posted 05-20-1999 12:24 AM               

You've received a fork in the head from: ** (******@yahoo.com)
for the following problems with your site : (www.sohodojo.com):

This fork-o-gram has been brought to you by forkinthehead.com.

Fork response: Far out! Our first fork. Okay, okay... so, our Open Directory Project submission reviewer went easy on us. Why, we even ended up with a Cool Site award!

posted 07-22-1999 03:54 PM               

You've received a fork in the head from: ** (******@AlliedSignal.com)
for the following problems with your site : (www.sohodojo.com):

This fork-o-gram has been brought to you by forkinthehead.com.

Fork response: Dear Name-withheld-to-protect-the-forker,

Thank you for the eloquent fork. We certainly agree with you that proper grammar is important. This is doubly true when it comes to on-line communication at a content-driven website such as http://sohodojo.com .

We are, however, somewhat limited in our ability to respond to the specific page, paragraph and/or sentence which sparked you to action. This limitation is due to the limits of the first-generation 'Fork-O-Gram' service.

The Good Folks at forkinthehead.com are founding co-sponsors of The Open Fork Alliance. Together, we are working on a more informative Flying Fork window which will tell forkees the specific page forked.

Unfortunately, Gen-2 forking technology is not available yet. So, we encourage you to use the following "Advanced Forking" technique:

1. Open a Flying Fork window as soon as you come to an OFA site. You're ready to fork at a moment's notice.

2. Something forkable grabs your attention. You spring to action.

3. Click to highlight the URL address displayed in your browser. (The address will probably be highlighted. If not, click-and-drag or shift-arrow to select the entire URL address.)

4. Copy the URL from your browser window address line and paste it into the 'offending URL (forkee)' text field at the top of your open Flying Fork window.

5. Complete and fire off the fork.

And, as in your case Anonymous Forker, if there is a specific sentence or paragraph that triggers the fork, don't hesitate to use the text copy-and-paste technique within your browser window to grab specific content. Paste the offending text in the fork form and add your comments.

This 'Advanced Forking' method is the best way to bring fine-grained feedback to our attention.

Anonymous Forker, we truly are committed to website integrity and visitor satisfaction. We thank you for your fork, and encourage you to keep up the good work. Your feedback helps us to improve sohodojo.

As members in good standing of the Open Fork Alliance, we have posted your fork and this response in the sohodojo Forks O'Shame forum here: http://sohodojo.com/forums/Forum11/HTML/000001.html.

Best Regards... and Happy Forking!
--Jim and Timlynn--

P.S. Anonymous forker, it is interesting how your own fork inadvertently strengthens your point. The nonstandard and widely-used non-word word, 'irregardless', has its origins in the colloquial transmutation of irrespective and regardless.

Jim and Timlynn,

My use of irregardless wasn't inadvertent. I'm relieved that you got the point. Not everyone does.

What triggered my gag reflex was on http://sohodojo.com , upper right-hand
corner. "The nanocorps is comprised of (sic) the finest-grained players in the internet-based global economy."

The commonly accepted rule, "The whole comprises the parts; The whole is composed of the parts," is now ignored more often than not and the penalty is that the presenter comes off as pedantic.

pedant \Ped"ant\, n. [F. p['e]dant, It. pedante, fr. Gr. ?
to instruct, from pai^s boy. See Pedagogue.]
1. A schoolmaster; a pedagogue. [Obs.] --Dryden.
A pedant that keeps a school i'th' church. --Shak.
2. One who puts on an air of learning; one who makes a
vain display of learning; a pretender to superior knowledge.
--Addison.
A scholar, yet surely no pedant, was he.
--Goldsmith.
Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary

pedant n : a person who pays more attention to formal
rules and book learning than they merit [syn: bookworm, scholastic]
Source: WordNet (r) 1.6

Do I see something of myself in the latter definition?

Regards and good luck in your endeavors,

Anonymous Forker

Interesting. This is great feedback. Thanks for taking the time clarify your recent fork of sohodojo's homepage.

You get at the heart of an issue that we have had on the backburner. And the issue is, indeed, one of linguistic ambiguity.

As you point out, we have too-loosely used the word spelled n-a-n-o-c-o-r-p-s in two contexts. Pronounced 'nanocore', we use it to collectively reference all nanocorp businesses; like we have the Army Corps of Engineers. The second use is the more-frequent plural form, pronounced 'nanocorpse', to reference more than one nanocorp business (but not the set of all nanocorp businesses).

So the homepage sentence you reference is ambiguous. As a result, we are changing the sentence to read more simply as "Nanocorps are the finest-grained players in the Internet-based global economy." Also, the phrase 'home of the nanocorps and small business revolutionaries' has changed to the singular 'home of the nanocorp and small business revolutionaries'.

Congratulations, Anonymous Forker, you are our 'Fork Of The Day'!

Best Regards,
--Jim and Timlynn--

P.S. I have updated this fork's posting in the Forks O'Shame accordingly. If you want to see the fruits of your fork, don't forget to reload the page at http://sohodojo.com so that the new version overwrites the copy in your browser cache.

posted 07-26-1999 01:10 PM               

You've received a fork in the head from: ***** (******@regas.net)
for the following problems with your site : (www.sohodojo.com):

This fork-o-gram has been brought to you by forkinthehead.com.

Fork response: Dear Name-withheld-to-protect-the-forker,

Our first TWO-TINE fork! Ouch and thanks.

User interface and site navigation are most important to us at sohodojo, so we truly do appreciate your fork.

sohodojo is a content-driven, special interest site, so we subscribe to a 'ruthlessly simple' style of HTML coding.

You won't find multiple-versions of our site for various browsers, no plug-ins, etc. Not even server-side tweaking of the overall 'look and feel' specified in the 'body' tag of our pages.

We subscribe to the "If you can't write the raw HTML in a text editor without the aid of a WYSIWYG authoring tool, it's too complex" school of page composition.

Currently, the only Javascript on our pages is a function which determines whether the visitor is on a single-window (WebTV, for example) browser or the more typical multi-windowable PC-based browser.

Our design target is to have an easily user-configurable user interface through a simple control panel. It is not there yet. Step one, where we are now, is to have very clean, simple pages which can be programmatically transformed based on user preferences.

About the background color...

On the technical side, this color is among those recommended for WebTV display. We strongly believe that websites should not set artificial barriers to access. Designing to the latest greatest dynamic capabilities of the major browsers sends the unspoken messages about who is 'worthy' to access a site.

On the aesthetic side, we wanted a color which evoked rice paper, consistent with the dojo theme.

On WebTV, the current color is almost invisible. It almost looks white. But this pale background is subtly different when rendered on a television screen. Text displayed on this #F7EFD6 color is MUCH more readable than text on a plain white background.

On all the access devices we have used to see our site so far, this current color comes across as a very faint, non-patterned tan. Your description of our color scheme looking like "lumpy chunks of wet granola" suggests that our color choices and your particular display adapter resolution and color depth do not work well together.

Background solutions...

Would you, by any chance be on a Macintosh? All our Macs are ancient, black and white mono vintage beasts. So we have no direct experience seeing our sites on Macs in color.

More immediately, we'll point you to our Visitor's Center. Here you will find browser-specific recommendations about how you can tweak your browser settings to make our site (and other minimalist HTML sites, for that matter) look better to you.

In particular, you might like our favorite 'alternative' browser, Opera. Sohodojo is VERY Opera-friendly. With a quick click of an icon or two, you can toggle on-and-off graphics, background and text colors, font settings, etc. We even scale very well using Opera's whole-page magnification features.

About our pointless splash screen....

So, firstly, pointless? Perhaps. But one thing you can say for it, as splash screens go, at 4K for the page and with two gif images totaling less than 10K, it is a FAST LOADING pointless splash screen. So we haven't added insult to injury like most pointless splash screens.

As to our splash screen evoking a porn site warning page, well we'll have to plead ignorance. This may sound silly. We know they're there. We support the freedom of them being there. But honestly, we just don't visit them. So we are unfamiliar with such warning pages.

But seriously, there is so much in our society and the media telling us if you aren't rich, getting rich or living in Silicon Valley, then you are a nobody in Internet e-commerce terms.

Our splash screen is our way of saying, "This is us and our opinions, for better or worse. You are the reader, you decide."

Tip for regular visitors... We suggest bookmarking the News page rather than coming in through the 'front door' of the splash screen. By subscribing to this page, you can keep current on happenings at the dojo.

Bottom line....

Thanks for visiting sohodojo, and please, keep forkin'...
    --Jim and Timlynn--

[To which Anonymous Forker responded...]

Thanks for your insights into WebTV.

I will consider how I can improve our site (http://www.regas.net) and how I can make it more WebTV and alternative device accesible. We already have plans for recreating the entire site and sub-sites as text only for PDA, handicapped, and other access, but this is an area that, as you point out, needs to be paid attention to.

I am also already a subscriber of your newsletter and look forward to receiving my first issue. I signed up long before I decided to fork you. Speaking of forking... I think I might take the plunge and sign up with the OFA. I try not to dominate our sites with graphics (Anomaly is our most graphically rich site at http://www.regas.net/anomaly ), but use colored table cells instead, which segment the layout much better than graphics ever
can, and in much less space.

We are also in the process of migrating from FrontPage and into GoLive! as FPs code often leaves much to be desired (and cleaned up after).

Thanks again,
Anonymous Forker

[To which we responded...]

Hey Anonymous Forker,

We'd sure love to see you are a member of the Open Fork Alliance. It really is a humorous way to deal with a serious issue.

No matter how you try to design otherwise, folks will get frustrated or confused by content and navigation we see as oh-so-simple. Forking gives forks an immediate release to blow off some steam. I also think just knowing that you are there every page saying, 'Fork us if you want.', gives folks a secure feeling knowing that you are there to listen to complaints.

Open Forking goes hand-in-hand with our 'back to basics' approach to page design and site navigation. Here's one of the BEST articles I have read recently which says more about site navigation design than anything I have read. The 'scent trail' and 'information predator' metaphors are profoundly simple and powerful ideas. (Q&A With Jared Spool: Why Must Content Suck?.)

Timlynn and I hope to see you as a member of the Open Fork Alliance. And thanks for your interest in sohodojo.

Best Regards,
--Jim--