Ejoh

About a month ago, when I had absolutely nothing to challenge my brain with except thinking about life, I made the above image. I was thinking about how people always seem to blame other things than themselves. That particular day I tried to write down what my friends blamed for various unfortunate happenings in their lives, quite a bit of fun actually. I encourage everyone to think about it a little extra after reading this blog post.

Anyway, once I had a small list I wrote a little note, used my scanner and then published it to the web. What I didn’t realize was that so many of you nice visitors would come to my site to see it, about 35 000. For me and my website at least, that is an immense number and I was really exited about it. The next day I received an interesting email from my host saying: You’re currently using up plenty of our resources for your site. Ejoh has a massive CPU-usage per user.

That is the main reason for me switching to this new layout, almost without images. It is a pre-made template but since I haven’t got the time to fix something else immediately it’ll have to do for now.

I’d love to hear what you think of the image. Have a nice day!

Running a big community web site with lots of users is like skating on very thin slippery ice. I have very little experience from doing that but I recently saw a big Swedish site perish under its furious users. The site, Bilddagboken, is a image uploading tool which allows you to view your images to other people much like Flickr and also comes with a diary for every user. Yesterday they decided to publish a set of new features along with a new fresh design.

Unfortunately for them the design loaded very slow in the beginning, for various reasons, and the users weren’t happy. Although the new style was far more pleasant to the eye than the old one they decided they didn’t like it. Probably because so much had changed that it was impossible to navigate through the site when you had learned another way to do it.

So, how do you launch a new design and keep your user base pleased?

1. Don’t change too much
   Your users don’t want to have to look for the features on your site on other places than where they expect them to be.
2. Test
   Never launch a design on a community site which has not been tested thoroughly. Your visitors will kill you if things don’t work the way they’re expected to.
3. Keep things simple
   Before doing extreme, futuristic design, you should make sure you have something simple that really works and is well thought through.

I am sure you could have figured out these three simple things on your own but it seems some big sites have not.

It’s not normal for me to feature videos on my blog but since one of my friends, a girl with very intimidating but beautiful eyes, asked me if I was going to publish anything soon I decided to do so.

These three clips come from a very good Swedish comedy called Kopps. Kopps is a deliberate misspelling of Cops if you didn’t get that. Anyway, the movie is about a police district in Sweden that the Police Chief has decided should be removed because of its low efficiency. The local cops aren’t very excited about it, which is understandable, and they start doing stupid things to make him change his mind. The clips feature one of the more violent cops and I think you’ll enjoy them. At least I hope so.

The videos can be seen here: http://ejoh.zmolklife.com/fs/kopps.html

Unfortunately the rest of the movie is in Swedish.