All posts by Mindful tester

A leader ships, AgiLe, Story telling

House Rules For Rules

A few years ago my wife asked me to attach some tubes to the wall. I noticed that there was little room for a wrench. So I used a ratchet wrench as shown in the picture.

There is an unwritten rule to use a wrench for a nut and a bolt.

There is no rule for the type of wrench.

Proof in the pudding

In the kitchen one of my kids was stirring in a pan:
“30 seconds should be enough, but I think it is not enough.”

I stopped with my actions:
“Is that not long?”

“Last time it went all right.”
I tried to remember the taste, the structure, and the smell of the dish. But I had only positive thoughts.

I remarked:
“First you follow the rules. Then you must change them.”

“Must?” was the reaction.
“I mean: if you think it will make things better.”

“Your boss will not be happy.”, my kid remarked.

“If you stick to the rules, then you will not become better than your teacher.
Otherwise everything will remain the same.

Not all experiments will go right, so you need some room.

My boss is also experimenting:
“I have this product.”
Customers will give feedback:
“We would like to have another product.””

Learning, Legal, Marketing, Programming

Link Missing In Action

“Know the ways of all professions”
– Miyamoto Musashi

UX designer

A few blog posts ago I told about my attempts to make this very blog more accessible. I just walked my talk.

For people who need a story:
As a user with no or bad view I want headers tagged as headers, so that the screen reader can read the headers differently aloud.

Web master

I changed the look of the headers in a lot of blog posts. I went in a flow and gained more speed in the process, until …

A small square disappeared. I just did an undo and continued editing.

The next time I let the square disappear, I had already updated the blog post on the web.

Hit the OK, Jack.
[on the melaody of “Hit the road, Jack”]

This was not good for my user journey. I did not want to lose a user by a missing link. Just stick around.

Tester

There was an easy trick for finding missing links. On the internet there were free websites and add ons for browsers available.

Marketeer

As a marketeer I had some problems with broken link reporters. A reporter had to hit every page and every link in it. So the number of hits would increase significantly.

Even worse there are web pages referring to other web pages. So some pages are counted double. Then there are categories and months referring to pages. So some pages are counted more than twice.

This would hide the real traffic in my daily reports. But this is not a company web site. Otherwise I should have to add a note about a maintenance period. For an auditor. So I could skip this role.

Tester again

First pick of a broken link service stopped half way. The second looked promising, but it had terms and conditions.

Legal expert

Now I was curious. I clicked on the link and landed on a page with lots of legal sentences. Must be American thing.

I tried to distil the information. The most important message was that the service was provided as is. There were no financial consequences for the service providers.

I have a website which does not provide me any income.
So what was I waiting for?

Enter my website and show my broken links you can find.

Author

Now it was the turn for the author to have a fix.
Yeah. Sure.

The first broken link was ejc2008.de. This is short for European Juggling Convention 2008 in Germany. More than 10 years ago. This must be an old-timer.

I entered the URL in the browser and got an error message. After 10 years the website was taken offline. But I needed a link.

Then I looked for internet archive wayback machine in my search engine. This website stores all versions of visited websites. I entered ejc2008.de and found my website.

I picked a link to 2019 copy and replaced the link in the blog posts. This way people can still read about a convention which was visited by more than 3,000 people sharing the fun of juggling.

In my list of broken links I found a link to a Let’s Test conference in 2015. I had a better link available, so I just updated the link. A similar situation for the first TestBash conference in the Netherlands.

It was a simple test tool. No need to switch to tester mode.

Another run of broken link test revealed that I had not changed the About me page. Why did they show up now? No idea.
Anyways. Fixed.

3rd test run revealed no more missing links. But something was wrong. I missed the comeback of the square. Popping back in view.

Web master again

In my memory I tried to locate the square. It was during header 6 handling. Then I remembered the use of anchors.

An anchor is a fast way to get a reader at the right place in a blog post instead of the top of the post. This saves the reader some scrolling. Example time.

In my blog post about a test exercise the following code is shown in my code editor:

My last upload before my workshop was for me <a href="http://mindfultester.com/a-look-behind-the-scenes/#disaster">another exercise in exploration</a>.

In my blog post “A look behind the scenes – in Runö” the following code is shown in my code editor:

<h1><strong><a id="disaster"></a>Flirting with disaster</strong></h1>

A broken link checker only checks whether the link exists and ignores the presence of an anchor. So it was an anchor missing in action.

Now I had to check the 90ish blog posts for anchors. Preferably automatically and not clicking all links myself. Please.

If I could only find them. I got a flash of insight. It was possible to find blog posts with a search engine in my Content Management System or website authoring program.

I looked for #. And yes, all blog posts with anchors and links with anchors were listed. Now it was easy to add missing anchors.

Professions

So I was

  • Tester
  • Marketeer
  • Legal expert
  • UX designer
  • Author
  • Web master

I skipped the auditor though.

Learning, Mind mapping, Techies conferring

Conference Digest Mind Map

This is my small tribute to Tony Buzan, who died on April 13th 2019. He was the inventor of the mind map. Rest in peace Tony.

Mind map with central object "Todo Wordcamp Rdam 2019 v1a" with main branches presentations, Notes, Goodies, Books, and Actions. Main branch presentation has sub branches Stomme post, Hashtag, http headers, Get fast and Live. Sub branch Hash tag has sub sub branches #ewmrtc and a part of an URL. Sub branches Goodies has sub branches Camera sticker and highlighter. The main branch Actions has sub branches 404, host, security.txt, xmrpx.php. Markers, and “words pictures”. The sub branch Markers has sub sub branch Backpack. The sub branch host has Csp and .htacess. The sub branch Books has sub branches “safe website”, “performance wordpress site”, and “SEO starters”!

Quick breakdown of my mind map

On my smartphone I use Mindjet Mindmanager. It is a rather dull looking mind map program. I can add colour, but that will slow me down. For me mind mapping is jotting ideas as fast as possible.

My first action was to make my conference notes readable. My handwriting is quite awful. The use of sketchnotes did not improve the quality significantly.
Just wait and see.

My notes were about WordCamp Rotterdam 2019. There were some really technical talks. It is almost impossible to translate technical stuff like settings of analytics programs or Cascading Style Sheets to images.
Yeah. You’re right.

Okay. The Notes branch was needed as a reminder that I would read my notes without thinking too long.

Almost immediately I added a branch with presentations. If needed, I would read the presentations in slow speed. Just before blogging I realized I made an error. I opened Twitter search and entered the hashtag “#wcrtm” and “slides”. #wcrtm stands for WordCamp RotTerdaM. All the presentations of the interesting talks popped up.

Another branch is Goodies. These are gifts of sponsors. I lost my highlighter somewhere. I marked this branch with a red cross. Then I remembered that I had a camera sticker from a previous conference, which I found and placed. So I marked this branch with a green V. For the English people: Jack in the box.

I got some booklets / books about SEO or Search Engine Optimalisation, performance of a website and website security. The reason, that I did put this branch under the central object, was to balance the tree. This tip was given by a business consultant. The way I interpreted was that I had to avoid a mindmap with too few main branches.

Back to my Books branch. This branch contained information which I could use. Not immediately, but it was something I could not put away lightly. The Goodies branch was more like: done and forget.

Now comes the most important main branch in my mind map: Actions. Sub branches were added during my note cleanup.

This website still had no proper 404 screen. Yes, there are some plug ins, but is there a more elegant way to solve this problem? Also too many plug ins will slow down my website.

During the conference there were lots of configuration suggestions. As a newbie WordPress administrator I asked, how I could configure this. The answer was to contact the host provider. Actions from my side could collide with actions from the host provider. Bracing for impact.

I still have to place a security.txt on my website. More information can be found in securitytxt.org.

On the web I read some disturbing information about Xmlrpc.php. On the conference it was strongly suggested to remove it.

Another action was to collect all my markers for future notes. A final action was to put extra information about text in my pictures in the Alt Text.

Depending on my progress and feedback of my host provider I will adjust my actions in my mind map.