However, encoding problems (we’re going from Western Roman to UTF-8, for those who understand the jargon) have made it such that all accented characters (é, è, û, …), very common in French, are messed up in the exported database. As such, I’ve had to replace these everywhere.

One thing I noticed when doing these replacements was the full control I had over content: I could easily check all the private messages sent in the forum. The temptation was oh-so-great, naturally…

For those concerned, rest assured: I did not look at all these messages.
It did, however, get me thinking: are we all “Big Brother” on the web?

Words you leave behind for all to see

Let me put it this way. When you take part in a discussion somewhere on the web, do you intend for people to trace the message back to you?
Some of us do, and we therefore use either a single pseudonym widely used by ourselves throughout the web, or our full name. When given the chance, we include a link to our website.
Others prefer to user random user names to protect their identity. It is then only through access to IP records that an administrator will be able to see that user “Jindog” is the same as user “Bock of Terror” and user “Slartibartfast3″.

The advantage with using a single pseudonym or one’s full name is that people will more easily be able to identify not only who you are but what you mean. It may give more authority to your words, where for example a “newbie” who has posted only one message on a website may be seen differently.

The disadvantage is that you voluntarily let go of some degree of privacy. This can have devastating consequences if you say one thing and adopt another stance later on, be it one day or five years later. Everything you say under one pseudonym is recorded, and unless the record in the database is erased, everything you say “can and will be used against you”.

As such, whenever you write something under a single pseudonym, there is a chance that someone with former knowledge of your writings will be watching.

Just do a Google search (no, I haven’t sold out to Yahoo! nor Microsoft) on your pseudonym or full name. Try to see how many results appear, and see if there are any of which you are ashamed.
I, for one, said many things five years ago that I would not dream of saying today. Yet all these posts are out there, their content available to anyone.

Words you leave behind for admins to see

Then comes the more omnipotent version of Big Brother: the one who truly sees all. The administrator of a website, and to some extent moderators (on webboards for example), will have access to such details that even a poster under different pseudonyms is no longer safely guarded.

On webboards, administrators have the power to see everything that goes on between users, be it in the public place (the discussion boards) or the private sphere (private messages). Your love letters and hate mail will be easily accessible, and there is no definite guarantee that an administrator will always display bona fides, good faith.

Just bear that in mind next time you hit the “send” button for a private message.

Is the web truly different from “real life”?

If it seems indeed that we, as users of the web, and we webmasters have a great amount of power, able to see most of the discussions between users, I wish to address a second issue: how is the web any different from the way things happen in our everyday “real” lives?

When you walk down the street, a couple of people are standing at the corner, having a conversation. They probably don’t desire to be overheard, but aren’t about to take precautions against overhearing. As such, when you walk beside them, you hear a couple of sentences. Who knows how important these words may be to them, or to you?

Hopping on the bus, you hear two elderly women talk about their respective grandchildren and their lives. Within five minutes, you can know enough about people mentioned in a conversation to startle them upon meeting them.

While taking a break at work, university, …, you may open a newspaper and read an article taking stance on an issue of the day. If you look up the author in archives or in other newspapers, who knows what you may find about him/her?

“Conclusion”

As you will have guessed, this is not one of those “answer” posts, more of a “beginning of a thought”.
I’d be tempted to say that the web puts us more in a “Big Brother” position than “real life”, because there is no single moment when you are alone on the web, whereas there are many times when no one is anywhere within 20 metres of you in “real life”. The panopticon therefore seems to apply more to the web.
Yet who can be sure? There are satellites monitoring our every movement outside of buildings, and there are many surveillance cameras to complement them. In a way, a webboard viewable only to select users is more private than a discussion within closed doors, where one can listen in through a keyhole.

Thoughts on the subject?

With time, however, I’m sure everyone got used to it, whether they initially liked it or not.

So, now that the new one has come, I’m starting to regret the previous one. Despite the fact that it wasn’t as good as the one before, I still prefer it to this current one.

Out with the old, in with the new…

Ambrosia Software did this recently, to illustrate, and it showed that “ASW” was letting go of its “sketched” look to go towards a new “modern” look.

And now, Google is doing the same thing.

I noticed it this Friday at noon.
This:

And it has a special gradient on it, too:

So, good or bad?

In my oh-so-humble opinion, it was probably time they changed it. Google has had that favicon for years now, and it did start to look “strange” among all those fancy new designs sprouting up all over the web. And in the new Firefox 3 (not yet officially released, still in “Release Candidate” testing stage):

But it marks the end of an era.
The old “G” was recognisable a mile away. It was a capital letter referring to a company that was becoming capital.
Now, Google is by far the “web search” industry leader for consumers in their everyday web experience, and it probably doesn’t need to make itself known much more.

But why a lower-case “g”?
I guess we’ll have to wait to hear from Google to find out.

While I like the simplicity of the favicon design, it doesn’t stand out anymore.
Plus, as you can see in the second screenshot (Safari) and the one below (Firefox 3), it doesn’t stand out at all when you hover over it on Mac browsers (no idea how it looks on a PC):

Perhaps they could have done away with that “fancy” gradient, and made the outline more defined.
Then again, it is much less bulky than the old one had become.

Will this lead Google to redesign its oh-so-convenient website?

Small update: it’s all over the web now. It seems most people prefer the old favicon, but many of the opinions voiced here and there tend to show that people either hate it or like it a lot. Funny how when Google sneezes, the internet shivers.

Update 2: poll added:

[poll id="2"]

Update 3: it seems that Google has published a small explanation of their choice. Interesting read, though it doesn’t convince me: it seems they are accepting new designs, if you have any ideas!

Update 4, 11th of January 2009: well, they’ve re-designed it again.

The website has only been truly complete for a few hours now, because I now believe no more changes are needed (though the past week has been just about tweaking). This means I haven’t yet received any real feedback (except from a couple of friends), and so I cannot say I’ve learnt anything from the potential users.
But as a web designer (an amateur, really), there are so many things I’ve learnt over the past month that I feel it necessary to write down the most important of them.

First of all, the default font.

As I started this website thinking about the design, I soon realised I had no idea what the best fonts should be.
See, when I designed the original Arpia website, I just tried to find information on what fonts would exist on all computers. This means the default fonts were as follows: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica and finally the generic sans-serif (for non-webdesigners, the browser will first check if the first one exists, and if not, move on to the second).

But those aren’t the best. Really. Some people made a movie about Helvetica, because it’s ever-present, but when asked why Helvetica was still so popular 50 years after its creation, type designer Erik Spiekermann asked "Why is bad taste ubiquitous?" (source). I think it’s ugly, but that’s just me.

So in the end, based on lots of research (and notably this webpage), I decided to go as follows: Lucida Grande, Lucida Sans Unicode, Lucida, Verdana, Arial, and the generic sans-serif. Perhaps it’s because I’m on a Mac, but I truly feel Lucida Grande to be the greatest font designed for the screen. I’ve tried to replace my OS X system fonts, but never found one that felt better than Lucida.

Next, the general layout.

Header

I designed the header and background early on, and though I believe I could still make the "R" in the "PETER" logo slightly nicer, I haven’t changed those elements in a while.

What really changed is the whole "buttons" section.

A friend, upon seeing the website, asked why on earth I was using Javascript for the very basic "Hover" effect. If you want to see what kind of effect it was, go to the old Arpia website and hover above the sidebar buttons. It’s an immediate change of status (from "normal" to "hover"), and it’s not really enjoyable. I started looking for "Pure CSS Hover" tutorials, and found none that explained it well enough. Plus, they still looked clunky.

And then I stumbled upon a website whose hover effect I really liked: PixelResort.com, the webpage of an icon designer (with some nice articles & tutorials). I realised that this "fade-in/fade-out" effect was much more powerful and enjoyable than my old "mouseover" technique.

Main body

Until I decided to add a WordPress blog (after a comment by a friend who basically said "Nice website. More content?"), I had a darker colour scheme for the text backgrounds, and it never felt perfect. The text was near-white, and the text background was dark blue (so dark it looked black).
At first, I had a really ugly gradient effect between the text background and the main background, and when a friend suggested I make it more "Web 2.0", I took a look Jonas Rask’s website (another icon designer), because I knew it to be one of the sleekest websites I knew.
The design got much better, but it still wasn’t perfect.

Then came WordPress and a shift of perspective.
The default theme for WordPress is the epitome of "cleanliness" in webpages, and it went so well (in my opinion) with the header and background that I decided to adopt it for the rest of the website.

Finally, browser support.

Back in the old days of designing the Arpia website, Safari for Windows didn’t exist, Safari 3 for Mac wasn’t even an idea, and the same went for Firefox 3. IE6 was still very much the norm in the Windows world, and so I had to take it into account. All the same, there was one thing I still couldn’t make cross-browser compatible (the Arpia logo, if you look at it in IE6, still isn’t well positioned – I can’t remember if it does place it well in IE7 or not).

Today, however, IE6 is nearly seven years old. And after reading a number of articles on the web, I decided that I was not going to support it. Turned out that PixelResort.com didn’t either, so I took a look at the code used.
And here is the result.
However, this webpage does not say why I decided not to support IE6 and older versions.

Reasons for dropping IE6

Over the past seven years, web developers have found and implemented a number of "hacks" to force Internet Explorer to render websites "as they should appear". IE6 has a number of shortcomings in terms of standards support, even image format support, not to mention the security problems for Windows users.
Paradoxically, this continued use of hacks has made users unaware that there are alternatives to IE, and that IE itself is outdated, which means few users moved to better browsers.

However, Microsoft seems to have finally understood that IE6 is a plague, and therefore introduced an automatic upgrade system in early 2008 to get most users on Windows XP to upgrade to IE7.
I therefore believe that it is time for all web developers to start giving some serious thought to dropping IE6 support (among those who visited arpia.be in the past two years, the percentage of IE6 users has dropped significantly – but perhaps this is due to an increase in traffic from students, who usually haven’t even heard of IE6 in years).

There, I believe this is a summary of the most important things I’ve learnt from this experience.
And I’m satisfied with the result.