Cron best practices - <AUTHOR> https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/cron-best-practices/ <comment><USER2> The crontab command has one of the worst UI problems:

1\. "crontab -e" lets you edit your crontab file, and "crontab -r" deletes it (without asking). The two keys are next to each other.

2\. "crontab" (no arg) reads the contents of the crontab file from stdin and replaces it. When you accidentally hit Ctrl-D after it, your crontab is replaced with an empty file.

<comment><USER3> I did the "crontab -r" accidentally today . luckily I had a backup.

<comment><USER4> 'luckily' \- that's the strangest spelling of 'sanely' I've seen yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cronic ([http://habilis.net/cronic/](http://habilis.net/cronic/)) has been a real life-saver when it comes to using cron in production services. I've been using it for 4+ years without looking back.

<comment><USER6> There's also "chronic" in Moreutils [https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/](https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/) which seems to serve a similar purpose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I never edit a crontab directly. I use external files and reinstall them with "crontab filename" as needed. Then of course the files can be revision- controlled.

Also, I name the files according to host so I remember exactly where they were installed in a networked environment (e.g. "host1.crontab", "host2.crontab").

<comment><USER8> Interesting, newbie question: where do you put the x.crontab file and how do you get the system to run it? Thanks

<comment><USER9> I put per-user crontab stuff in ~/.cron/ not only cron-specific scripts go there, but ~/.cron/crontab is the (inactive) master copy of the crontab itself.

Make changes active with _`crontab ~ /.cron/crontab`_

Diff with _`diff -du <(crontab -l) <(cat ~/.cron/crontab)`_

For servers or not-my-own-user crontabs, config management is the way to go. The crontabs should be in a config management repository, so there's not just a single copy that's deployed and active.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> 0\. Use systemd timers instead.

OnCalendar= has a less insane format than cron, exit code and output logging, locking, proper command line tools, and other niceties like Persistent= (catch up e.g. after system was powered off) etc.

(And yes, you can still have user "cronjobs" if you enable systemd user session lingering.)

<comment><USER11> There are lots of ways of scheduling stuff out there. The systemd stuff is Linux only, so there isn't really any good reason to bother to learn it for trivial stuff like timed jobs. Cron is much the same everywhere.

<comment><USER12> It depends how frequently you use a server OS that isn't UNIX. SmartOS and OpenBSD are great, but they're not popular.

<comment><USER12> I mean _isn 't Linux_, obviously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A few notes that I think are worth going over:

1\. mysqldump can require quite a few more permissions than mentioned, depending on your utilization of mysql

2\. The best way I've found to test the cron-like environmentis by following this: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2135478/how-to- simulate-t...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2135478/how-to-simulate-the- environment-cron-executes-a-script-with)

Otherwise you run the risk of .profile (and similar) being loaded, where they will not be when run in the cron task.

3\. Extra emphasis on using a lock file to avoid overlapping cron tasks!

4\. I love using `time` or similar means to pass execution time somewhere (a log file, or a web hook), which helps with point 3.

</comment><comment><USER14> Cron best practices: use anything else.</comment>


The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work - <AUTHOR> http://deep.design/the-hamburger-menu/ <comment><USER3> I researched this topic a few days ago and beside the (excellent) article from James Archer, I found the following links worth reading:

       Why and How to Avoid Hamburger Menus[1]
       Hamburgers & Basements[2]
       An Update on the Hamburger Menu[3]
       The Hamburger is Bad for You[4]

A bit off-topic, but the Hamburger icon was actually invented at Xerox PARC[5].

[1] [https://lmjabreu.com/post/why-and-how-to-avoid-hamburger- men...](https://lmjabreu.com/post/why-and-how-to-avoid-hamburger-menus/)

[2] [http://jxnblk.tumblr.com/post/36218805036/hamburgers- basemen...](http://jxnblk.tumblr.com/post/36218805036/hamburgers-basements- why-not-to-use-left-nav)

[3] [http://jxnblk.tumblr.com/post/82486816704/an-update-on- the-h...](http://jxnblk.tumblr.com/post/82486816704/an-update-on-the- hamburger-menu)

[4] [http://mor10.com/hamburger-bad/](http://mor10.com/hamburger-bad/)

[5] [http://gizmodo.com/who-designed-the-iconic-hamburger- icon-15...](http://gizmodo.com/who-designed-the-iconic-hamburger- icon-1555438787)

</comment><comment><USER4> It's very interesting that Apple just adopted a hamburger menu for their apple.com redesign (mobile version). They even told everyone not to use hamburger menus at last year's WWDC! [1]

[1] WWDC 2014 Session 211 Designing Intuitive User Experiences @ 32:00, available here: [https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2014/](https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2014/)

Addendum: It's a responsive design so you can see this even on a desktop browser just by shrinking the width of the window. The top menubar collapses into a hamburger.

Addendum 2: Illustrated transcript here: [http://blog.manbolo.com/2014/06/30/apple-on-hamburger- menus](http://blog.manbolo.com/2014/06/30/apple-on-hamburger-menus)

<comment><USER5> Apple is very _very_ good at telling everybody else what not to do, then going and doing it themselves.

<comment><USER6> Apple, under Jobs in particular, reminded me of the schoolyard "cool kids" that would verbally piss all over something until they themselves could afford it.

Jobs loudly proclaimed that people didn't read, yet within a year Apple was selling ebooks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Before hamburger menus became popular, weren't people complaining about the exact opposite problem? That is, if you break out the menu items into more prominent interface elements (e.g., tab bar items), then you're at risk of cluttering your visual design with less-common functions. As in all things design, I suppose a balance needs to be found, but I personally don't find anything wrong with a hamburger menu per se.

Almost everything has or needs something like a hamburger menu _somewhere_. Can it be abused? Yes. Does that make it inherently bad? I don't think so.

<comment><USER8> > _I personally don 't find anything wrong with a hamburger menu per se._

The trouble, which the article describes with some case studies on engagement before and after hamburger menu implementations, is that people who are not you are confused by it and don't understand it to be a menu.

fwiw, I've encountered this quite a bit when helping users switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox or Chrome -- both of which use the stupid hamburger menu -- an users hate it and "being able to find things" is probably the number one reported reason that they go back to Internet Explorer.

ed: for a more specific example, look at Firefox or Chrome, try really hard to imagine that you are a first time user of that web browser, but you've used IE before, and then figure out how to do one of the most common things that people want to do with a web browser: bookmark a page.

<comment><USER9> >people who are not you are confused by it and don't understand it

This is the history of computers and users. So many technologies that seem completely intuitive now started out just like this. being confused by it and don't understand it is only a problem if stays that way like shortcut key combos. Hamburger menus are like "right click". it's not that bad and when people have seen it a few times it won't be some confusing.

<comment><USER10> People still don't understand right click. Hate to break this to you. UI that isn't clear and visible on the screen is unhelpful UI.

<comment><USER11> They don't understand double click either. I know people who double click everything - buttons, hyperlinks, everything.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, me too. And its amusingly frustrating to watch. And we know why double- clicking is a thing, and why it's not consistent across widgets, but I wonder if we'd be better off if the mouse originated not with "left" and "right" buttons, but instead "do" and "select" buttons. The Do button would open the files and visit the hyperlinks, the Select button would add the object you're looking at to a stack of selections, or provide more information about the thing you're pointing at, or some other lower-cost action.

(I just changed the setting on my desktop to use single-click-to-open, and was immediately punished by it. Couldn't merely select files anymore without fear :) )

<comment><USER13> Shouldn't you also have a third button to list available actions, or would you throw that away? Overloading the select button would be just as confusing; I hope you don't want to do that.

<comment><USER12> Ok, ok. How about these buttons?

        [Select]  [DO!]  [Context]

You're right of course. At some point a trade off has to be made among usability, discover-ability, and simplicity. (Pick any two).

Adding another button reduces simplicity, but enhances the other two. Apple's one-button mouse—at the other extreme—makes things simple and discoverable, but often not as useable as I'd like. I still don't know how OSX's equivalent to Windows' [Alt] key access to menu items (does it exist?)

<comment><USER14> I do think using three buttons are good -- I'm not so happy with the classic "Xerox Parc/Smalltalk" layout -- I'd prefer to have a button on the thumb (like many logitech mice have) _and_ a scroll-wheel in the middle that's _not_ a button.

Which leaves us with a bit of a problem for touch screens. While it might be ok to demand users to learn one and two-finger touch -- three finger touch might be going a bit too far...

[ed: And for those that want to remap buttons, but avoid the bloated logitech software, in windows I recommend: [http://www.highrez.co.uk/downloads/XMouseButtonControl.htm](http://www.highrez.co.uk/downloads/XMouseButtonControl.htm)

In X it's of course much easier (or more difficult, depending on your point of view): [https://wiki.debian.org/Keyboard/MultimediaKeys](https://wiki.debian.org/Keyboard/MultimediaKeys) ]

<comment><USER12> I used to use an MX Revolution mouse[1] that had what you describe. Multiple thumb buttons, that amazing flywheel scroll wheel, that _other_ thumb wheel. I loved that mouse.

Unfortunately I love trackballs more than mice now, and am severely limited in my choices. The Trackman is nice, and has a couple of extra buttons, but it would be so nice to have something close to what I had with that Revolution mouse.

In response to your comment above, no I wasn't being ironic :). I'm sure I've seen similar schemes before that informed my "idea", though.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Revolution-Cordless-Laser- Mou...](http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Revolution-Cordless-Laser- Mouse/dp/B000HCT12O)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> One of the things that I felt Windows Phone 7 and 8/8.1 in their design language did well was encouraging designs that were better than the hamburger (pivots and sprawling "hubs" that encourage you to explore in two dimensions; app-bars with ellipses).

It's interesting to see Hamburger menus bleeding back into the design language with Windows 10. It seems a strange, sad concession to meeting Android/iOS designs and even Desktop designs (with their million year old menu bars) "half-way". That said, one of the interesting twists that Windows 10 designs thus far tend to put on the Hamburger menu is that secretly in many cases the Hamburger icon is just a replacement for the Windows Phone 8's App Bar ellipsis:

The items on the bar show just icons at tablet size or lower and the Hamburger simply reveals app labels and maybe (rarely) lesser used text-only options. (At larger than table sizes sometimes the bar defaults expanded rather than condensed.)

This roughly corresponds with the Facebook suggestions in the article here.

The interesting differences to a WP8 app bar are that the W10 hamburger "app bars" have mostly gone vertical and the hamburger is a toggle rather than the WP8 app bar ellipsis was a "slide".

It will be interesting to see how this design language continues to accrete/evolve as Windows 10 Mobile gets closer to launch.

<comment><USER16> As someone who has been using Windows Phone devices since WP7 was launched the hamburger button making an appearance makes me just shake my head in disgust. To an extent Microsoft has been making reasonable use of it, in Outlook it's particularly nice since I no longer need to expand the app bar to get to my folder list - but I fear the signaling it may be giving 3rd party designers, that they can get away with mystery meat navigation and ruin one of the better parts of the Windows Phone UX.

<comment><USER15> I'm right there with you. My hopes are that enough developers and designers are paying attention to why and what the hamburger menus are doing in Outlook and Xbox and some of the other Microsoft-built Windows 10 applications rather than just duplicating whatever they've been doing on iOS/Android. I've got a feeling that maybe Microsoft themselves hope that their smarter use of hamburgers might be contagious in the other direction (just as so much of Material UI copied some of the flatter styles of WP7/8) and iOS/Android developers might start using the Windows app bar-style of hamburgers. I'm worried, of course, that designers/developers won't be paying attention and will assume the consistency in iconography applies a consistency in functionality. That said, I also see Microsoft's point that the global consistency in iconography may be more important than consistent functionality in a world where users are using applications on multiple platforms (ie, so many people are using some admixture of Windows, Mac OS X, iOS, and Android these days).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It is almost always preferable to have all of your options available to the user at all times. However, it's very important to make the distinction between apps and websites when talking about a hamburger menu.

A tab bar is great in an iOS app with a limited scope of functionality. That just doesn't work a sprawling news site covering dozens of topics. A small, product-focused website may even be able to get away with showing all of their navigation options at once. For many sites, however, it's unfortunate, but sometimes you just need a well-organized junk drawer inside a hamburger menu.

<comment><USER18> I keep reading these articles about how awful hamburgers are but so far not a single one addresses menus that have more than 3-5 items. I manage sites that we have kicked around ideas for how to deal with the menu better, but the size of what is in that menu makes all the proposed ideas I've seen not feasible. So I'm right there with you that it is unfortunate, I wish these articles had more in way of solutions than just regurgitating what we've heard for a while, hamburgers suck.

<comment><USER19> I'm gonna sound like an old fart now (mostly because I am) but back in the late 90s we used to have a discipline called Information Architecture that existed to handle exactly this case.

You see, Information Architecture has more to do with capital D Design, not fad, bandwagons and styles. Its about solving this exact problem. I really hope the concept of User Experience dies in a fire so we can go back to real Design.

(User Experience is in my opinion the most nebulous, snake-oil concept I've heard since SEO. Users don't want "an experience". They want to get in get what they want and to get out. The experience should be invisible)

<comment><USER20> Perhaps the term IxD (Interaction Design) would sit better with you than UX. IxD includes UX but also Info Architecture and has a lot more to do with structuring information before any 'design' takes place. In IxD you wouldn't normally touch on users or appearance (affordances for example is far off down the road at this point) before you sort out the "what is it?" and "what data?". It's very easy to start thinking about the users, too easy in fact, that many self-proclaimed 'UX-experts' focus on that and forget that 'content is still king' and it's presentation may actually _attract_ users, so don't try to tailor shit to maggots when you can create a garden and attract bees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> My summary. Tell me if I missed something.

Hey, designer. I know screen real estate on mobile is extremely limited. I know it would be really nice to fill the whole screen with content and just have a little, square, "more" icon tucked in the corner. I know you've tried to establish the hamburger icon as the universal "more" icon.

Too bad. Users aren't catching on as quickly as you'd like. They don't notice, understand or utilize the icon. Even if they do notice and understand, an ambiguous "more" is dramatically less engaging than explicitly showing what they can get. A "more" icon is asking them to expend effort up front exploring your interface with no clear reward in sight. So, they don't bother. Like, a measurable 50+% drop in engagement don't bother.

So, stick to tab bars as much as you can. It seems like a waste of screen space. But, the results still seem worth the cost.

<comment><USER22> Mmm, close, I would nitpick a few points:

\- Most users do understand the hamburger icon, so they notice and understand it, but they definitely don't utilize it.

\- It's not really about engagement. Users generally don't go about thinking to themselves "boy that icon looks so engaging and just begs for a click!"

\- It's all about workflows and hints built into these workflows.

At any moment on your website/app your users are trying to accomplish something. UI nudges and pulls them in the correct direction towards their destination. At every step the user is evaluating the screen to determine the thing most relevant to moving closer to their goal.

A hamburger button never - and I mean _never_ \- tells the user "click me and you'll be closer to your goal!". A hamburger button is utterly neutral in every single way, even to the trained user who knows what a hamburger button does.

\- When evaluating the screen to determine what they should do next, almost everything feels more relevant than the hamburger button.

It's not that people don't _want_ to click on the hamburger button, it's that in any particular circumstance some other UI element will feel more relevant (even if it isn't actually true).

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> James Archer, author of the piece, is Chief Creative Officer of both Crowd Favorite, and Forty, both of which use -- surprise -- the hamburger menu in their mobile sites. Is this another case of "do what I say, not what I do"?

<comment><USER24> It's in the queue. :) The Crowd Favorite site is in the process of being redesigned, and there'll be changes to the Forty site coming shortly after that.

(These changes aren't just because of the hamburger menu, obviously. Digital stuff moves pretty fast in general, and companies keep evolving.)

<comment><USER25> Ah, so this was a preemptive, "We don't use the hamburger 'cause it is not cool anymore", blog post. ;)

<comment><USER24> Actually, more like a "We don't use the hamburger because there's now ample statistical evidence that it doesn't work" blog post. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > "and it's consistent with the logic of the progressive disclosure design > pattern."

And this is the crucial misinterpretation. Progressive disclosure as defined and used by Xerox is about objects and related actions. And it's all about visible objects! [1]

(Mind the classic example of a square in a drawing application: Clicking the shape discloses editing functions and displays handles to size the object.)

And here is the real problem: The hamburger icon as used today has no other object but the global context. By exposing context to the global context, it's a mere apropos without an object the user might relate to.

When Norm Cox designed the original icon for the Xerox Star user interface, it was a visual anchor for a menu revealing contextual functions to the visible content of the document. (Like selecting rows, etc. [2]) This is notably something else than the global, quite abstract context of a site navigation, disclosing navigational functions to address off-screen content.

Today's hamburger icon is just a paradigmatic misunderstanding.

[1] "A subtle thing happens when everything is visible: the display becomes reality. The user model becomes identical with what is on the screen. Objects can be understood purely in terms of their visible characteristics. Actions can be understood in terms of their effects on the screen. (...) In Star, we have tried to make the objects and actions in the system visible." (Designing the Star User Interface; David Canfield Smith, Byte, Issue 4/1982)

[2] Compare: [http://g.recordit.co/8Q5oAYCaVx.gif](http://g.recordit.co/8Q5oAYCaVx.gif) (Outtake from a ACM CHI 1990 conference video, [https://vimeo.com/61556918](https://vimeo.com/61556918). Mind that the window-less bar at the top represents the global system as opposed to the document window below and its menu button(s).)

<comment><USER26> [continued] To put this more clearly:

The hamburger icon/menu introduces a metaphor of its own that is not consistent with progressive disclosure as used elsewhere in common interfaces (see above). It's more a "and here is the rest that you may be missing"-icon that isn't motivated by any consistent notion of the interface, but by concern for screen real estate. As a user, we may not assume the content of the menu, but by empirical knowledge and by considering functions that we are missing and that may be hidden somewhere.

The hamburger menu _is_ the application. It's content may be related to only by expectation and assumptions regarding the extent of the application's basic functionality. Arguably, in the light of this considerations, the icon is communicating rather sparsely what it is and what it does. (Actually, it exposes a global, unrelated view on the basic extent of the app.)

While its use may be arguable for an application (esp. mobile apps), it's highly problematic, when used in web sites and web applications. (The difference: While in the former case it's located rather in the window chrome, thus relating to the viewport as an object, it's part of the view in the latter – like a wormhole to the global context.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> It should be obvious to most designers that critical features of your product should not be buried or hidden.

I disagree with this article that hamburger menus should be burned to the ground. I think it's useful for tucking away secondary or tertiary functionality.

* Facebook still uses it for accessing your friends list. With smartphones growing in physical size, there is more vertical real-estate to bring the tabnav back.

* Despite it not working for NBC, it seems to be working well for New York Times – and not yellow. And I actually really like NYT's new page layout.

* Google Maps uses it – also not yellow.

<comment><USER28> Just because people use it doesn't mean it's a good idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The hamburger menu's entire value is that it's a simple default that you can generalize even programmatically across all websites. It's why the frameworks mentioned in the article can implement it for you. It's a place to start.

But it requires some deliberate thought, effort, and app-specific solutions to replace it with something better, and that planning makes you answer all sorts of hard questions you might've not ever had to answer about your website/product, like "how are my users actually using this?"

I'd wager that everyone agrees that their own site's hamburger menu is a sore spot, suboptimal.

But the next rung up is a taller order than these types of articles admit.

I think a good follow-up blog post would be "Design patterns for escaping the hamburger menu" that showcases a variety of real-world approaches.

</comment><comment><USER30> Chrome has a hamburger menu, even on a huge desktop screen with plenty of room for a proper menu. OSX has an excellent universal menu which, due to consistent placement, behaviour, and content, provides a high level of usability. Chrome's hamburger menu duplicates some - but not all - of its functionality, and includes some bonus functions not available in the main menu at all. It also has a submenu named - and you might want to check this yourself, because it's pretty hard to believe - "More tools".

The main menu would be absolutely fine on its own; I think the hamburger menu is present because it's present on Windows, which - of course - doesn't have a universal menu. Still, I'm not letting Google off the hook here. These flagrant abuses of usability are things that the average undergrad should be able to identify, yet one of the biggest companies in the world can't? Disappointing.

<comment><USER31> Weirdly, the shortcut for this menu on Windows is......

drumroll please....

alt-F, like it is the File menu.....

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Or in short: Having a single, minimalistic hamburger icon doesn't convey enough information to be useful. It may be possible to improve engagement metrics by using informational icons and titles. None of these statements are particularly controversial.

So, should we web developers start ripping out hamburger icons on our sites. _NO_. Avoid groupthink. Implement and test layouts that produce measurable results. Removing hamburger icons is no panacea. What are the users doing? What does the data say? If cargo cult thinking produced an over-reliance on a single navigation icon, we aren't going to solve anything by snapping back in the other direction.

Also, there's a difference between a _hamburger icon_ and a _drawer menu_. On mobile devices a drawer menu is still a fantastic way to reveal additional navigation options without a page reload over a (potentially) slow network connection. Stuffing a navigation list into drawer menu is an easy solution. But it may produce poor results.

</comment><comment><USER33> Long before these mobile menus appeared, an icon with a series of lines always meant "drag here" (e.g. in a desktop app, inside a resizable divider or a size box).

My first impression of these was therefore to try to grab them and pull, as if to _slide_ the bars that they appear on. Unfortunately, even now, most implementations of "hamburger menus" do the worst possible thing when you try to slide them: _nothing at all_.

And then there's the weirdness of seeing them on the desktop where there is plenty of space. It's the same frustration I feel whenever I see a desktop app _force_ content into a tiny, non-resizable box with scroll bars on a 1920x1200 screen! If I have the space, I really, really want to use it. Any design that refuses to expand to available space is simply wrong.

<comment><USER28> Here's where I always see them:

[http://kdcissell.com/2012/09/28/75/](http://kdcissell.com/2012/09/28/75/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I might be missing something but the first Facebook example used in the article seems wrongly applied to this problem. They just transferred the menu bar to the bottom. All the icons, which were at the top, are now just located at the bottom. They are now easier to see - the text doesn't hurt also, and probably easier to use (no conflict with the phones top-bar), which could be the explanation for the observed results. The only difference I can see is the switch of the hamburger at the top with a search icon.

Nobody ever asked me - for obvious reasons, because I might be blind - but I'm partial to an icon where you have a + sign ("additional" items) on top a V ("directional clue"; could be pointed in other directions for a pull-up menu for example) to form some sort of arrow.

</comment><comment><USER35> Another good observation on this by Luke Wroblewski. [http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1945](http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1945)

</comment><comment><USER36> My co-founder and I debated whether to use the hamburger menu for our iOS and Android apps (currently in beta -- [https://recent.io/](https://recent.io/)).

We decided to keep the hamburger menu on both platforms for launch. Our reasoning was that it's a common UI convention and our primary navigation options -- Home, Recommended, Hot News, Local News, and topics -- are visible in the extended app bar. An option to follow additional topics appears inline in the Home tab.

So the three functions that are _only_ accessible through the hamburger menu are bookmarks, history, and settings, which seems like a reasonable compromise. You could use our app fully for a year, albeit with the default settings and no bookmarks/history, without ever seeing the hamburger menu.

Analytics shows that the hamburger menu is used frequently by our beta users, so I'm fairly confident that we made the right choice. On the other hand, the new YouTube Android app -- which had more in its hamburger menu than we do -- has moved in the opposite direction and eliminated it.

<comment><USER37> Could you integrate bookmarks and history into "home"? For instance, if home is supposed to be what's recent, history is a natural "less recent".

<comment><USER36> Thanks for the suggestion! I don't think either of us had thought of that.

Inside the app, Home is a starting point that lets you see your news highlights at a glance. It does seem like the concept could be broad enough, as you say, to support history and bookmarks...

<comment><USER37> The inspiration came from Firefox Mobile, which has a unified home screen that incorporates navigation, recent history, bookmarks, and tabs from other devices, all in the same home screen.

If Home is highlights of the day, then it seems natural to scroll down and see a heading for "Yesterday" with yesterday's highlights, rather than less relevant news from today (which could appear in the other views).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> In my apps I generally use the Hamburger menu to hide stuff that's required but not used very often. (Settings, legal agreements etc..) Since engagement is lower for these things anyway it allows you to have them there if needed without cluttering the main content that should be the focus.

</comment><comment><USER39> Dare I suggest that the "gear" menu, so ubiquitous on Google pages these days, suffers much the same problems as the "hamburger"?

<comment><USER40> Except that at least a gear looks like an icon, which suggests it might be clickable (since the flat-design people thought that making buttons look like buttons was a bad idea). My problem with the hamburger menu is that I literally don't see it, because three horizontal lines does not look like an icon to me, it looks like a decoration. In pretty much every place I've needed to use it I end up going "hmm, where is [essential feature I can't find]?" Nowhere? Not possible! Oh, yeah, those three lines, that's actually a menu. Yep, there it is.

<comment><USER39> Good point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I hate the Nondescript Icon Movement. The Hamburger should die together with Three Dots, Angle Brackets and other geometric shapes that have a chutzpah to call themselves icons. Not to mention they killed the Tooltips!

These things don't appear in the vacuum - the Hamburger Menu originated from the Celtic Knot Menu, which was originally at the end of the Ribbon. The Ribbon itself confused the use cases of the Menu and the Toolbar, and was rightly criticized for that.

I am just learning Emacs and it's a little paradox that this aspie guy Richard Stallman is the one who got so many things around the UI right. We are unfortunately confusing "easy to learn" with "dumbed down so much there is nothing to learn".

<comment><USER42> The one thing that frustrated me the most about Android was being confused about what the icons meant, especially when trying to copy text[1].

Select text > Think for a few seconds about which one of these similar looking icons means "copy" > press buttons until I figure it out.

[1] [http://www.droid-life.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/cut- cop...](http://www.droid-life.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/cut-copy-paste- lollipop2.jpg)

<comment><USER31> Android buttons can have hints associated with them, so if you long-press on a button, a tooltip/hint will be presented (if the developer bothered adding tooltip text)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Here's the core question, is this a permanent or temporary problem?

I remember back in the early years of the web (mid to late '90s) and one of the most important factors in designing websites was realizing that users don't scroll. They just didn't, and if your site design relied on that fact then you'd be screwed. But users learned to scroll, and now scrolling is perhaps the most important and most universal method of interacting with the web. In another 10 years will the hamburger menu become so well known and universally relied upon that not doing it will hurt your usability? Or are there fundamental reasons why it will never be good?

<comment><USER44> The article tackles that:

"Some people argue that "we just have to wait for users to learn the new navigation convention," but hopefully you can see how the principle of information scent invalidates that argument. [...] The problem wasn't that users were confused by the hamburger menu, but rather that there was never a compelling reason to click it in the first place."

The principle of information scent is explained in the previous section:

"Most people navigation based on what's called "information scent." When faced with a set of options, they'll choose the option that gives the strongest indication that it'll bring them closer to what they want, like an animal sniffing around for food. [...] You know what never looks anything even close to what the user actually wants? A small three-bar icon tucked in the corner of a website. It has no information scent. Even after the user has exhausted every other option, it still might not occur to them that the answers they seek are hiding behind those three bars. Users generally aren't inclined to click it."

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Origin [https://www.evernote.com/shard/s207/sh/022f2237-4b4f-4096-87...](https://www.evernote.com/shard/s207/sh/022f2237-4b4f-4096-87f2-053acd228c2d/ede2672bc3f39a1b0232f84e01ca0a83/?utm_source=designernews)

In Depth [https://medium.com/@saffadkhan/the-hamburger-paradigm- ebb695...](https://medium.com/@saffadkhan/the-hamburger-paradigm-ebb695b5da86)

</comment><comment><USER46> The desktop Firefox has one of these. It's been quite unintuitive. It contains some commands depicted by icons, which constitute an overlapping set of the functionality under the regular F)ile menu, like "New Window", "New Private Window", "Print" and whatnot. But there are commands that appear in other menus: the monkey wrench Developer icon appears to have similar content to "Tools/Web Developer".

I think what we are supposed to understand is that this Firefox Hamburger Menu (FHM) is really a TOA: Toolbar Overflow Area. It's a repository of icons for doing arbitrary things.

Its Customize button at the bottom invokes exactly the same UI as View/Toolbars/Customize: a big view where you can move icons between an editable version of the FHM, the browser toolbar, and a repository of available tools (shown in the main pane as a large area).

So any item that can be on your toolbar can go into FHM, including bookmarks. Hence: TOA: toobar overflow area for items you don't use much.

It would be better if they initialized it empty, and if it somehow clearly communicated "Hey, I am a toolbar overflow area: put stuff here that would go on the toolbar that you don't need so much, when you don't have space on the toolbar."

<comment><USER47> This is what I use it for. When I do mobile bootstrap I'll always have something else in navs besides the hamburger, and treat it as overflow.

A hamburger on its own is, like the article says, dead weight with no meaning. If its on a bar with a bunch of other nav options and you feel like the one you want is missing you often use it.

If I ever get around to it I'll hack up the bootstrap code and make it tab based (icon + text underneath) but that seems like a PITA with how bootstrap does its layouts in nav bars from my paltry experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I cannot agree with the car analogy.

There are two reasons why the signs on the highway are so prominent:

1\. When you are driving a car, you are basically meat bags inside 1.5+ ton collapsible metal cages moving around at 30+ or even 100+ km/h. One wrong move and meat bags risk being injured or killed. That's why the signs _need_ to be simple and prominent.

2\. A highway network has one and only one purpose: to transport people and things around, so the number of things that you can do on a highway network is inherently rather limited, which is why you can make decisions fast: go faster, go slower, stop, yield, merge, change lanes, exit a ramp, enter a ramp, turn left, turn right. That's why the signs _can_ be simple and prominent.

Neither condition applies to websites in general:

1\. If you lose your way on a website, you generally won't injure or kill anybody.

2\. Websites generally don't have one and only one purpose, the number of things that you can do on a website cannot be expected to be limited. You could argue that the website _menu_ should have one and only one purpose - <USER2> bring visitors to various pages - but that's not always true either.

</comment><comment><USER49> > Here are a few reasons why the design industry is having trouble giving up > the hamburger menu:

 _list of reasons people are doing dumb thing, mostly blaming the people_

Can we be honest here for a second? The reason people are still using hamburger menus is because people have to make things work for phones. Phones with screens that are vastly smaller than the screens on even the smallest laptop, even for people who are hauling around the biggest phablets they can find. And people with phones want to visit the same websites they visit on their computers and there just... isn't... room. The hamburger menu gives you close to double the space to work with, from a UI point of view.

The alternatives presented are partial solutions. It may well be true that more people are reaching for the hamburger menu than truly need it. But the tab bar example from the article only scales up so far before it stops being a valid solution. And I don't know if there is a really good answer that doesn't involve rewriting the web from the ground up.

</comment><comment><USER50> Why do designers gravitate to extremes in these fads? Skeuomorphic! Flat design! Everything in the hamburger menu! Nothing in the hamburger menu!

What's wrong with moderation? Day-to-day navigation elements shouldn't be in a hamburger menu (also, an extra 'click' for common tasks is bad), but there are plenty of non-everyday things that can go in there.

<comment><USER51> > Why do designers gravitate to extremes in these fads? Skeuomorphic! Flat > design! Everything in the hamburger menu! Nothing in the hamburger menu!

You're blaming designers , I'm blaming developers(and managers) who can't tell a good designer from a bad one and choose to work only with people that "gravitate to extremes in these fads"(ie a majority of startups) Even Google and Apple are not that dumb, they know flat design is stupid,they actually have the data to prove it, thus they kept some depth within their UIs and don't hesitate to use border shadows ,even on mobile, while trying to "refresh" their UI, because a few influential SF bloggers were bashing their "lack of minimalism".

Flat design makes absolutely no FN sense, from a UX stand point in an app on a computer. If I can't tell what I can interact with and what I can't, I'm not going to play a guess game, I'm going to move on and use something else. I'm a big proponent of skeuomorphism and I don't care how ugly it looks. It's all about usability. If it can help convey the purpose of a feature then it's a good thing.

What makes sense on a poster, a printed magazine or a book doesn't make sense for an app or a website.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Regarding NBC, their failure wasn't in the hamburger menu itself. They didn't use it properly.

Their design had what looks like a menubar which is the precise anti-pattern to a menu-button. Those items, and what is showing already as top page content, is guaranteed to catch everyone's attention first. Those menu-button items are not only hidden and require an extra click, by design they have been made less important. And since so many sites have de-cluttered themselves by simplification, users' first impression is that they got rid of everything for the better... except it wasn't what they did, so basically everything under that menu was unreachable.

Two things would have been better. First, they could have kept the menu icon but had it expanded on the top page so that people would see those items as top page content, and also make the intuitive connection that there was a button that's associated with them. When the reader goes deeper, the menu items could then safely be hidden, with the user intuitively fetching them via the button as needed. Second, they could have given the button a name, instead of use the icon. For example, Amazon's "shop by department" button is the equivalent of NBC's hamburger menu. But since they have a menubar, instead of having a menu-button on a menubar, they put a menu-item instead by giving it a name and an equal member of the top selection. This upholds the primary design pattern in use.

NBC's designers went for the hamburger without knowing how to use it or understanding what made it popular. You cannot mix competing philosophies and color is no substitute for broken intuitions. Even now that they settled for the menu-bar, they don't have an at-state, under "more" we see the same items in the menu in different order, and they use the pinned menu that doesn't go away even when you scroll -- a design already falsified by the frame paradigm of 1999.

</comment><comment><USER53> I think the real question should be: Are users using the hamburger menu and do they know what it means?

Also this may not apply to apps, but on the web the hamburger is an indirect result of responsive design techniques where a navigation menu has to compress due to limiteds screen real estate in mobile.

But the funny thing is that as a designer I hate the hamburger because it does feel like a hack. Yet I can see the popularity is due to trying to have something work on both mobile and desktop.

In fact if you look at mobile only apps they tend to avoid the hamburger trap (example: Instagram) but if you look at any app with a desktop legacy (example: Facebook) you almost have to need it (unless you are willing to cut features or make a suite of apps).

</comment><comment><USER54> The neat thing about UI is that even bad designs eventually become the best ones as people get used to them and recognize them. The hamburger menu appears on a bazillion sites and it's going to be familiar to most users soon if it isn't already.

<comment><USER55> Exactly. As a user I don't mind them at all, as I recognise what they mean and know how to use them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> > As a last-ditch attempt to solve the problem, they made it yellow

Amazing! I could almost write a script for the meeting in which that solution was decided upon.

Rough sketch:

Idea is proposed by one individual at level N in the hierarchy. Some cursory justification is provided, based on theory from a design article they read, they think, or maybe it was a youtube video - doesn't matter: Yellow attracts attention! Green makes people want to proceed! Red makes people want to stop! It's so obvious.

Numerous objections are raised by individuals at level < N in the hierarchy, who have a fairly deep understanding of design and have thought a lot about the problem. The objections are considered briefly, and then summarily ignored.

Meeting concluded.

<comment><USER57> Or in a less jaded view, they decided to try a very low cost fix before pulling the trigger on a very expensive site navigation redesign. Or, even better, this showed a partial improvement while they worked on the navigation redesign since "turn it yellow" takes 2 seconds and redesign the navigation takes much longer.

<comment><USER56> I like how this reads as jaded, was actually just an attempt at a bit of humour! Of course I agree with everything you said, that's probably what it actually was.

I've still not learned, probably never will, that tone rarely comes across in text :-)

<comment><USER57> Well, I had no doubt that I was interpreting it correctly, so I'll mark it down on my personal scorecard as well:)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I think of it as the 'menu of last resort', that should never be a primary navigation element. In that sense it works just fine.

I might also refer to it as the 'vent', since it seems to heat up after a few months of not restarting my browser.

</comment><comment><USER59> The main takeaway (which should be obvious) is that you should test your navigation and probably test it a lot. It is very important and it does matter. I've caught myself thinking of it as a pesky thing and I'm not a designer and usually don't optimize for pretty because well I'm not good at it. But the fact of the matter (imo) is that focusing on content and navigation until you get them perfect is the best approach. "Silly" exercises like card sorting early with potential users (or regularly for an existing site) are actually pretty solid methods to improve sites and apps greatly.

</comment><comment><USER60> Just use a tab bar where the right most tab is "more" and that brings up more navigation options. Can still have more than 5 nav links and avoids the hamburger menu, you can thank me later.

</comment><comment><USER61> I'm surprised no-one has mentioned Android version 2 (vintage), which had a hamburger menu as a physical/soft button. It was then ditched and replaced with a app switcher button.

That hard button was even better from a real estate point of view, and since it was consistent across all apps it seems like users ought to have grasped it.

The surprising and important thing here is that, even if the user knows the menu is there and that, if asked, it could help them, it doesn't appear salient and doesn't get clicked.

</comment><comment><USER62> This example from the article still has a hamburger menu, just in a different location:

[http://deep.design/wp- content/uploads/2015/07/B82uUMQCcAE4Eo...](http://deep.design/wp- content/uploads/2015/07/B82uUMQCcAE4Eoh.png)

</comment><comment><USER63> The fact that designers think this icon looks like a hamburger is the real problem with design these days. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER64> Reading this article I instantly saw parallels to Gnome 3 and it reminded me what a usability nightmare it is.

</comment><comment><USER65> In a substantial app like Facebook or Spotify, the hamburger menu is still there, in addition to the thumb-able tabs. Large applications have a significant navigation structure, and you can't reduce them to 3 or 4 tabs. While the OP's arguments are good, is there a valid alternative?

</comment><comment><USER66> It shouldn't be the only thought you have. The pluses are that people are used to it; sometimes common usage is better than inventing something unusual. But design should involve thinking about what people are trying to do with your app rather than starting with some design idea.

</comment><comment><USER67> Shit parallax doesn't work either.

</comment><comment><USER68> I like the hamburger icon because (I think) almost everyone who would read my web sites (technical stuff) knows what it is.

I agree that if the hidden menu has very few options then it is a good idea to have everything visible but that is not feasible for more than a few navigation options.

</comment><comment><USER69> [http://blog.manbolo.com/2014/06/30/apple-on-hamburger- menus](http://blog.manbolo.com/2014/06/30/apple-on-hamburger-menus)

</comment><comment><USER70> I generally use "Menu" alongside the burger icon to remove ambiguity, and still show 2-3 primary nav options alongside to minimise loss for those who don't use it.

</comment><comment><USER71> I thought it was about food. I'm going to In-N-Out anyway.

</comment><comment><USER72> hamburger menu should only contain notbso often needed actions. There can be additional buttons in the GUI. Simple as that.

also most android apps support swiping from the border which gives the user a quick access to actions not using any space. The author doesn't mention it?

</comment><comment><USER73> Awesome! Redesigning away the hamburger menu on my site immediately.

</comment><comment><USER74> In all honesty, I thought the article was going to be really about restaurant (fast food or not) menus... And I know what hamburger menu is... But hamburger icon would've been more direct and up to the point (for me at least)!

</comment><comment><USER75> Oh thank fuck. I thought I was the only person who thinks the hamburger menu is awful. I have been totally bemused by it's pervasiveness.

</comment><comment><USER76> Worse is the "invisible x" menu. The one for the options that help the user but decrease revenue, such as "mark this item as spam". Facebook uses this a lot. (Mouse over a Facebook ad. A greyed-out "x" appears at the right of the ad. Mouse over the "x", and the grey turns darker. Click on the "x", and a menu comes up demanding to know why you didn't like that ad.) So does Youtube. (Those silly pop-ups on Youtube, if moused over, display a tiny, tiny "x" in the upper right hand corner which will make them go away.)

Yet another tool for "screw the user" UI design.

<comment><USER77> Except these don't actually "remove ads." They are meant to further train the algorithm on relevancy while providing the minority of users who use it a button that lets them feel like they are doing something about the annoying ads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> I was inclined to dismiss this author's view on mobile design since they were saying "click" this and "click" that everywhere. On mobile, there is no clicking. Clicking is for when you have a mouse. On mobile there's tapping.

But. That being said, the article makes sense. Hamburger menus are where features go to die.

So if you want a feature used, I agree it should be brought forward in a different way.

<comment><USER24> I definitely struggle with that wording issue, since there are a variety of devices and interaction methods that make it difficult to write about without the language getting cumbersome. :) "Click" seems to be the most commonly- accepted term for initiating a request for the browser to load a URI based on a hyperlink, so I went with that as a general term.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Linux laptop with good multi-touch trackpad - <AUTHOR> I'm running a couple Linux machines (a Lenovo X1 and an otherwise nice Dell with an abysmal trackpad) but I've never gotten a good multitouch  trackpad working. I suspect the trackpad hardware I'm working with is limited since no amount of tweaking is working for me. Has anyone gotten a good trackpad working under any flavor of Linux on any hardware (except Apple, I'm trying to get away from their hardware monopoly) <comment><USER2> There may be more avenues left to try with your current hardware, before you make a choice:

Check to makes sure you're running a distro with recent enough Xorg/linux kernel (but not _so_ bleeding edge stuff like libinput-gestures isn't supported). Also if you use integrated graphics, life may be easier since you can pick between Wayland and Xorg to find which DM supports inputs best in your case.

Xorg drivers: [https://github.com/p2rkw/xf86-input- mtrack](https://github.com/p2rkw/xf86-input-mtrack)

libinput: [https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/latest/index.ht...](https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/latest/index.html)

libinput-gestures: [https://github.com/bulletmark/libinput- gestures](https://github.com/bulletmark/libinput-gestures) (example: [https://gist.github.com/SkyBehind/d664448838d065428eded7eb6d...](https://gist.github.com/SkyBehind/d664448838d065428eded7eb6d562d4b))

Gnome extension with some gesture edgecases: 3-finger swiping to different windows like macOS: [https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1253/extended- gesture...](https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1253/extended-gestures/)

Also if you really like trackpads and want a consistent experience, you can get a logitech t650 / apple magic trackpad and share your configuration for libinput/etc. across machines.

Edit: I reread and noticed you're trying to stay away from apple hardware. You could try logitech's trackpad, but apple magic trackpad may be better a la carte. If you did I'd recommend using via USB w/ bluetooth off to avert pairing headaches

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, that's good advice. I'm ok with an external apple Magic Trackpad. As long as I can bring my own device so to speak.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Curious, do you really mean multitouch, or just a trackpad with two finger gestures? I only use the latter.

I got a Surface Go with the intention of running Linux on it but Firefox and WSL/bash works well enough for me. And it has a decent trackpad. The Surface Pros can run Linux with varying degrees of success and is what I'll be looking at when I move away from Mac as they're lighter than competing laptops.

</comment><comment><USER4> The lenovo has a decent trackpad. At least mine does, and works great for me with the windows driver. I am guessing no one has written any decent drivers for them on Linux.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's an active project to make good trackpad drivers for Linux. I suspect I could get better performance from the x1 given some work. I'll focus on that one. The dell latitude 7250 I suspect just has a crap trackpad.</comment></comment>


Presentation of scala 3 (dotty) by Martin Odersky - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lWrt6H6UdE <comment><USER2> Differences between Scala 2 and Scala 3: "Changed Features" and "Dropped features" in [http://dotty.epfl.ch/docs/index.html](http://dotty.epfl.ch/docs/index.html)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> One of the main new announcement is that dotty should ship as scala 3 next year (2018).</comment>


Tell HN: Site statistics for month #2(35K Visitors, top 100K alexa, PR5)  - <AUTHOR> http://blog.styleguidance.com/post/341255858/site-statistics-for-month-2-35k-visitors-top-100k

<comment><USER2> That's great growth for two months. It would be awesome if you do a little writeup here or on your blog about some of the techniques you're using to promote the site and the lessons learned from this.

Also, just something I noticed, your main site is still showing a 2009 copyright date in the footer.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the heads up.

good idea, I'll write something up and will post in 1-2 days

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Good to see you doing well!

Rembember though: growing fast in the beginning is easy, maintaining that growth once you get larger can be very hard.

From 100 to 1000 visitors per day is 1000% growth, but from 1000 to 2000 visitors per day is only 100%, it is just as much if not more work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks man :)

oh yeah I know that it'll start slowing down, and I'm more or less prepared for that to happen. Slow and steady wins the race :)

My current goal is to generate the type of numbers that'll get me some more mainstream coverage. I think 100K-200K visits a month, should at least get me some mentions here and there. Which will in turn drive traffic to the site, but most important will boost my link juice and will rank my questions higher in search results.

<comment><USER3> I wished I had some rabbit in my hat that I could pop out to give you a boost but the 'match' between what you're doing and what I'm doing is pretty slim.

What I've found about media over the years is that it works wonders but only for the moment, it is very hard to translate that in to longer term sustainable traffic.

The way you are going about it right now is very close to the optimum, with more coverage you'd reach some more people quickly but you'd also risk killing the atmosphere that you have right now.

100k to 200k visits / month looks like an achievable goal to me, but you'll have to determine how many people you think that translates in to. You could be looking at a 'hard core' of between 3 and 6 k visitors that comes back _every day_ all the way to 3 and 6 k visitors / day that will never come back.

The first is obviously the one to go for, so visits / month is a bad metric to optimize for.

The numbers from analytics that have the most importance for you at this stage imo would be 'time on site', 'bounce rate' and 'recency'.

Those are hard to get under control but that's where the real pay-off will be. As you increase time on site and decrease bounce rate you are increasing stickyness, which in turn should lead to people re-visiting.

Bounce rate is mostly landing page optimization as well as making sure that you're found for the right kind of stuff, as well as linked in a way that creates an expectation in the mind of the person that clicks that matches the impression your site gives when it first presents itself.

Otherwise that link is a wasted one, not that it would be better without, but the text of the link could have selected people more likely to convert in to repeat visitors.

Time-on-site is another measure of how well you are doing in this respect, a 'bounce' is just the shortest way of being on your site, increasing time on site shows that people found what they were looking for and will dig deeper to find more.

A/B testing is your friend!

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't worry about it, you've given me a ton of help already.

For me media, is mostly link juice. Q&A sites are very content oriented, so the more link juice I have, the more traffic I can get. Even if I get a jump by one search engine results position, it'll equal thousands of people long term.

Yeah I'm focusing on uniques too, right now with 35K visits, I had 28K uniques.(I just use visits since it's a a bigger number hehe). My return/recency rate seems to be about about 22%, which isn't that bad since people who come through Google tend to have a horrible bounce rate, so they screw up the results.

I'm not sure I can use time on site and bounce rate to track progress. The Google people tend to throw numbers off. Since most people who come through there, are only on the site to find the answer(don't really care where they get their answer). So when they find it, they just close the page and move on.

\+ I think my current design is too polarizing, it's about 50/50, half the people love it, and the other half think it sucks. So I'm probably losing a lot of people on that one aspect alone. So a more streamlined web design should help improve the bounce rate big time.

Yeah A/B testing is good. I'm doing that right now for ads to see what type/positioning converts best for me.

<comment><USER3> > The Google people tend to throw numbers off.

You can drill down to exclude them

<comment><AUTHOR> oh yeah. Man Google Analytics has so much information it's hard to track all of it down

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does your site use the Stack Exchange platform, or is it just similar?

Also, I think your site would benefit greatly from a visual design overhaul, seeing as you're in the fashion/style industry.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I use the Stack Exchange platform, but it's heavily modified. At this point I have something like 4,000 lines worth of modifications.

I kinda agree with the design, the users they are kinda split 50/50. Fashion people like it, techies hate it. The current design was more or less hacked together due to user feedback, which is why it looks like it was designed by a committee.

So my next version will be a lot more universal. It'll still have a fashion feel, but it won't send regular people running for the door :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You need to push your site on sites like styleforum.net and askandyaboutclothes.com.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't find forums to be all that effective in my initial marketing. A forum with supposed 100,000 members, usually means you'll get 50 thread views, and maybe 2-3 clicks.

<comment><USER4> If you make valuable contributions to the forum on a regular basis, and include an unintrusive link to your site in your signature, you may get many more clicks over time.

<comment><AUTHOR> 10-20 clicks a month(and that's what those signature links tend to get you) is not worth it. My time is better utilized on SEO.

Because with SEO it's a linear increase, every month you get slightly more visitors. With forums, you hit your peak right away. And that 10 new users are no different than the 500-550 a day I get from Google.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why filipino startups fail in the Philippines - <AUTHOR> http://kareerkoblog.azurewebsites.net/why-startups-fail-in-the-philippines/

<comment><AUTHOR> Quick Summary:

* Government is not startup friendly.

* Current educational standards are producing graduates with inadequate skills for what the current market is demanding for.

* Students are not at the same level as students in North America, Europe, and other places. Graduates finish a lot younger and have relatively no experience in life, what more in work or business. They are eager to learn and from my own personal experience with my own employees, they have the smarts.</comment>


In search of linux mentorship: tips? - <AUTHOR>

I'm getting there.  It's been about two years in several server environments, but I still have much to learn.  I've purchased several books, but it doesn't come close to someone scrutinizing my actual presence on the command line.  is there such thing as linux tutors?  other ideas? <comment><USER2> Hang out on IRC? Volunteer at someone's startup? What do you have to offer in return?</comment>


The NSA Told Me It Needs 4 Years to Answer a FOIA About a Coloring Book - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-nsa-told-me-it-needs-4-years-to-answer-a-foia-about-a-coloring-book <comment><USER2> So the author is clearly wasting the time of the staff that handle FOIA requests at the NSA and then is surprised when the NSA doesn't respond in a prompt fashion? But at least he got to waste tax dollars and write this super cool article to signal that he is one of the cool kids, I guess.</comment>