One of the my icons of Programming, Internet and in general of my digital life is of course, Dilbert – brilliant creation of Scott Adams.
That is daily dose of geeky humor, sometimes strange, and sometimes it feels like Scott was peeking over your shoulder when he was drawing latest episode of Dilbert.
Unfortunately, this time, Dilbert is a bad example – or to be more precise – current implementation of Dilbert’s site is bad example of technology usage all along.
I like simple, working web solutions (pure Html + Css if possible) – so, “previous” Dilbert as a simple image and archive coming along was fulfilling all my needs; add to it reading via blog and I was more than happy.
That changed with introduction of all-shiny-flashy-flash new version of the site – that changed to a bad 🙁
Those pages are now heavy, very heavy, with complex flash objects and what is worse – not working flash objects 🙁 You can’t easily search, you can’t easily get your daily dose of geek humor:
This was simple search, and no, parameters are not a problem – if you keep pressing Search button, you will eventually get the list of missing strips; however, getting “big” versions by clicking on found elements is another problem – does not work in most of the cases.
All in all, very bad example of heavy multimedia site – I do not mind for change, but please do basic testing of:
- Is it working?
- Is it working as it is supposed to (search)?
- Can it handle load?
(I won’t get here in a rant why they changed site on this way in a first place; Dilbert’s audience is “special”, so different from average surfer or MySpace visitor; they probably know their market and someone did thorough analysis what new is needed – at least, I hope so).