Slashdot's Vastu 386
nanopolitan writes "Wired has a story on harmonious website design according to Vastu, 'the Indian counterpart of feng shui'. The graphic accompanying the story has an analysis of Slashdot's design by Dr. Smita Narang. Her verdict? This site is 'in desperate need of balance'." From the article: "Thirty-year-old Smita Narang is rapidly becoming one of India's hottest Web designers. Her method: applying vastu shastra, the Indian counterpart of feng shui, to the online realm. The process entails mapping page attributes - HTML, colors, graphics - to elements like fire, water, and air. 'Any disturbance of these established elements can cause an imbalance in the site that directly affects its business,' Narang says."
Shouldn't there be a foot icon? (Score:2)
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I thought it was obnoxious and just goes to further the promotion of bullshit pseudoscience. You know, vastu shastra, like feng shui, is really nothing more than prescientific observations on how to situate a building so it doesn't get flooded, have dirt blown in by prevailing winds, etc (hence the 'feng' and 'shui' in feng shui). It makes this article all the more comical. Thankfully, everyone knows it's bullshit, so no one's listening to this jerk, right? ...Right? RIGHT?
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Feng shui and vastu and the like are, at least partially, non-western models for something that could generally be called aesthetic experience. There are also western models for aesthetics. One could even concieve of usability research as a kind of scientification of a subset of aesthetics.
Standards! (Score:5, Funny)
I'm not kidding.
Re:Standards! (Score:5, Funny)
I know "this thread is useless without pics" is a Slashdot faux pas, but calling this chick a dude is pretty harsh.
We don' need no steenking standards... (Score:4, Funny)
Irrespective of the gender confusion of parent, or the relative merits of using Vastu Shasta in preference to Feng Shui or one of the western astrological website balancing methods, this website designer needs some serious help:
A website designer needs to be held to a very high standard of compliance. This website designer fails it.
This post deserves to be modded as very, very funny...
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Actually, HTML IS a programming language: it is one of the semantic mark-up languages of the SGML family [wikipedia.org], designed for computerized implementation. I think what you meant is that HTML is not an imperative language [wikipedia.org] like Fortran, Cobol, ..., Perl, or Python. HTML is instead a declarative language [wikipedia.org], like most other markup languages, or the regex language em
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Less prone? It's an error itself! It's equivalent to this code:
If you use a slash in an attribute value, that value must be quoted. It's fallout from the SHORTTAG NET that lets you specify attribu
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When was the last time you wrote a parser? Regex engine? Context free grammar?
These things exist for a reason. English is hard to process in a computer because it's contextual. Would you argue that removing spacing from English is ok because many ideogram-based languages depend on context to tell you what the correct spacing of a sentence is?
What is the proper segmentation of "theyouthevent" ? They you the vent? The youth event? T
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If you bust in the door of a McDonalds and start saying "Put that table there, and that chair should be glued to the wall.." you're going to be asked to leave.
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So she's broken into Slashdot, has she? I wasn't aware that Slashdot ran on Windows Server.
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Of course we do.
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And like feng shui, IT'S BULLSHIT! (Score:4, Insightful)
Only people with double-digit IQ or a severe case of money poisoning actually listen to these jackasses.
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Me an' me bro...uh...Cletus went thar' an' won that thar' lottury.
Momma, she says, "Boys, you best git on' them thar' web saytes up an' stuff."
So, I'd a' like to...uh...su..sub..subsc...git that thar' newslittur your have.
Feng Shui is correct (Score:4, Insightful)
While the explanations claiming "energies" for Feng Shui may not be correct, the human psychology behind it is. Those same principles may or may not be applicable with regards to web design, but don't discount entirely that which you clearly do not understand.
Re:Feng Shui is correct (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah. There's a sucker born every minute.
"Those same principles may or may not be applicable with regards to web design, but don't discount entirely that which you clearly do not understand."
Yeah. And my cash-mishandling invisible man in the sky who is going to sentence me to eternity of fire and brimstone and suffering...but loves me can beat up yours too!
The problem is, I DO understand it. This is why I call it like I see it. Bullshit. First to last.
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There was some show (was it Bullshit?) where they selected 3 different Feng Shui consultants to come into a house and redecorate it. It was expected that, if this is a Science, they would come to similar conclusions regarding what the layout should be. At the very least, th
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What exactly do you mean with "literally [...] energy"? Our modern concept of energy (as in thermodynamics) is much younger than feng shui, so that is obviously not what the Chinese concept of qi refers to.
While the Chinese may have constructed theories to explain their observations that aren't true in a literal
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I think it's you who doesn't understand "basic scientific principles". The 1st sentence you posted is, well, wrong. It's a well-known fallacy. You can conclude many true things based on the fact that the sky is red. All you need is a consistent set of "rules" for such deductions to be made.
If you a
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Will putting a water fountain in a "harsh corner" improve your finances? Of course not, not in a direct causitive way.
Does living in a shithole make you less motivated and less likely to attract friends and influential people to help you make money? Fuckin A right it does.
So, does paying attention to your surroundings and having a well-put together harmonious environment overall improve your life? How could it not?
Only people with a double-digit IQ b
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Attention to good composition isn't bullshit. It's a variable with millions of opinions on "correctness".
This isn't even that. We start talking about "aligning with fire and earth....", you get the idea.
But if they left the pseudomystical psychobabble out, it'd just be another boring talk about good composition. But NOOO! It's VASTU!
*Waves hands, wiggles fingers, and pops eyes out*
OOOOOOOH!
Spare me...
Re:And like feng shui, IT'S BULLSHIT! (Score:5, Insightful)
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I vote this post "Irony of 2006". You rant for people who fall for easy scams based on personal opinion, and then refer to people's "IQ", otherwise known as "someone's totally subjective opinion of how intelligence should be measured".
Really, a huge bunch of those suckers paying
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You forgot the obligatory link. [sho.com]
P&T did a show on Feng Shui in which no two of the three "experts" came up with the same answers about how to arrange the furniture. There's only one place Feng Shui works, and that's in Nintendo's Animal Crossing game.
Page length (Score:5, Insightful)
People who advocate short page lengths probably don't use the web for information.
And yes I think google should default to 100 results
Re:Page length (Score:4, Interesting)
Gotta agree with that. People who want multiple pages are usually trying to pump ad views. This chick just seems to want to make things pretty, or her version of pretty anyway. I guess if you can spout BS well enough to sound knowledgeable, people will throw money at you. Serves no useful purpose to anyone else, but must be nice.
Re:Page length (Score:4, Insightful)
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Right on! Another paper-based oddity that I'd like to get rid of is the use of black text on white background. If you use a CRT and read such pages, you could be just as well staring at a light bulb.
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On the other hand, you could argue that we have progressed beyond the days of paper and ink, and we are no longer restricted by that technology's color combination. It's great that we can choose the colors to our liking; I don't particularly like green on black, but grey or cyan on black is quite nice.
Somehow I don't like the idea that background color should
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Both schools have advantages and disadvantages. The specifics will always be root for discussion between webdesigners.
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Possibly, she could have meant that we post way too many uninsightful comments...
preferences on google search results (Score:4, Informative)
The link just to the right of the text box that says preferences.
Penn and Teller (Score:5, Informative)
It's all bullshit!
Just like the subject of this news post.
Re:Penn and Teller (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't live so close to water that it washes your house away. Don't live so far away from water that it's an inordinate pain in the ass to get. Don't live close to the edges of cliffs which might collapse, or which you might fall off of. Do live in a location where your dwelling has as much protection from the elements as possible. But putting it directly in the path of the tree that looks kind of rotted and is about to fall it probably a bad idea too. Don't shit where you eat or are likely to drink. The sun is bright and hot, avoid suffering it unnecessarily. But the sun is also helpful, make sure you've got enough of it.
All it is are a set of building codes set to a spiritual narrative that's supposed to make it easy to remember. A smart person with good aesthetic sensibilities is required to make it work. Well compensated professionals in Asia, they get paid because they have some measure of the later, and more than some skill blending Confusian sensibilities with modern needs and tastes. The people on Bullshit! that's not what they're doing. They're banking on the ignorance of others.
The real tenents, with the mysticism striped away, they make a lot of sense to me. Except for the living underneath a rotting tree thing. Look, you buy the home you can afford.
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Re:Is it all BS? Is Christopher Alexander bullshit (Score:2, Interesting)
This phrase summarizes the only real redeaming quality of "sciences" like Feng Shui.
The truth is, there is no "science" behind these collective wisdoms. But that doesn't mean all of the conclusions derived are by definition wrong. Unscientific and wrong are not the same thing.
Once upon a time, collective wisdom (in some areas of human civilization) stated that the sun rose every day, carried on the chariot of a God. One could argue that this perception derived from the col
I've known for a long time.... (Score:5, Funny)
Windows (Score:5, Funny)
It's clear that Microsoft's GUI designers have been smoking some pretty serious weed and studying arcane bullshit notions and ologies of myth when you use Vista or IE7.
You made a funney. (Score:2)
Thanks a fucking lot, my 2-month-old kid was finally falling asleep now that it's nearly five in the morning, and then you had to go and write what you did.
I suggest submitting the name change recommendation to Microsoft along with a suggestion that the default skin should paint everything with orange gradients.
I sense a great disturbance in the Force (Score:3, Funny)
Her website is damn UGLY!! (Score:5, Informative)
"When houses, restauants, shops, shopping centers can be made according to the ancient science of Vastu Shastra then why cann't the Websites also follow the same rules"
-Dr. Smita Jain Narang
Gee
(btw, what's a "restauant"?)
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Re:Her website is damn UGLY!! (Score:5, Funny)
I wish I hadn't clicked on that link.
The goggles... they do NOTHING!
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And has a fixed-width table! (Score:2, Insightful)
Even worse than being ugly, the page uses fixed-width tables for layout:
She shouldn't be writing books on web design; she needs to read quite a few of them first.
Bunch of horse hooey (Score:2)
The page should have less articles so it's "proportionate"? What do they think it is, a book?
People in glass houses... (Score:2)
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LAFF at "The fusion of two sciences" bit on there.
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GGAAHH, that site is far from perfect.
Press Section [webvastu.com]: multiple videos autoplay, forcing you to either mute you speakers or rapidly click all the pause buttons.
The three boxes ("About the book", "What is...", and "How to order") don't have enough black border around them. But more importantly, they look very similar to Google AdSense ads, and the positioning on certain pages makes this illusion worse. So you eye ends up automatically tuning out the most important content.
The red background is at leas
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By the way, that site is good for you. It makes you avert your eyes from the screen in disgust, thus giving them a break from staring at it for hours. Thus it belongs in the same category of ergonomic goodness as Goatse.
Design of the Book's site (Score:5, Interesting)
Assuming that the site for the book (http://www.webvastu.com/ [webvastu.com]) was done according to the principles within it I don't see what this text could offer. My knee-jerk reaction to the aesthetics of the site is that it looks as if it were done using the Frontpage WYSIWYG in 1997. Looking at the HTML the site uses table based design, has presentation markup in the html, and contains a host of other minor errors (i.e. uppercase tags). The CSS http://www.webvastu.com/style.css [webvastu.com]) is a mess and demonstrates a lack of understanding of modern 'best practices'.
I might be able to accept the idea of some people using such a whishy-washy approach to design if the end product could stand on its own but that's not what I'm seeing by any measure.
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Overall, I think Slashdot is well designed though and it's upgrade is pretty good. It's an informational site that has stood the test of time and many many users. That's more than most site's
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!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//SoftQuad//DTD HoTMetaL PRO 4.0::19971010::extensions to HTML 4.0//EN" "hmpro4.dtd"
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My take - this is basically BS. I can couch good principles of web design in Hindu, Buddhist or any other sort of mysticism, but if I don't have the aesthetic sense and technical abilities to practice what I pre
Look how harmonious Webvastu is ! (Score:3, Funny)
Yes, it's a picture of beauty which adapts web standards from, er, well from a few years back really.
The site looks like a large blob of curry stains, but boy, is it ever harmonious, with the use of white text on a curry brown background !
Note how the footer is in black italic text and how the whole construct is cunningly created in tables!
Note the subtle use of a ruddy great drop shadow on the logo!
Hear the stunning web page background music when you visit the news page - that sounds like it's playing out of a toilet after a heavy nights drinking in a curry den.
Yes, folks, it's a far better layout than Slashdot, indeed.
After all, who needs good design when you've got Webvastu !
It's harmonious darnit, because we all love muddy brown websites!
Good Water flow (Score:2)
So will several cups of tea or several glasses of beer.
(As for "...Rob Malda chose an excellent URL, even though it's confusing when read aloud", one wonders why the good doctor thinks the domain name was chosen in the first place.)
What I really want to know is what Web Vastu says about loading up your page with stupid Flash animations so that when you go to a new page, the page slowly drops down or slides in or rolls down, or the letters fly into p
Says it all really (Score:4, Informative)
If you can't get that right you've got no chance.
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Yes, I would tend to agree [w3.org]
Hilarious. (Score:2)
What a load of bollocks. What follows next is the sales pitch to glue some special crystals into the web server to help it reverberate with only good juju, like a cosmic drum ... or whatever.
These are pretty tall words coming from someone with such a shitty website, too; http://www.webvastu.com/ [webvastu.com] needs more gradients, larger leading, more fonts, narrower columns, and definitely more orange. Especially the orange. For a special treat, disable style sheets: accessibility++. I would make some statement about
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Correct me if I'm wrong but I think the term Karma originated in India. So I'd say the Indian term for Karma is Karma.
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So in case you were wondering... (Score:2)
I wonder... (Score:2)
Dynamic stabilisation. (Score:2)
WebVastu (Score:2)
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What can hurt business is a technical site that is (Score:5, Informative)
Plus, even that short recommendation is full off weirdness.
A) Instability of "horizontal layout" is stupid. Put the pencil down horizontally. Is it unstable? How about standing on it's end?
B) In case of established site URL does not matter, so this point does not apply. If people know that site has interesting stuff on it, they will put a bookmark or remember the address. Easy to type ones are good for radio/tv commercials
C) Yellow? Even CNET toned down their yellow colors lately. Say hello to the world of Taxi Web sites? Green and blue are present as main elements. So... off the point
D) What little graphics there is it's actually not the best feature of the Slashdot
E) I wonder if she never reads anything that is more than 2-3 pages long. Or has that obsessive clicky-clicky-syndrome where person wants, no, needs to click on something NOW! Hence desire to split everything into tiny pages and users that have to use tricks (such as "Print this page") to re-assemble stuff back. Again, technical field pretty much demands more text than, say, some short poems collections
F) About the footer... She has to wear bell-bottoms then
Conclusion: more bullshit than usual, less design and pretty things than one'd think. Slow news day at Wired. Slashdot is not for the customers of Vastu-fied sites (but *gasp!* you already know that
Another candidate for review (Score:2)
http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/ [somethingawful.com]
Too much air (Score:2, Funny)
Vastu (Score:2, Informative)
Even though some follow these 'rules' religiously now, I think they were primarily established to promote good atmosphere/convenience by the ancient people who set it.
And there are always people who try to make money off it, by scaring people into believing that 'something bad' might happen if it isn't f
The water of Slashdot is out of balance (Score:2)
This 1995 style homepage with terrible code in desparate need of a complete rewrite.
Yet, she/he (?) just said "Slashdot is out of balance" and you fall for it. I wouldn't post this obvious-things-your-already-know post, if it wasn't happening all the time.
Just few days ago we have a book review article here, of someone who believes good web design in
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No we don't. It seems most people are actually making fun of her.
water flow? (Score:2)
Vastu not even good for ADHD people? (Score:2)
It drives me nuts... For so far balance to the mind
Tried to find her site... (Score:2)
Vastu is big in India (Score:2)
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Slashdot was just redesigned (Score:2)
Um, the current slashdot site is a redesign from earlier this year. Did you miss all the posts from CmdrTaco evaluating the various design submissions?
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Yes I'm also looking forward to the times where I can load 400+ comments, have them hidden by CSS, so I can see the remaining 10 or so 4+ posts I care about.
That would be so much better.
In fact this is one of the biggest sins of CSS: people assume it's ok to just splatter everything in the code and then hide the offensive parts depending on situation and media. Especially insulting is the use of mobile media CSS, to generate huge pages, 80% of whi
Ah HA! (Score:2)
Next time, I'll be fully-cocked and won't try to respond to something when I'm half-asleep. I literally wrote that post after being awake for only 2 minutes.
Dr. Narang, meet Dr. Dre (Score:2)
I said "Hell no bitch, you'd have a dick in your mouth! mouth! mouth!"
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That depends on the American you're talking to; there are probably plenty of them who'd lap it up if you gave them some Biblical quote that one could, if one worked really hard at it, interpret in some way that one could, if one really wanted to, think referred to some Web design is
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Re:You understand not the truth. Let me guide you. (Score:2)
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You need to have sound turned on. I think it's poking fun at vacuous marketing promises, dotcom absurdities and the everything-can-be-done-online mentality that gave us the iLoo. Well, "could have given".
It's the moderation system (Score:2)
Now watch me get modded flamebait or something
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Some would argue that it's impossible to apply to a building, too.