A while ago -- at approximately the same time -- Facebook and Digg both started using a 'Navigation Bar' plopped at the top of all their outgoing links. Anyone who will remember the late 90's on the web will find this tactic familiar. Why is it annoying? Because it steals traffic, that's why.

This morning I received notice of two security update releases in my inbox: one about Drupal core being upgraded, another about the OpenID module containing a security vulnerability before 1.2.

Since upgrading Drupal core is such a pain, I've generated a patch (it's attached to this post: click on '1 attachment' to retrieve it) for upgrading your existing sites from 5.7. If you're not running a 5.7 site, please don't try to use it.

In my experience, there are three different categories of site slowdown and delay:

• Imperceptible
• Perceptible
• Unusable

Other distinctions really don't matter so much. The user doesn't care whether the page load latency is 10 seconds or 15 seconds. They're just going to leave.

The progression of a delay is:

Imperceptible -> Perceptible -> Unusable

Plug in a search term or terms into the top of futureshop.ca's website, and if the search returns no results, what do you get?

As the cliche goes, a picture is worth a thousand words:

How, praytell, do I easily repeat my search? Oh, that's right, I hit 'back' and type it in again. Users are lazy.

Every day, the forgot password? functionality on many different sites gets a workout. The symptom: people not being able to remember which of their 12 different usernames they used to register on a site. Reducing a user's memory load is an issue all too often ignored by developers. At the very least, it lets me pick the username I want if I can use the email address to log in.