vColin

Thanks for the encouragement!

That actually reminds me - that stuff shouldn't even be in the client-code. And even if it should be there, methinks it ought to be scrambled somehow :)

Your deductions are indeed correct - I am in the UK - Cambridge in fact.

I think I know exactly what you mean - restrict the highlighted letters to be in a single direction.

Something I was considering was changing the selection mechanics so that you click at the first letter and then drag to the final letter before releasing. I think that would be more intuitive.

Yes, I agree it's raw, almost embarrassingly so. Still, release early and iterate!

Thanks for pointing that out - my IE testing has been sporadic at best! I'll definitely take a look at that.

Noted. At the moment I am just happy if anyone even visits the page though. But I realise that there is no clear direction to the new visitor. Another thing to add to the never-ending list.

Find where you should aim with this handy utility: http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~ryantibs/darts/dartsapplet.htm... (context: http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~ryantibs/darts/)

Yup, the start of the first sentence should read "An official from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) told reporters today" rather than "An today".

Bad markup being the culprit - somewhat ironically.

Looking at my list of domains there are:

  * 118152 com domains ending in "book"
  * 14450 net domains ending in "book"
  * 8666 org domains ending in "book"

Even narrowing it down to domains ending in "book" with "face" somewhere in the domain, there are:

  * 6175 com domains
  * 691 net domains
  * 389 org comains

37Signals covered this or something similar: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2087-smart-pasting-at-the-new....

Tynt (http://www.tynt.com/) was the "culprit" in that case and looks so here.

Another related bit twiddling resource: http://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html.

The comments accompanying the code are interesting too.

"10:42am UTC: Compromise was due to a compromised SSH Key, not due to any software exploits in Apache itself."

Interesting – I wonder what the variance in the “kind” of sign-up might be. Perhaps those designs that highlight the “free” aspects will encourage a lot of try-outs that then bail after the 30 days; while the designs that don’t will see more longer term sign-ups.

The results of a follow-up after 30 days to see how many stay could also be enlightening.