Notes

Last month, I was reading through the posts on one of my favorite nerdy blogs, OSnews, and came across something that interested me enough that I felt the need to share it on my own blog: most websites use dark patterns to manipulate their users to perform actions desirable for the website owner, but generally not for the user.

A global internet sweep that examined the websites and mobile apps of 642 traders has found that 75,7% of them employed at least one dark pattern, and 66,8% of them employed two or more dark patterns.

Dark patterns are defined as practices commonly found in online user interfaces and that steer, deceive, coerce, or manipulate consumers into making choices that often are not in their best interests.

ICPEN

As I said, I originally read it on OSnews, so here is the link to the post there. I couldn’t agree more with what the author wrote about it there. Having to deal with cookie banners is annoying enough, but then having to click through a hundred different popups just to get to the actual content of the website is really off-putting.

In fact, I make it a point to never sign up for anything I have to close in order to access a website’s content. Want me to sign up for your newsletter? You’d better damn well not make me deal with it before I’ve had a chance to even see what your site has to offer. Want me to not block ads on your website? Maybe you’d be better off letting me see the content on your website first before I make that decision.

It’s frustrating and leads to the worst user experience you can have. Marketers and business people may not understand that, but it doesn’t take a lot of common sense to see why such dark patterns are so utterly obnoxious.

Sources

• https://www.osnews.com/story/140203/majority-of-websites-and-mobile-apps-use-dark-patterns/
• https://icpen.org/news/1360

I don’t often post memes or other images I find on the internet because I prefer original content. However, sometimes I stumble upon one that really just hits the nail on the head and this is one of them.

I love computers and programming, but I somehow hate them at the same time. Sometimes I really do wish I could retreat to a cabin in the woods and never have to use any computer or derivative (i.e. smartphone, table, etc) ever again.

For me, that’s usually a sign that I’m tired, burnt out, and ready for a break. At that point, it’s time to take a vacation and leave most of my technology at home. Afterward, I come back feeling refreshed and ready to dive into programming once again.

“Notes” is a new category on my blog where I am going to post small, interesting things I stumble upon. It might be links or images or tidbits of information. I really don’t know what all I will post here, but I have a ton of ideas and inspiration and feel like I need a spot to post small things without much comment.

And this is that place.

Is it really though?

There really isn’t a whole lot to say about this topic other than that PHP is still the stalwart of the internet. New languages come and go, get popular and fade, but PHP still remains dominant.

I used to use PHP for all of my personal projects, but have since moved on to TypeScript/Node.js for most the most part. That is primarily due to being able to share code between frontend frameworks such as React and the backend which makes maintainability and development much easier for a single developer.

I do, however, still maintain several WordPress websites that each have their own custom themes and/or plugins which I’ve programmed in PHP and it really isn’t all that bad.

As terrible as a lot of people find PHP, a language with that sort of staying power and robustness can’t be as bad as some people make it out to be. That might be a controversial statement for a lot of developers, but I would argue it wouldn’t be so widespread otherwise.

Anyway, enough of my ramblings. This post really had no point other than to share the graphic.