Archive | 2005

Compare The Rhetoric

15 Sep

Its no secret. I’m firmly of the opinion that Lenny Schafer is a borderline bigot. He recently wrote an open letter to his Evidence of Harm list mates which I repeat below:

I should like to provide a summary to this encirculing (sic) discussion. The autistics condemnation of those who seek a cure for autism rely on two rhetorical devices to do so. First, is their special, cultural and vague definition of autism. The other is a cynical definition of “cure”. The autistic movement indeed condemns parents who do not agree with their creed. They have joined legal efforts to restrict the funding of ABA programs in Canada and often engage the media to attack parents who seek cures for their children.

Let there be no mistaking it, the “don’t cure autism” rhetoric is little more than a vehicle for parent bashing. This is both irrational and unjust. It may not be Stephen Shore’s intent to condemn anyone, but the movement for which he attempts to apologizes for does; it is not so easy to weasel away one’s personal support of such efforts with platitudes about helping people. This is not just about honest differences of opinion; this is about a creed who intends to interfere with the quest of parents to relieve their children from the misery of clinical autism.

Its the same old stuff from Schafer. Clinical autism. Yeah. Parent bashing. Right. He acts out of fear and a closed mind. By contrast, here’s a recent post from Wade Rankin. Its a long post which needs to be read in full but the last two paragraphs spoke to me:

In the biomedical community, we often throw around the word “cure.” When I use that word, I know what I mean and most other people who practice biomedical know what I mean. We are seeking to alleviate the dysfunctional aspects of ASD in our children. We will never alter the genetic makeup of our children, and to the extent genes make them autistic, they will remain autistic. I can live with that. But I believe that one or more environmental insults has acted in concert with my son’s genetic makeup to create stumbling blocks that keep him from using all of this gifts. I cannot believe I am wrong in trying to reduce the effects of those environmental insults.

On the other hand, when I am confronted with the eloquence of Kathleen Seidel or the extraordinary testimony of an adult with autism who wants no “cure,” I have to realize that the issues surrounding ASD are not easily addressed by one-size-fits-all answers. Could the “cure” we seek help other people who reject biomedical interventions? Perhaps, but that’s not a necessary given. More importantly, that’s not my choice to make.

Wade Rankin.

How refreshing. Someone at least prepared to question and look. I know I’ve thought differently of some of the people involved in the Biomedical camp since encountering Wade online. I don’t agree with his use of the word ‘cure’ and I wonder if he were autistic himself whether or not he would see enough of his behaviour as dysfunctional enough to _require_ a cure but I also believe he acts out of a genuine desire to help his children. I genuinely do not know what desires move a man like Lenny Schafer. All I know that reading what he writes is like feeling a cold wind on one’s spine. He’s become the poster boy for intolerance.

The best thing about Wade is that he is obviously a man who understands the power that words carry. Unlike Schafer who uses his words as a blunt weapon, Wade is often reflective to the point of hesitancy when trying to explain his thoughts. Its so refreshing to hear someone from the Biomed camp describe gettingthetruthout.org as ‘extraordinary’. I shudder to think what Schafer would describe that site as and I genuinely have no desire to hear his thoughts on the matter.

The Evidence of Harm maillist recently ‘outed’ Orac. They published his real name, contact info including tel number on EoH. Various hangers on repeated the information on their own sites. Schafer did nothing to prevent this although he recently become apoplectic when Jerry Newport of AutAdvo apparently did the same to him. maybe he thought it was just revenge.

However, a lot of EoH members protested this stupidity and questioned the motives of the EoH attack dogs like Ashleigh Anderson, who did the ‘outing’. A few people left expressing disgust with what the list had become.

EoH maillist is crumbling. I hope when it does crumble that out of the rubble steps a man like Wade to create a group that is capable of thinking instead of blindly lashing out. He is an honourable man with honourable intent. A lot of people on EoH would benefit from a leader less prone to bigotry and more prone to reflection. I sincerely hope they get it.

Microsoft IE/DOM Naming Conventions

13 Sep

I’ve recently had occasion to get more heavily into DOM and AJAX scripting and I have to say I’m quite enjoying it. I’ve ordered Jermey Keith’s new book on the subject but In true impatient style have got on with it a bit.

The last time I really used Javascript consistently was when we didn’t care how we used onclick attributes or cluttering our markup with frightening amounts of functions in links. It always vaguely annoyed me back then but I didn’t have the Javascript expertise to address my concerns and besides, a lot of the stuff I really wanted to do wasn’t implemented in various browsers or was too haphazard.

Javascript has undergone something of a redemption of late – and why not? As Jeremy keith and others show, its fairly easy to make Javascript unobtrusive, accessible and as an interface enhancement as oppose to something thats just ‘cool’ with no real purpose.

The MagpieRSS/AJAX parser on the home page of this site is not very well coded but it enabled me to get to terms with the basics of doing and at some point I can revisit it and concentrate on doing it well.

But already I’ve run across an amusing throwback to the dear old days of browser sniffing because of a (ahem) certain browser.

Consider the following code:

if(subLinks[i].getAttribute("class") == "ddown")

I know the double equals signs are missing. I have no idea why but they just won’t render.

Its part of a larger object but I’ve taken it out so we can look at it in isolation. Its a fairly easy piece of code. Its saying, if the value of the ‘class’ attribute of the elements I’ve isolated is ‘ddown’….then go on to do something later in the code. Simple eh?

Except life’s never like that with IE is it? Try as I might, this line of code was tripping me up in IE. It worked fine in Moz, FFox and the latest version of Opera but no joy in IE. After a search I turned up this:

When retrieving the CLASS attribute using this method, set the sAttrName to be “className”, which is the corresponding Dynamic HTML (DHTML) property.

MSDN.

So is it? Are MS doing it right and everyone else doing it wrong? This seems highly unlikely.

Anyway, I now had to use a way of setting the right value for the right client. Luckily, because I was using AJAX I already had this:

if (window.XMLHttpRequest) {	  
	 .....
  }else if (window.ActiveXObject) {
      ......
  }

to name my request object,so I modified it slightly to add:

if (window.XMLHttpRequest) {	  
	  var classFix ="class";
  }else if (window.ActiveXObject) {
         var classFix ="className";
  }

And changed the offending line of code to:

if(subLinks[i.]getAttribute(classFix) == "ddown")

Now I’m not enough of an AJAX whiz to know if this is the right or wrong way or if this is a known issue or if I’ve missed something simpler. Please let me know if I have.

Getting The Truth Out

11 Sep

Awhile ago, the Autism Society of America rebadged and relaunched themselves. Their website was overhauled and they launched an accompanying campaign which can be found at http://www.gettingthewordout.org – its very slick, very professional and totally misleading.

By contrast I urge people to visit Getting The Truth Out which is a much more realistic look at autism.

Its a big site and you’ll need at least a spare hour but please – when you go, read it all in one go. Don’t stop halfway through. Lots of people won’t get the message if they stop halfway through. It might be a very different message than the one you were expecting.

In places, for us parents, its not an easy read.

In other places it feels like we as parents have to accept that whilst we know our kids well we don’t know autism as well as autistics.

In still more places, this is a read full of hope and confirmation that difference is not equatable to bad or something that requires curing.

I’ll leave you with the plea to go visit this site whomever you are. Instead of donating money to a charity this week, please invest some of your time in reading this:

The young woman in this picture has autism, a debilitating developmental disorder that affects communication, socialization, and behavior.

The spots where she doesn’t have hair on her head are because she pulled it out so much that it never grew back. Self-injurious behavior is a common symptom. It’s easier to deal with her hair-pulling if her hair is cut very short.

The Autism Society of America (ASA) says that 1 in 166 people are diagnosed as somewhere on the autistic spectrum. They say that there is one autism diagnosis every 20 minutes.

Parents are devastated.

She can’t speak, so this website is speaking for her and many others like her. Our aim is to portray some of the realities of living with autism.

Once more I urge you: please find out the truth about autism.

The Coming Gold Rush

10 Sep

Prometheus publishes an article that I hope he doesn’t object to me reproducing below. The reason I do is due to the extreme importance of Prometheus’ message. Comments are turned off on my post. If you wish to comment follow this link or the one at the bottom of this post and comment on Prometheus’ blog:

From the “Evidence of Harm” Yahoo group:

With the news articles about the possibility of gold helping children with autism I wonder if something like this might help my grandson. I would like to know if anyone has given this to their child with autism.

Which was in response to a story by – who else! – Dan Olmsted, UPI’s senior autism-mercury editor. In his story, Mr. Olmsted has tracked down one of the patients in Leo Kanner’s landmark article on autism, Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact (1943).
This man, identified as Donald T., is now 72 years old and experienced a significant, if not dramatic, improvement in his autistic behaviors at age 14 (or 12 – the story contradicts itself on this point) after receiving injections of gold salts as treatment for life-threatening rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Mr. Olmsted and – since the article – a growing number of parents of autistic children, postulate that the gold injections were the cause of his improvement. Puberty is another event that happened at about the same time, but was discounted.

Mr. Olmsted’s understanding of how gold might help autism is – as you might expect – tied in with the autism-mercury hyposthesis. In his article, Mr. Olmsted explains it thusly, in a quote from JB and Lisa Handley of “Generation Rescue”:

It is no surprise that gold salts improved Donald T.’s ‘autism.’ As gold miners as far back as the Roman Empire would tell you, gold and mercury have a strong binding affinity for each other, and the gold salts likely acted as a rudimentary chelator to help Donald T. detoxify. (Mercury is used in gold mining to separate small particles of gold from sand.)

Yes, mercury was (and still is) used to separate gold from its ore – metallic mercury. The gold dissolves (amalgamates) in the mercury. This reaction can only occur when both the gold and the mercury are in the metallic state.

The gold used to treat Donald T’s RA was a salt – the gold was an ion and not able to amalgamate with metallic mercury. In addition, mercury in animal tissue is also either ionized or chemically bonded with organic groups (e.g. methyl, ethyl, phenyl…) and also not able to form an amalgam.

None of this seems to have stopped the speculation that gold may be either the next “cure” for autism or, at the least, a vindication of the much-battered chelation therapy.

Clearly, the current state of our knowledge of the chemistry of gold and mercury does not support the “chelation hypothesis”. And the prospect of gold becoming the next “cure” for autism is very ominous.

I could go on and on about the potential toxicity of gold treatment, but I think that a 2001 study in the Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases said it the best:

GST [gold sodium thiomalate] is more toxic than MTX [methotrexate] but it remains an effective alternative in patients in whom MTX may not be tolerated…

Gold sodium thiomalate is injected gold and methotrexate is a cancer chemotherapeutic agent that is often used in more severe autoimmune diseases (of which RA is one).

In the right hands, with proper monitoring and for a disorder in which it is known to work, gold therapy is a useful – if not first line – treatment. However, our only indication that gold might help autism is a single case from the 1940’s.

This rather slim reed of evidence is made even slimmer by the fact that gold therapy has continued in used to the present time. Gold therapy is used in severe cases of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis (JRA) often enough that at least a few autistic children with JRA must have been treated with gold.

Yet the first we hear of this startling new therapy option is from a case that occurred nearly sixty years ago.

Before embarking on this 21st Century Gold Rush, I hope that someone will bother to look and see if any autistic children receiving gold for JRA or other autoimmune disorders have reported the same sort of improvement.

Lives may be in the balance.

Injectible and oral gold are much more toxic – and have the potential for much longer-lasting toxicity – than almost any of the other therapies currently advocated for autism.

Let’s look before we leap.

Comment on Prometheus’ blog

Back To School For Megan

8 Sep

This is an important year for Megan’s education. Last year was very successful for her and we were very proud of the amount of effort and work she put in to progress as much as she did but still, it was in a very non-academic environment – almost like a very structured Nursery – and this year is the first year of ‘proper’ schooling with teachers expecting significant feedback and measurable targets and all that.

Obviously, there’s been lots of discussion between us and the school about how suitable these things are for Megan and there’s widespread agreement and understanding that she’ll need a lot of latitude in certain situations. She’s also not very familiar with her two new-ish support workers who she only met for about a week before the end of term in July.

Its also unfortunate that she’s going through a period of not sleeping very well. Wake up time is around 2am so she’s pretty tired by the time its time to get ready for school. As are we!

However, as with most things, our wonderfully stoic daughter has taken all this pretty much in her stride (or so it seems. Calm waters can sometimes hide strong currents so we take care to take nothing for granted). Naomi reported that she _ran_ into school on Tuesday and actually had a minor meltdown when it was time to go home. Thats not great obviously but better that than the other way around!

Yesterday, her afternoon support worker said that she was very chatty and communicable – leading her (the support worker) by the hand to the things she wanted or (occasionally) asking outright. I think its fair to say that Meggy loves school.

However, as I said at the start we have to be aware that this is something of a make or break year for Megan. The tight structure could work both ways. It could make her feel more secure and know whats expected of her, or it could add too much pressure to feel she has to conform to (to her) an alien way of thinking. If the latter does happen then we’ll need to think long and hard about where we go next. Our only really viable option in terms of state education is a special school but we’ve already been there for a look around and it wasn’t a good experience.

That leaves private education which we simply cannot afford. The prices for autism specific private education are outrageous. We may be able to get the LEA to either fund or part fund it but this is very very unusual.

Its at times like this that I do get genuinely jealous with the options parents of non special needs kids have. If they don’t like a school, they can swap to another one with very little hassle. If we feel a school isn’t right for Megan, our next choice is usually a school that we feel is even _less_ right for her.

Who Are My Competition And How Do I Compete?

8 Sep

When you’re optimising a site to get a good placement in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), it vital to try and isolate who your _actual_ competition is. This process of course starts with your keyphrases.

Lets say we’re optimising a page for a mortgage brokers. We might be tempted to try and optimise for the word ‘mortgage’. This would be slow suicide. When optimising for very popular and established markets you need to be honest with your client. Don’t tell them you can get a top 30 ranking for a word like ‘mortgage’ as you can’t. Not unless they have an unlimited budget and an expectation of the process taking several years. Instead we need to identify some less popular keyphrases, ensuring of course that they are actually used at all!

Head over to DigitalPoints excellent and free Keyword Suggest tool. This excellent script queries Overture and Wordtrackers keyphrase database to see whatelse is returned for a given word/phrase and how popular each alternate phrase is.

Type ‘mortgage’ in the box and choose UK (if you want to follow my process – feel free to select your own country, the principle remains the same but I’ll be referring to UK numbers here). You’ll have to enter an antispam Catchpa but thats no hardship.

When the results come up, you’ll get two columns, one with Wordtracker results and one with Overture results. The numbers to the right of each result tells you how many searches _per day_ are done on that phrase/word.

Basically, the lower the number, the less competition you have. You can count on a conversion rate of between 2% – 4% so (for example) the phrase ‘100 Mortgage’ (which is searched for 370 times per day) will lead to between 7 and 15 click throughs to the client site a day (assuming I can get somewhere on page 1 or 2 – maybe 3). Bear in mind this isn’t the same as a _conversion_ rate. I have no way of knowing what your clients conversion rate is.

From those lists I would be tempted to have a go at anything under 300 returns per day – don’t go too low as it won’t be worth your time optimising for the return you’ll (not) get. If you feel braver then go higher. If you’re less confident, go lower.

Copy and paste all your desired phrases into a text editor and switch your attention to Google. We’re going to find out who our real competion is in the worlds most popular search engine.

Lets go with ‘online mortgage’ which returns about 100 times per day. Do an ordinary Google search (remember, I’m using google.co.uk so details might differ from your results.

Using that phrase I get 44,800,000 results. Yikes. thats a lot of competition. Except not all of it is. We need to narrow it down to see who we’re really up against.

Google adds weight to keywords/phrases in certain HTML elements – the tag for example. So lets see who uses this phrase in their page titles. Copy and paste the following into the Google search box:

allintitle:online mortgage

This little switch returns a set of results of pages that use the phrase ‘online mortgage’ in the element. Notice how much our competition level has dropped – from 44,800,000 to 334,000. thats a big, big drop. Still, thats quite a formidable number.

Its also well known that Google adds weight to a page if those who link to it use the keyword/phrase that is trying to be optimised. Lets see about that:

allinanchor:"online mortgage"

This returns about 129,000 results for me.

So now we have a more realistic idea of the amount of people who are actively trying to do business on that phrase. What we need to do now is find out how well they are doing. This is easy. Make a note of each distinct domain going back about 3o results and go to each page in turn. If they’re spamming or blackhatting in any way, report them (all’s fair in love and war).

After you’ve checked them out, go back to Google and type in:

www.kevinleitch.co.uk -site:www.kevinleitch.co.uk

Obviously switch my domain for the site you’re researching. This will give you a set of results based on people who are linking to the target site. I know about the ‘link:’ switch before anyone mails me – its just not very accurate. Go through the first 30 results for each of your results and make a note of each unique site. When you’ve done this for each result you should have a substantial list of people who you can now approach to ask about giving you a link – after all they did it for your clients competitors so they’re likely to do it for you too. they might charge you though so be sure to make the terms clear.

This is a long, slow, time consuming process but it will pay off for your client. Not immediately, but by being realistic on the keywords/phrases your client should target from the word go you aren’t going to be stuck optimising for a word or phrase that you’ll never stand a chance of ranking well for.

Chelation Therapists Are Spammers

7 Sep

Its no secret in the SEO (search engine optimisation)community that blogs are structured to do very well in search engines. The centrality of the subject together with the bonding of ever-growing communities means most search engine algorithms spider blogs perfectly.

Consequently, anyone wishing to do well in Search Engine rankings could do worse than get themselves a blog. And so, we finally come to blog spam – the setting up of a blog that is maintained solely to push people towards commercial products.

Its no surprise that a murky subject like Chelation has its practitioners indulging in blog spam. The underhand always find an underhand way of bucking the system.

Let me welcome you to ChelationTherapyTKV. Quite obviously a spam blog due to the fact that is totally dead apart from ‘Sarah’ its alleged owner. This spam blog is relatively new and thus won’t do very well in search engines yet. In another 9 months or so it should be doing very well for its keyphrases. And boy aren’t _they_ obvious? Nearly _one tenth_ of all words on the front page alone were ‘chelation’. And they made sure the ,

and elements were well populated too. Oh and of course, there’s the obligatory AdSense campaign as well.

And tucked away in the in page links – what do we find? Links to very er, reputable companies such as….Energy Patch. Not _too_ sure how this applies to Chelation but hey – they probably were prepared to pay more for the link on the home page of the blog.

They also link to ArticleInsider which appears to be another SEO spam trap. “Click here for a leading Chelation Therapy for Autism resource” screams the page and helpfully links to CardioRenew – a bunch of quacks pushing EDTA for heart patients. Great autism resource. But wait – ArticleInsider has *loads* of helpful links on the left: if you visit every page you get a different Chelationist link everytime – I wonder how much the chelationists paid these spammers to set up the campaign?

Anyway, back to the blog. Yet another ‘article’ stuffed full of keywords and engine-friendly spam links us through to another spammed up landing page (a landing page is exactly what it sounds like – a page specifically set up for spammers to point to which in turn points to lots of different commercial spammers) – welcome to the authoritative Find Articles where no tin of spam is left unturned to aid you in your search for quackery. Google throw pages like this off their index each and every day. But first they have to know about them so I helpfully reported this virtual stew of spammery.

I also came across the caring folk at the Sanoviv clinic. How cool is that? Even big shot clinics pay for spammers to peddle their shit.

And so it seems that Chelation has joined forces with porn peddlers, Viagra hucksters, penis enlargement specialists, Telesales, phishers and other assorted lowlife. Quelle surprise.

Lenny Schafer Part IV: FAQtually Incorrect

7 Sep

Recently, Lenny Schafer made a post to the Evidence of Harm (EoH) maillist in which he helpfully prepared a FAQ on the NeuroDiversity movement. Unfortunately, he made several errors as one would expect from someone uninterested in accuracy and more interested in scoring points. I’ll seek to address them here. Please bear in mind that these are _my_ views of Neurodiversity. I’m not a spokesman, these are _my_ opinions having been ‘part’ of the Neurodiversity movement ever since my daughters needs and Mr Shafers bigotry drove me to become vocal.

How is “neuro” in NeuroDiversity (ND) defined medically?

It is not clinically, measurably defined. It would appear to self- apply to people who display neurologically based behavior that deviates from the norm (the NeuroTypical), but mostly applies to those who are high functioning. It mostly does not include those whose behavior is disabling as the result of treatable or curable medical disorder or disease.

1) It does not mostly apply to the ‘high functioning’ except insofar as that group so far make up the majority of ‘members’. Members of the Neurodiversity movement consider everyone, regardless of level of functionality to be diverse and to be valued as such.

2) It most certainly does include those ‘whose behaviour is disabling’. The belittling and lessening of the impact of those autistics who are not classed as ‘low functioning’ by Mr Schafer is both well documented and incorrect from a moral and medical perspective.

How does autism fit in?

ND campaigners promote a revised definition of autism that includes most high-functioning neuro-diverse behavior, regardless of actual diagnosis. However, its embrace excludes extreme disabling behaviors that are a result of medical pathology or developmental disorders. This ironically would exclude clinical autism, while including most of the rest of the autism spectrum, and any other-than-neurotypical high function behavior. This autism is a natural part of the normal
neurological landscape, is their argument. To treat or attempt to remedy that which is only different, but not pathological, is seen as a demeaning, if not a bigoted diminishing of the intended victim’s humanity. We can for the moment call this “autism-oranges”, to distinguish it from clinical autism, which we’ll call “autism-apples”.

But clinical autism, autism-apples, is not disabling as a result of social oppression and intolerance, although such attitudes certainly can add to it. Here autism is defined and measured by functional disability. Seeking remedy to the disabilities of autism is no more immoral than the desire to have the blind’s vision returned.

Autism-oranges excludes functional disability. Behavioral “differences” do not require remedial treatment and cures, only
acceptance and assistance.

Autism-apples is clinically defined by disability (DSM-IV). Treatment that leads to the restoration of ability is a rational and moral goal. Such treatment may also include social acceptance and assistance.

The NDs do not always acknowledge that their definition of autism has components opposite to the clinical definition. This definition shell game is employed to convert parents who express a humane desire to alleviate their children’s disability, autism-apples, into heartless, selfish intolerant monsters whose bigotry keeps them from accepting their children for who they are: autistic-oranges.

1) ‘ND’ proponents do not ‘promote a revised definition of autism’. In fact they promote the factual definition of autism as defined by various diagnostic criteria. Schafer – as ever – tries to make two things out of what is one – autism is autism.

2) Its embrace does not exclude anyone whos neurology differs from ‘the norm’. Including what Schafer refers to as ‘clinical autism’ by which he probably means ‘classical’ or Kanners autism.

3) What Schafer refers to as medical pathologies are probably what the medical world calls ‘comorbidities’ – these being the non-standard behaviours/conditions that sometimes occur to autistics such as lack of speech or ADHD or gastric problems. These things do not indicate a separate type of autism as they form no part of any diagnostic criteria. This is because they cannot be used to define or diagnose autism because they do not occur to all autistics unlike the differences covered by the triad of differences. Proponents of neurodiversity both accept and promote humane and non-dangerous methods of treatment to aid autistics in their struggle with their sometime very debilitating comorbidities. Out of the two communities (neurodiversity and the Schafer represented community) neither group states that treating comorbidities is unacceptable and only one seeks to repeat that error as fact.

4) Proponents of Neurodiversity have never, to my knowledge, labeled anyone as heartless for trying to alleviate the disabling comorbidities that their children may have. As a parent myself whos classically autistic daughter undergoes PECS and speech therapy I’ve never been castigated as ‘selfish’ or ‘a selfish intolerant monster’. On the other hand, I have been told by some parents who support Mr Schafer’s position, some of who are members of the EoH list, some of whom are Rescue Angels and some of whom identify with the goals of these groups that I and parents like me are child abusers, that may daughter is ‘a retard’ who should be ‘put down’, that I am scum, that I am an idiot, that I am stupid, that I have a psychological disorder, that I am evil, that I will go to hell, that I am a cunt, that I can ‘go fuck myself’, that I should ‘sit next to the nearest Arab with a rucksack’ (which I assume is a racist based wish that I become victim to a suicide bomber), that I am in the pay of ‘Big Pharma’, that I part of a loose association of lawyers protecting the interests of Pharma companies’…I could go on. I get lots of hate mail. Most of it comes from people with incredibly similar writing styles to those who populate the EoH maillist. My blog has been signed up to porn spam, corporate spam, software spam and at least three people have attempted to perform DOS (denial of service) attacks on my site.

What is the ND Agenda?

The group vitriol against parents is so pronounced, I find it difficult to believe that it is the welfare of my child that is at the
core of their agenda. Altruism has no such rage. I suspect we are but stand-in proxies for their own parents who they may hold responsible for bringing them into such an unfriendly world for autistic-oranges. The agenda seems more about revenge, than reform.

1) Even if that were true (which I can assure you it is not) how does one explain the many *parents* who believe in and follow the Neurodiversity credo? I can think of at least 10 parents who post comments to this blog who do not wish to treat their kids with dangerous treatments and who wish the world to change for the better of their kids rather than meekly accepting the worlds intolerance for the sort of people our kids are.

Overall Mr Schafer, your FAQ was not a FAQ but a ‘FAQ on a mission’. You again promote your singular and totally unsubstantiated and error strewn definition of autism and then expect everything else to fall from that.

Recently, people with more tolerance and wisdom than you have attempted to find ways to reconcile neurodiversity and biomed proponents. These people seem to have no axe to grind, no diagnostic criteria to mangle and no politics to push. I would strongly suggest you step back and allow them to have their time. Your group is evolving into places you cannot seem to go.

Having A Mint? Nope.

6 Sep

So Mint got launched. The product site is gorgeous and you can almost taste the minty tang on your tongue as you surf around. Watch for it appearing in CSS Galleries over the next few days.

Regarding Mint itself: First things first. It also looks fantastic. But then its designed and built by Shaun Inman so thats hardly news. It also works like a dream but, again, its designed and built by Shaun Inman so, again, thats not a surprise.

What _is_ a surprise is how limited it is functionally. It picks up on browser share, visitors, searches. Its a Stats programme. Call me cynical but I was distinctly underwhelmed. Whats new here that justifies $30 per site?

Most disappointingly of all, you can’t configure it to hook straight into your server generated log files. Instead its dependant on Javascript to source all stats. Thats not good. Or as reliable as getting data straight from the source.

Now I know some people will say that its very simplicity (which seems to be becoming synonymous with ‘lack of standard functionality’ on the web these days) is its attraction – thats its easy to just get the most ‘vital’ data and go. Hm. What web stat application can you _not_ do that with? Personally, I’d rather have all the options I can and then invest some time in (gasp!) learning why they’re important and how to use them.

I don’t mean to knock Shaun Inman here. He’s a web designer/developer that the vast majority of us can only aspire to be as skillful as. Maybe thats why I’m so disappointed by this. The ‘Inman’ brand usually comes with an assurance of innovation and ‘must have’-ability (sorry for the word mangling).

I use Awstats on all my sites and the sheer power is hard to beat. Its also very well organised, dead easy to use and a doddle to find what you need. Its also free.

Mint on the other hand seems like its aimed at a ‘vanity’ audience who just want the quick warm glow of seeing which of their mates linked to them. Thats all very well but whats the point in that other than a quick ego-trip? A tool like Awstats by comparison allows you to develop a brand new skill – learning to read log files in order to better your SEO skills. If you’re in business then the better your SEO skills are, the more money you make. If you’re an agency or in-house developer then the better your SEO skills are, the more money you make for your company and the better your chances of career advancement are. How can you lose?

One area of interest might be Pepper which is basically an API to allow 3rd party developers to develop plugins for Mint. But to be honest, if I’ve already paid $30 per site when I can get 100 times the power for free then I expect much more functionality to be in the core product from the word go.

Is there some aspect I’ve missed here? Something that would blow me away?

Web 2.0? No Thanks.

5 Sep

Web 2.0 – I’ve seen the phrase now and again but I’m not big on hype and I wouldn’t consider myself a really early adopter so I just marked it away for future consideration and moved on. Over the last few months though I read an upsurge in articles about Web 2.0 and have a clearer idea about what it actually is.

What it is is hype with very little substance. Steady on now as I’m going to have a bit of a rant.

First is the idea of attaching a version number to an uncontrollable system. This is the most bullshit marketing aspect of the whole deal. The whole point of versioning software is to retain an aspect of control over its staged development.

It also seems to be an attempt to add ‘coolness’ to something which doesn’t need it, in much the same way as the year 2000 become known as Y2K. I really hated that too. A year (or the web) isn’t cool, it just _is_. If it needs to have coolness thrust upon it then its almost certainly a concept that isn’t a good idea.

Secondly is my fear that this is simply a way to wrap up a series of perfectly understandable and easy to access concepts in a containing idea that simply adds mystique where none is needed and might actually be counter productive. We have enough to learn as web designers/developers without having a totally unnecessary concept put upon us.

Lets have a look at the technical components that encompass Web 2.0:

CSS, semantically valid XHTML markup, and Microformats
Unobtrusive Rich Application techniques (such as Ajax)
Syndication of data in RSS/ATOM
Aggregation of RSS/ATOM data
Clean and meaningful URLs
Support posting to a weblog
REST or XML Webservice APIs
Some social networking aspects

Wikipedia

So basically, Web 2.0 is any halfway decent out-of-the-box blogging tool.

This leads me to strongly suspect that Web 2.0 is essentially a big old-boys club for web designers/developers. Once we were able to take the piss out of those lesser than us because we could code valid XHTML and they couldn’t. Now they’ve caught up we need to up the stakes to something else in order to maintain the old boys network.

What the hell was wrong with the ‘Semantic Web’? as a concept? At least it didn’t appear to be a way to exclude rather than include people, it didn’t place a stupid amount of emphasis on blogging and it had a totally valid purpose – to make the web more semantic and thus easier to understand. Most of all it didn’t have a bloody infantile ‘version number’.

WikiPedia sums it up:

An earlier usage of the phrase Web 2.0 was a synonym for Semantic Web. The two concepts are similar and complementary. The combination of social networking systems such as FOAF and XFN with the development of tag-based folksonomies and delivered through blogs and wikis *creates a natural basis for a semantic environment*.

Thats right, it does. And a naturally developed environment has no need to suffer through the bullshit of a hyperbolic naming and packaging process. Let the semantic web evolve and stop trying to coerce it.

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