Divine Lunacy

Surely we’ve all watched the sixth sense… Either way, you’ll surely understand this pop culture reference… I see pseudo-geeks. Walking around like regular people. They don’t see each other. They only see what they want to see. They don’t know they’re not geeks. This technical era in which we live has brought about it’s own kind of fake—the pseudo-geek. They’re everywhere, and much like in the Sixth Sense, not just anyone can see them. Only Cole is able to see dead people, and in our real life geek parallel, only geeks can spot pseudo geeks. This is what makes them dangerous and annoying.

I know few people who lack the intelligence to browse an acronym finder. 4ny0n3 c4/\/ 5p34k 1337, 8u7 f3\/\/ 4r3 7ru1y 31337. I can go around talking about KDE, and how it’s a GUI, but I prefer my good ol’ bash shell. I could give a speech about how much I love cd’ing through my ~, and rm’ing all the junk. (this reminds me… I’m still running a 2.6.10 Kernel with SELinux. Time to update…) If I select * from readers where clue > 0;, only true geeks will be returned. Unfortunately, only a true geek will get a correct return on that query. All of the non-geeks who read this blog probably think that query is enough to make me sound like an ubergeek. So you’ve seen that I can talk the talk, but can I walk the walk? Do I actually know anything about something?(say yes or feel my wrath.) This is how we distinguish the Geeks from the pseudo-geeks. Pseudo-geeks are often able to compose nice sentences full of meaningless technical jargon. Here’s an example: I fsck’ed my main partition today because I had a bunch of orphaned GUI’s. To someone who doesn’t know that GUI stands for Graphical User Interface, that sentence probably makes perfect sense. (orphaned Inodes would be correct.) Only us true geeks can see through their facades. Only a true geek can expatiate about the benefits of *nix over winblows…

In the past, I have tried to avoid writing about idiots on this weblog. Perhaps because I don’t want to deal with their stupidity-ridden comments, or perhaps because I’m just too lazy to rant. There are few idiots who have been lucky enough to be featured on this Blog, and this person happens to be a returning moron. Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls, Spiders, Googlebot, Feedster users, and Technorati users, I give you Rambacher. [Crowd cheers as Greg introduces the guest with a hint of disdain in his voice.]

We’ll begin our journey back in time with a definition of webmaster. I remember the days when a webmaster was a “an expert user of the Web,” not merely a person who creates webpages. Under today’s standards anyone who can read and move a mouse can be a webmaster. The webmasters of the olden days were people who understood the web. They knew how the web worked, and they all had a clue about things. They also possessed basic color-coordination skills. The web was young then, and has since opened up to the idiots.

Now we’ll take a look into a few basic principles of web design. The first question any good webmaster asks himself when designing a web site is “Who will visit my web site, and why?” Weirdos who actually care about reading about my life come to my blog. They come to read about my life. For this reason, the homepage features my life. You did not come here to read about monkeys, or peruse the links on the right, however, if this were a site about monkeys, it would be a very bad place for me to blog… A good webmaster must put his audience in a box, and design the site around the needs of that audience. In addition to targeting his audience, a webmaster should also ‘check out the competition.’ (we’ll get back to this later…)

Long standing BSD webmaster, and geek, Justin G., was kicked out of his webmaster position for ‘political reasons’ last year. He was replaced with an incompetent net admin suddenly gone webmaster. As if Justin wasn’t a big enough loss, the website was soon switched over to a Windows server. I guess Rambacher couldn’t handle Unix/Apache. It turned out he couldn’t handle Windows/IIS either. He just couldn’t cope with an httpd.conf, and a GUI seemed to be a bit too much for him as well. Ninety percent of the links on the moved website were broken. Here is his first big error: He ditched the good server, and broke the website. The website was a production site, not a development site. If he had any brains whatsoever, he would have gotten it working on the new server, then reconfigured the DNS to point to the new server. Clearly not satisfied with the destruction he had caused, he soon did away with the pretty, functional, well coded website and replaced it with an ugly piece of junk that seems to be made with frontpage. He lacks the dignity to at least use Dream Weaver. (note: I don’t really know that he did all of this personally, but I like blaming him.)

Let’s take a look at the new website. I hope that your first thought upon loading it is that it’s ugly. Unfortunately, the site sucks far beyond the poor aesthetics. To really see how terrible this website is, we must think like webmasters. Who visits a School Department website? Parents, Teachers, Students, and perhaps the occasional person seeking information. Why do they visit? The main reason I can think of is for News, Announcements and schedules. I took the liberty of Googling “* School District”. I clicked on the top six results, all of which have News and Announcements on the homepage. The biggest problem with the BSD website is that the creator didn’t put the audience in a box. Whoever made the site put the ‘About Us’ on the homepage, which means he expects the primary audience to be people from out of town. Not having the News on the homepage is one thing, but leaving it out all together is terrible. I could go on forever about the content flaws in that website, but I think you get the picture.

I also have a few general complaints/criticisms about the site. First off, the left navigation should be in-site navigation. If they want to link to ride, that’s fine, but I really don’t see the point of that link. What the hell is ride anyway? Why does the audience need a link to riode.org? I’m sure they’ll get there if they want to. Next off, I found a total of three broken links on the site. Apparently the genius who made it wasn’t quite smart enough to test it. Lastly, there is no contact information for the webmaster, and there is no copyright in the footer. Hello?!?!?

The old BSD site had sub-sites for each school in the district. Only the high school site was completely functional. It had UPDATED news and announcements. It had an alumni database, and it had a lists of courses with descriptions. None of these useful things are present on the new site.

Pseudo-Geeks are the root of all evil described in this post. The people who do the hiring are not geeks and thus lack the ability to spot them. If the person in charge of hiring that crazy network administrator and his web publishing minion been a geek, they probably wouldn’t have made it past the interview.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 26th, 2005 at 2309:23 and is filed under dev/tech, Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.