Why 60% of Internet Users Will Not See My Site
I have made a decision. I have thought about it quite a bit. It has gone back and forth in my mind, back and forth until I begin to scream at it to shut up and please go away, I’m trying to sleep here. I’m trying to read. I’m trying to play guitar. It is a penetrating decision that could prove to be fatal to everything I want to do.
But it’s a decision I find myself needing to make.
People always find things that they simply cannot stand for. They will do whatever they can to try to demolish whatever it is that they can’t stand for. This decision is a reflection of that, of my views. It is in no way the size of decision that even echoes the magnitude of importance that other movements have. It doesn’t even echo the importance of things in my life, if you know what I mean. It isn’t as important as a boycott of Monsanto, or Coca-Cola.
You could say it’s trivial. And it may be. But it’s important to me, and I feel I can do a little bit to stop it, the same way stopping buying GMO foods made by Monsanto or Coca-Cola products would do a little bit to stop them.
This is why, starting with the next upgrade to sttimmypro.com (STPv3), I will no longer support the browser Internet Explorer, which constitutes about 60.7% of all internet users (via pingdom.com, click for article). What does this mean? It means that if you try to view this website in any version of Internet Explorer, you will get a page that asks you to upgrade to Firefox or Chrome. There will also, most likely, be a link to this post, on a blank white page with no style information. That way it will work in IE.
But why? Why would I do this?
Because Internet Explorer is a terrible browser. There is no getting around it. It crashes, it’s insecure, and the one that takes the cake — or no, the one that won’t fess up and gets the whole class stuck in the room for an extra five minutes past the bell: it doesn’t follow w3C standards.
Sure, IE8 is far, far better at standards than IE7 or IE6.
But the deal is, the developers ignore important aspects of internet standards, and try to make their own set. Due to the large number of internet users who use the browser, web developers — the people who make the websites you visit — are forced to throw dozens of workarounds into their code just so that their site will display properly in the one browser that it won’t work in.
Think of it like this.
Let’s say there’s a large group of car designers from a bunch of different companies that gets together and agrees on standards for their car designs. And they agree that the cup holders in their cars would have a diameter of two and a half inches when at their full size, at a minimum. Every company involved at this meeting adopts the policy.
So in the following years, every car on the market from companies all around the world have these cup holders that have a diameter of two and a half inches.
That is, except for one certain company. And it’s the company that has the most people who drive their cars. Their cars have cup holders with a two inch diameter.
Meanwhile, the people who make cups for fast food restaurants have to either decrease the diameter of the base of their cups a half inch to comply with the fake standard that the one company feels entitled to build into its carsl, or continue making cups that won’t fit in 60% or so of ever car ever made. While the standard-size cups fit in every other car you could possibly buy, the cupmakers still feel forced to make their cups a different size because the majority of people who drive cars drive that company’s brand of car.
Do you understand?
Internet Explorer is the asshole car company. Web developers are the cupmakers. The W3C standards are the standards the association of car designers made about cupholder size.
And so, from now on I will not make my cups a half inch smaller or whatever (don’t make a dick joke don’t make a dick joke don’t make a dick joke). From now on I will only comply with normal internet standards, not Internet Explorer standards. Because if I make my cups smaller, it is literally an act of support for a browser that doesn’t fit to standards. I don’t believe you can support internet standards and support Internet Explorer at the same time.
Which is back to the main point: starting with the next upgrade to this website and continuing until Internet Explorer is fully standards compliant, sttimmypro.com will not be visible in the browser.
So if you haven’t, upgrade to Firefox. Seriously.
Smart button (I was like, “Well that’s ironic. The button supporting Firefox works in every browser but Firefox.” But it turned out someone installed adblock on this computer. Stupid adblock.)
Also, semirelatedly, the IE Car would stop working every six seconds and the bottom would fall out every time you hit a bump.
Inside the Monster’s Dollhouse (The Depravity of Innocence)
So sometimes I write some things. Inside the Monster’s Dollhouse is a place where you can go and read some of these things.
Go check it out! Original music by Sir Quinn Jarvis Holland and Sir Madame Jordyn Reeser that is awesome and hardcore and that I’m thinking I should turn autoplay off on because that pisses some people off and makes it take forever to load on my computer.
But regardless.
Go check it out! It is unequivocally hardcore!
-Benjamin
BY THE WAY, STP V3! COMING INCREDIBLY SOON!
Filed under General Site Stuff, Miscellaneous | Comment (0)St. Timmy Productions Version 2.0
This, my friends, is STP v2.
And this is an image I just made about STP v2:
At the surface this is no more than a redesign of this website. Below that it is a redesign and rewording of crap. Even further below that you find the hour upon hour of blood, sweat, and tears that went into this theme and the true ingenuity of some of the modifications made to this website. Not to mention the bitterness and depressing thoughts involved in that… And on the bottom layer you finally get to the restructuring of the mindset and the team at STP.
Before I go on with that, just to let you know, I realize this theme is not the greatest. It’s an incredibly hacked version of another theme. And to be completely honest, the result is slightly mediocre. It’s too monochrome and contrasty. I’m sorry. To go farther into it than I need to, I’m kinda tired of WordPress. It’s not WordPress’ fault that the theme’s not great, but it didn’t help. I don’t like customizing WordPress.
Now.
Let’s start with the mindset.
St. Timmy Productions’ primary focus is now on alternative storytelling rather than, you know, standard storytelling. That is not to say that we will completely hault with our filmatizing. But our focus is going to be on Web Series, ARGs, Interactive Fiction… Basically, we’d like to direct most of our resources towards immersive, interactive storytelling.
Why? Because it’s awesome. For real. It’s awesome, it’s exciting… not much else to it.
There’s seriously some epic stuff we’re going to be doing at St. Timmy Productions. No joke.
Another I’ll announce right now is that Davis and I are in the conceptual stages of our latest collaboration. The working title of this project is Ashes, but that’s subject to change. It’s going to be pretty epic. More on that later.
For now, welcome to STP v2. Enjoy the site. Join the forum.
-Ben
Filed under General Site Stuff | Comment (1)