thank goodness for delicious.com!

On a similar note I've also dropped Foxit Reader for Adobe Reader 9. Version 9 of Reader loads far more quickly than 8 ever did (or 7 or 6 for that matter!) and the far better quality of document rendering, scaling, and scrolling makes it much the better choice. Plus I like the direct intergration within Firefox--PDF documents load in Reader in a tab, rather than in a new window in a new app.

Keep an open mind folks, and don't be afraid to switch software--use the best!

English village fete calendar/guide

2008-05-10T11:47:00.001+01:00

'Tis the season for village fetes. I love to go to these with my family -- my mum loves the cakes and teas (I don't mind them either), the kids love the games. A nice way to see a nice bit of proper English countryside. We'd always found out about local fetes through a BBC local website "what's on" guide. Well turns out that the almighty and all-arrogant BBC have closed this event guide (it was the only useful thing on their local website).

After a bit of googling I've found the Innocent Smoothie village fete calendar, which seems to fit the bill. Not that many entries on there yet though :-(, but better than nowt. If you know of any village fetes that aren't on there already do submit them!

Cute website too.

BBC News redesign: while developers ignore their users, the users fix the site!

2008-04-02T12:49:00.009+01:00

Today Julia Whitney, "Head of Design & User Experience, Journalism", has posted a second response to the 1,500+ odd complaints about the new BBC News website. Most of it is disingenuous, fingers-in-ears "nah nah nah we can't hear you" fluff, but this part takes the biscuit:

"For those of you who mentioned flexible rather than fixed width, and concerns about the line spacing and the grey type - we'll take these themes into our next set of user testing and listening labs over the course of the next month and a half."

So it's going to take six weeks of "focus groups" to decide that actually, black text on white (as used by the rest of the entire print and internet worlds) is better than low-contrast* grey? Sounds more like a politician trying to hide behind excuses rather than admit they were wrong. And we all respect people who do that, don't we?!

Luckily you don't have to wait that long to fix the site, at least if you're using the Firefox or Opera browsers (IE users are out of luck). A site's design is dictated by something called "CSS", short for cascading style sheets, and these two browsers allow you to over-ride those rules with "local" ones.

What a developer on the userstyles.org website has done is develop a set of rules that "fix" the new BBC News layout. It removes the large black banner at the top and the big grey one at the bottom, sets the page back to left-alignment, removes much of the excess "whitespace", reduces the page width to something manageable, and replaces the grey text with proper black. (What it can't do is restore all those missing story links. Less content in more space. Crazy.)

If you're using Firefox, you first need to install the Stylish plugin. Then visit this userstyles.org page, install the new syle, and voila, a fixed BBC News website is yours to enjoy.

Opera users don't have to install anything new, but have a slightly more complex path to follow:

1. Open Notepad
2. Go to the userstyles page and click "Load as user script"
3. Copy and paste that code into Notepad
4. Save that file as "user.css" somewhere. Be sure to change the filetype from "Text" to "All" before saving -- this is very important
5. Navigate to BBC News in Opera and right-click on the page
6. Select "Edit site preferences" and then click the "Display" tab
7. At the bottom of that tab, "choose" the "user.css" file you just created
8. Click "OK" and enjoy a fixed BBC News page :-).

*I was interested to see if the new grey text broke usability standards, so did a quick investigation. Via 456 Berea Street I downloaded a contrast analyser. To meet minimum standards, text should have a contrast ratio of at least 5:1 and preferably 7:1. Black text on white has a contrast ratio of 21:1, but BBC News's new grey-on-white has a ratio of only 9:1 -- just above the standard, but still much poorer than black-on-white. Other areas of text, such as certain headers(!), have ratios as low as 4:1 -- well below the minimum.

The new site really is a joke. Hundreds of markup errors and it doesn't even meet basic usability guidelines.

The BBC News redesign disaster

2008-04-01T12:21:00.027+01:00

Update: The BBC "responds" to the criticism so far, but actually fails to answer a single point made in the 1,400+ complaints now left on the BBC blogs.

Something very strange is happening in the BBC webdesign department. Usability rules and user experience testing seems to have been tossed out the window in a head-long rush to be new. The revamped BBC News website has so many problems it's hard to know where to begin. However a flavour of its reception can be gained from the comments to the blog announcement, which after just 30 hours has seen over 1,000 complaints about the site! That's despite the problems with commenting to BBC blogs due to their being locked into an ancient version of Movable Type, meaning that it takes minutes for a comment to finish posting, if at all.

~~Other BBC blogs, such as the BBC Internet blog announcement, have seen their comments turned off to hide from the deluge.~~ Nick Reynolds says, in the comments below, that this was to herd the comments into one place, although oddly now there are at least three BBC blog posts on the topic with comments enabled. Make of that what you will...

So what's so bad about the site? Let's start with the mark-up. A w3c validation check shows 347 errors in the "XHTL 1.0" code. Three hundred and forty-seven! That must be some kind of record. Oddly, setting the validator to check against HMTL 4.01 shows only 81 errors. So it seems the BBC coders don't know the first thing about compliant code, or even which doctype to use.

(Update 2 April Martin Belam explains that the legacy CMS the BBC use could well be the cause of such bad mark-up.)

Their CSS fares better -- only five errors and 275 warnings against CSS 2.1. In fact their CSS performance is remarkably good considering the site has 54 kb of code spread over 8 CSS files.

(In total there are 140 seperate objects on the page, including another 54 kb of external javascript in ten files.)

More coding oddities include using pixels to specifiy font sizes rather than the standard ems, that a serif font is specified after verdana making the site rather ugly on many Linux systems, and the fact when the site first launched it didn't work at all in Firefox (tiny text), which opens questions about the BBC's testing procedures. (In fact the site is also broken on the iPhone.)

Other design changes seem odd. The new site is 1024px wide, but has 15% less content (primarily a reduction in the number of stories linked to from the main page, cutting links in the Around the World, UK, and Sections from two to one). This forces the user to scroll and eye-scan over a much larger distance in order to access less content. The space is taken up by increased padding around the remaining elements. I can't find a single design guideline that mandates that.

Despite ostensibly being based on a grid (pdf), very little on the page lines up. The left column, including the banners, features five different horizontal alignments (and six styles of text, including text-as-images). Included in that is the main BBC logo and the large BBC News logo immediately below -- they don't line up.

Vertically, the main and right columns fail to align too, with jumps in the horizontal dividers.

(The right column also features links to videos in the original Real Media format, despite claims that the site now uses embedded Flash video.)

Very little bolding is used for the headers, which for the minor ones depend on ALLCAPS. How very '90s. The reduced contrast and lack of background-highlighting makes scanning for seperate sections much more laborious.

Perhaps the strangest design choice though is the use of grey text, rather than black, on the white background. The reduced contrast makes the site harder on the eye and is one of the leading complaints to the blog announcement. To say that this goes against everything usability stands for is an understatement -- a triumph of form over function.

However the grey-on-white text must vie against the new pan-BBC header bar -- simply a black rectangle with two links and a search box. The search box doesn't indicate whether it's a site search or a web search -- maybe it's just pot luck? Originally there used to be links to the major BBC website sections such as News, TV, and Radio, but they've been swept away. Presumeably the BBC believes that users will instead type into the search box to access these sites, much as many web users now use Google as their "bookmarking" system. Hard to see how this increases site usability.

Overall the site is a disaster in both design and usability. During the recent BBC homepage redesign it was boasted that the site had been developed and deployed in only three months with a minimum of testing and usability studies. This trend of slap-dash, rapid-development seems to have spread throughout BBC webdesign.

Compare all this to their last redesign in 2003. Everything lines up. Consisent fonts are used throughout. The aim of the design was to show more information with less scrolling. Pretty much perfect! (For a flavour of the quite positive reactions that redesign brought, read this thread on Webmaster World.)

Perhaps the BBC have been drinking too much of the web 2.0 kool-aid. Agile programming, release early and often etc. Such memes might suit small, young companies such as 37signals, but not heavyweight players. How often has Google changed its homepage in the last ten years? Even much younger, fully "2.0" sites such as Facebook have stayed away from rushed redesigns.

The most ironic part of the whole debacle is that, in the original blog announcement, the BBC confesses that the majority of users they surveyed before the changes were made had said "leave the site alone"!

Companies: don't blog if you can't keep it up!

2008-01-31T10:55:00.000+00:00

Take, for example, Adpinion. An interesting new startup where readers rate the ads they see on websites, so the adverts served to them become more and more relevant -- clever stuff.

However Adpinion has started a blog called Button of Judgement (named after the thumbs up/thumbs down button on their ads). In three days this January they made three (good) posts, and then nadda, nothing, zip. That doesn't inspire confidence in their product! How can I trust them to maintain their service, when they can't even maintain their own blog?

I found Adpinion through Paul Stamatiou, who writes a great nerd blog.

Google GDrive: would you trust it with your data?

2008-01-20T10:16:00.000+00:00

Hell I would. Here I back up my families' and my own data across all our machines in different locations ("lots of copies keeps stuff safe"; more on that later), but really few people do that. Most have their data on one computer -- vulnerable to fire, theft, accidental damage, simple mechanical failure, you name it.

By comparison a remote server adminstered by Google will have *lots* of back-up systems covering it. I'd say that's a lot safer.

Free AOL anti-virus - down the pan

2007-10-16T21:49:00.000+01:00

I've been using AOL "Active Virus Shield" for the last few months, and have been a happy bunny as under the branding it's actually Kaspersky, which rates tops in tests of AV software.

However AOL have just mailed me announcing that they're discontinuing the Kaspersky product and replacing it with one based on McAfee. I have two problems with this. First, I like my software to be stable and not need baby-sitting - I certainly don't want software I have to entirely replace whenever the supplier feels like it (I've been using Microsoft XP since 2002). OK, I guess I was expecting a bit much with free software from AOL, but all the same it's pretty obvious that they tender for their AV supplier every so often and that's no use to me.

Second, McAfee is a piece of crap. I'm not having that on my system!

Wikipedia being edited by US defence industry

2007-09-10T08:10:00.000+01:00

Take a look at this. Steven Trimble is a senior editor on Flight International and he's been using the wikiscanner. It seems a lot of none-too-bright employees of major defence industry companies have been editing Wikipedia to massage their products or trash those of their competitors. None-too-bright as they've not been creating accounts, and so have left their company IP addresses for all too see...

And we're back

2007-09-07T10:59:00.000+01:00

After a good 36 hours, Google Reader is restored to Opera users. What an utter shambles.

Google Reader not working with Opera

2007-09-06T08:58:00.000+01:00

In the last few hours Google have made a change to Reader that prevents it from loading in Opera - Google Reader is broken. As a poster on this Google Reader Help group thread says, Opera is not some obscure browser. Google should be testing more thoroughly than this.

Just imagine if you're company was using Google Apps and they screwed that up like this... you begin to realise why the "online office" has no future.

Fossil website

2007-05-10T13:41:00.000+01:00

Here's an oddity. A website largely untouched since 1998, the shop window for a company that folded seven years ago.

You can even see the pricing for the airplanes in 1998 dollars.

What happened to Wikipedia:Attribution?

2007-05-05T12:19:00.000+01:00

You may remember the introduction of Wikipedia:Attribution. If you edit Wikipedia on a regular basis you may have noticed that the link just below the edit box went back to Wikipedia:Verifiability about a month ago, or some three weeks after was first changed to point to WP:ATT.

What happened? Well, when the switch was first made at the end of February I (and few other editors) were not happy. We reverted the change from having the seperate WP:V and WP:No orignal research to the single WP:ATT, but we were reverted straight away by the user Radiant. I also left a note on Jimbo Wales's talk page alerting him to the changes, but he was away travelling with limited net access. A day later the Essjay storm broke and when Wales regained regular net access, everyone's attention was on that and WP:ATT was forgotten. My note on Jimbo's page was lost in a page-blanking after the Essjay affair.

But then on March 20 Jimbo noticed for himself that WP:V and WP:NOR had been merged, and he wasn't happy. He left this message on the WP:ATT talk page while reverting the changes (and this time, Radiant did not revert, lol). This suddenly brought the whole thing to everyone's attention, leading quickly to a poll where the merge only gained the support of around half the 900 or so people who voted. This was quite a blow to the main architect of WP:ATT, Slimvirgin, who had been working on the merge since last October.

Jimbo's suggestion to resolve the issue was to form a "cross-party working group" (seriously). This seems more of a move to calm the heated debates rather than to actually reach a solution other than the status quo, and it worked. There were efforts to try and pick people for this group and work out what they should actually do but there were arguments over every detail, even over whether they should have terms of reference or not. Slimvirgin eventually tired of the discussions in mid-April and left, though she still tends to WP:ATT from time to time. The "working group" discussions gradually petered out.

What's the outlook? WP:ATT is dead. Far too many people recognise and support the need to have seperate policies, policies that have worked very well for six years now. AP:ATT pretty much worked but wasn't really needed. The "merge" process was badly mishandled - there were no merge tags placed on the the policy pages and only one small invite for community input early in the process, which left a small group of isolated editors working on the project out of the eye of the general editor population. When these folks decided WP:ATT was ready for the prime time they felt they had consensus, but it was only within their subgroup (clique, really). A few people objected but couldn't be bothered to fight the socially inept, stubborn and arrogant editors Wikipedia attracts like Radiant. When Wales noticed the change and came down against it, it was game over.

Throwing a bone to the clique was almost cruel - it would have been better, especially after the results of the community poll, to make it clear that WP:ATT was dead and to help the people who'd invested so much time in it begin to move on.

Unfolding news

2007-04-16T21:44:00.000+01:00

When terrible events happen how the news broke to the world can often be traced in the history of the Wikinews article.

It's so sad to see the true horror become apparent.

Death of a Blog

2007-04-14T22:18:00.000+01:00

One of my favourite blogs - IAG, a brilliant airliner and airline news blog - has retreated behind a paywall; I mourn the site's forthcoming death.

The site's owners - two "old media" types - did some market research before making this decision, where they discovered that only 20% of their current readership would consider paying to access their content. The owners believe that even with just 20% of their readers following them behind their paywall they'll make more money than they currently do with advertising.

This is probably true (except I doubt the take-up will be as high as 20%, people saying they'll pay is one thing in a survey but actually paying up is another), but represents a classic example of going for small short-term gains at the exspense of greater profits in the longer term. Now, their content will rapidly age out of search engines and people will stop linking to their content as no-one can read it - so no-one will find their site anymore. At the same time existing subscribers will drift away - people unsubscribe from sites all the time for a million different reasons. So their (small) paying readership will slowly dwindle to nothing, and they'll go out of business.

If the owners had been smart they'd have adopted the tactics used by all other successful blogs out there. They would have swept away huge mess of advertising that was plastered over their site and used a few relevant, well-chosen, and well-placed adverts, such as those from Federated Media and Text Link Ads. (They could also have used Feedburner's RSS feed adverts.) That would have greatly increased their existing ad revenue.

Then they would have simply carried on as they were - producing great content and growing their audience. Eventually their ad revenues would have far exceeded what they'll ever hope to make with a paywall.

But that's not what they did, so IAG is disappearing from the web. A shame.

Addendum It only took a few minutes of searching to find replacement blog with all the content IAG had.

Old companies fighting the new

2007-04-11T23:04:00.000+01:00

Here's a cracking comment left on Scoble's blog: "old" companies - big ones - are beginning to fight hard against new Internet companies. A great insight.

Myspace blocking Photobucket's video-hosting is a crazy example of this. They probably won't lose existing users who are locked into large existing networks, but they sure as hell aren't enticing new ones. Where's the growth model there?

Newsflash: positive comment about Vista on Slashdot not modded down!

2007-04-10T18:21:00.000+01:00

A rare and beautiful thing. In the World of Slashdot Vista is "defective by design" and never works for uses. (Note that this +5 comment still recieved a negative mod as "flamebait"!)

In the real world the new OS is selling slowly but steadily and by all other accounts is actually working jus' fine.

Killer demo of Windows Presentation Foundation

2007-04-04T13:15:00.000+01:00

An excellent demonstration via PodTech of how Windows Presentation Foundation can be used to produce slicker and much more engaging interfaces for web 2.0 services. The company is thirteen23.

Don't forget that to run WPF apps you only need .NET 3.0 - not Vista. Any Windows XP computer can run these apps. I tried thirteen23's Flickr Nostalgia app on my four-year-old laptop and it ran a treat.

Can Apollo compete with this? I'd like to see a demo that is as compelling. Apollo has being cross-platform in its favour, but with the dominance of Windows in the market is that important? I think not - companies code for the biggest market, and that's Windows.

Sierra, Locke et al. - moving on

2007-04-03T23:04:00.000+01:00

Like everyone else, the blogosphere has a short attention span and this incident will soon slip from the collective short term memory to the long term memory of blog archives.

This marks that transition for this blog here. As well, this is a time to learn. My position, clear from the start, is zero tolerance. People who make or facilitate misogynistic or other hateful posts must not be tolerated - they should be isolated and, if possible, deleted (I'm looking at you - everyone on Digg, those with mod points on Slashdot, everyone who has a blog with comments).

What are other people saying?

Well, we've already seen Kathy Sierra and Chris Locke's statements (note, not joint statements). But let's not forget that this went well beyond the two of them.

Here's Scoble. He states it's a strain to moderate comments on his blog and considered closing the comments - as many other bloggers have. That would be a shame - what conversation would be left? And it would be letting the bullies win, to boot. Scoble then goes on to make a good point that attack/hate blogs are frequently attention seeking (hell I'd never heard of Chris Locke before).

Then he makes an odd statement: "Lots of bloggers hate them [attacks], but know they better not speak out against them. Kathy, last week, got MORE attacks AFTER she wrote that post than before. So, bloggers, if they are in this for the long haul, learn they should keep their mouths shut." What's that about? Give in to these idiots? Not a chance.

Scoble finishes by saying that there's not much we can do. Hell yeah there is, hound these idiots off the face of the internet, that's what we can do. Bullies don't like it when their victims stand up to them. Just watch Locke crawling now.

A few other posts caught my eye. Sessum is tired of people pointing out that she supported Meankids. Well, she should have thought about that before being an idiot. You thought racist, misogynistic crap was good? And let's not pretend that stuff only came out later in the blog's life - check the search engine caches, it was like that from the start.

Finally, I like Tara Hunt's thoughts on these people's motivation. I couldn't agree more.

That's it. Time to move on.

But never forget.

Kathy Sierra and Chris Locke CNN video

2007-04-02T20:05:00.000+01:00

As promised, here it is.

Be warned though, at times it's so simplistic and at times so corny it's almost funny. Locke features for about five seconds.

All in all, pretty worthless.

Kathy Sierra and Chris Locke speak

2007-04-02T12:26:00.000+01:00

Kathy Sierra and Chris Locke have made statements about the affair, with introductory posts on their blogs - Sierra's and Locke's (Locke is using his "Rageboy" ID).

One thing I note is that Locke still claims that he deleted unclebobism himself. So why did wordpress.com bother to put up "this blog breaks our terms of service" notices on a blog that had already "been deleted"? Draw your own conclusions.

Locke's post also dissolves into a standard "protect free speech" post. Writing from a country (the UK) where hate speech is illegal and our society is considerably better for it, I cannot agree.

Sierra and Locke also appeared on CNN today. If I can find a clip I'll post it here.

My own position on the matter remains unchanged. I believe people involved in pathetic hate-blogs like meankids and unclebobism do not deserve to be included in the Conversation. Furthermore, and importantly, comments posted on blogs that are about nothing but the sexualisation of females should be deleted on sight.

Disappointing

2007-04-02T12:23:00.000+01:00

Well, Scoble broke his week-long no-blogging protest to post an April Fool's joke.

Not even going to bother to link.

Kathy Sierra: 72 hours on

2007-03-29T23:26:00.000+01:00

Little new has come to light but the general opinions and thoughts of people have become clearer.

One thing I'm seeing is continued confusion over what actually happened and who is involved. It seems quite common for people to think that this is only about Kathy Sierra - not so.

There was a horrific attack made on Maryam Scoble posted to meankids.org - this, in particular and rather understandably, upset Robert Scoble. That entry was posted by a member of meankids using the name "Rev Ed".

A commenter going by the same name left sexually abusive comments on the second site, unclebobism, but these comments were not directed at Sierra. He did call Sierra a "crack whore", however. Rev Ed, by the way, used Alan Herrell's picture as his avatar.

Furthermore, there was at least one racist post made at meankids - look at the title of the post.

What was was directed at Sierra was picture of her with a noose next to her posted on meankids, and on unclebobism a digitally-altered image of her suggesting sexual violence was shown. Who actually made and posted those images remains unclear (there's no record of the meankids.org image, and posts to unclebobism aren't credited), which brings me on to...

Who was responsible. We know Paynter founded meankids.org and Locke was one of the bloggers there. We know that Locke objected to Paynter's moderation, possibly of the Maryam post, so that once meankids was closed Locke started unclebobism. Beyond those two, the only other blogger we know for sure who was on unclebobism is Paul Ritchie. Ritchie, incidently, is proud to have vandalised Kathy Sierra's Wikipedia entry. He seems to be a bit of a nobody really though.

"Joey", who blogs as the Angry Phuqe, was only involved insofar that he left a comment on the noose image post, possibly referring to the "Kat Herding" character invented by Chris Locke and Jeanene Sessum.

Alan Herrell is a tricky one. We know his image was used as the avatar for Rev Ed, but Herrell himself issued a denial of involvement.

Jeanene Sessum, the fourth person mentioned in Sierra's original post, doesn't seem to be involved at all. She has denied ever being part of unclebobism or any other group blog and no search engine cache searches have shown any kind of link between her and meankids. Pending further evidence, she's innocent.

Then we have the reactions: the "get used to its", the "outraged" (waves) and the "I've had it worse"s.

Finally we have some ideas for what should happen next. Robert Scoble calls for sexist posting to be stamped out. I've called for sexist bloggers to be ostracized. Finally, we have the Stop Cyberbulling Day tomorrow.

What happens next? Well, while Sierra has updated her blog post, she is yet to blog again. Will she? I sure hope so - bullies must not win. Scoble will also post again in a few days. What will his reaction be after silently observing the conversation for a week? And what of the people involved? Will Locke and Sessum post again? When will Paynter post about something else? And will Herrell ever return to the blogosphere?

Slashdot's take

2007-03-28T12:38:00.000+01:00

It's interesting to see what's been modded up on Slashdot regards Sierra. Largely the posts modded up the most are of "the internet is a big bad place and you need to accept that" nature.

Huh?? This behaviour is acceptable? Newsflash: it isn't.

That said, this view probably just reflects Slashdot's roots and demographic - lots of ex-Usenetters, people who have been on the web along time, few or no females.

"Joey" responds

2007-03-28T11:27:00.000+01:00

Load Kathy Sierra's original post then do a find-in-page search for Joey to see what one of the anonymous accused has to say.

Not thinking straight: Paynter is not the bad guy here

2007-03-28T10:26:00.000+01:00

In my previous post I accused Paynter of being complicit as the post attacking Maryam Scoble was made on March 16, and for some time thought Paynter didn't take meankids down until March 24. As I researched more, I realised he in fact pulled the blog on March 17 - the next day, quite possibly in reaction to the Maryam post.

But I didn't process that fully and left my call to ostracize Paynter standing. I now withdraw that statement - Paynter is one of the better guys in all this. Not the best - he is still the founder of a pretty pathetic site - but not the worst.

Chris Locke is.