Category: Miscellaneous

Learning a Language Like Russian

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Revisited some time later

I would retain what I have written here, including a parallel Bible. However, a good friend tipped me off to FluentU (App Store, Google Play).

However, I think I've found a way to overclock FluentU. Once you have down the skill of pegging (see Memory and Prayer for an introduction to the skill and a tool to practice; the skill is discussed at book length in the first part of Kevin Trudeau's Mega Ego Memory), FluentU gives the spelling and pronunciation of a Russian Word, and then deliberately slows down to visually emphasize what the word means, giving some animation to the item that is being communicated... in fact, they give enough time to peg the Russian word to what it refers to once you're proficient at pegging. I don't consider myself great at it, but I find that I'm retaining stuff much more quickly when I'm watching the animations that cover word content.

This post is most immediately about learning Russian for native English speakers, but most of the principles apply to learning other languages as well.
At least one webpage I've seen about easy, medium, and hard languages for native English speakers placed Russian squarely in the middle difficulty level for languages to learn; the major qualification for difficulty is simply a vocabulary that doesn't overlap modern English that much; I would guesstimate that the number of Russian words a native English speaker would easily recognize amounts to less than 10% of the words one would encounter. Beyond that, the grammar is not particularly slippery, or otherwise odd; the alphabet has strong and recognizable similarities to our own (compare CJK ideograms or even trying to see where one letter ends and another begins in Arabic for the un-initiated). It's actually a lot nicer an alphabet to outsiders than the English use of our alphabet is. Learning Russian is moderately difficult, but it's doable, and this page is here because I want to share what gleanings I've learned in my studies, and make things easier.

A preliminary note: the Russian alphabet

The first point I'm mentioning is the alphabet. In a word, it's not a hard alphabet to learn; it's just unfamiliar and takes practice. I learned it on an iPhone app named "Learn to read Russian in three hours." Good old fashioned flashcards should work just as well, or for that matter having the alphabet below handy for cross-reference in reading. (Or a memory technique discussed below.) Also, don't feel the need to make every sound. The Russian R sound is trilled; I've tried at length to learn a trilled R and don't know how to make it. The H sound is a grated H, the kind that makes you sound like you are clearing your throat because you have a bad chest cold. I can sometimes make it, but I've heard native Russian speakers pronounce it as an English K, or an English H, so apparently both work. There is also a sound that sounds like an "sh" followed immediately by a "ch"; I'm working on this and sometimes succeeding at making it one sound without a break between the "sh" and "ch" sounds. Don't sweat it overall; in most languages people will have some tolerance for imprecise sounds: if your worst liability is an inauthentic R or H sound, you're doing well!

The Russian alphabet
Open just this image to print it
The letters you should pay attention to are those on the far left.

A first language-learning workhorse: A parallel Bible

I will try to cover a few primary techniques, but the main workhorse I've found, after a lot of other things, is reading a parallel Russian-English Bible. I found, to my irritation, that all the Russian-English Bibles I could track down on Amazon were made by the Russian Bible Society, which is a Protestant organization that omits certain books of the Old Testament that are present both in the Russian and English translations. (The Reformers at least included those books in an appendix!) The modern Russian translation you will be wanting is the Synodal Version (RUSV), which was translated into Russian by Orthodox Christians rather than Protestants. I wanted a nice leatherbound edition; there is also a nice but cheaper option (the only one really cheaper one I could find was a paperback edition).

Additionally, there is at least one available parallel Slavonic-English prayer book I'm aware of. It could perhaps be better, but it's not too many words to learn, and the words are often the same as at Liturgy. There is also a transliterated version of the Liturgy that displays the English version as you hover over the transliterated Russian.

No matter how much you may want to learn Russian, please start forays into the Synodal Version slowly, and ramp up slowly. As Orthodox mystagogy would have it, you don't begin exercise by running a marathon. What I would recommend instead is reading the Gospel of John the Theologian, and start with the prologue.

The basic initial technique is to look at the Russian side for a single verse like John 1:1, and then see if you can make connections to the English side. And if you don't on the first try, that's fine. But try again an hour later. If you're comfortable with a verse, move on to the next one. Before long you may be able to read a different verse each hour, and continue with hourly study. If you are comfortable trying to read one verse at a time, try reading two verses, and maybe not all the time. When you are genuinely comfortable reading two verses, move on to three. It is possible this way to get up to maybe a chapter: "Little and often fills the purse."

But by all means, no marathons, nor stretching yourself as hard as you can for a short while. One detail about lawn care is that the kind of sprinklers that are great for children to play in should only be used for that purpose as they are terrible at watering lawns. What happens to a lawn used by the sprinklers is that the stream of water is shot high up into the air, and with the same force slams down into the ground. If you slam water onto parched ground, it isn't absorbed; it can't be. What each droplet of a fist does, instead of being absorbed, is hammer the ground into a beaten shield that repels further droplets. And you end up with a deceptive situation where there is water streaming in rivulets over the surface of the wet-looking soil, but an inch down the soil remains as parched as before it was watered. This is something you don't want to do in educational situations, including learning a language. Little and often fills the purse.

One specific note to people who are in fact looking to learn classical Hebrew and/or Koine Greek: you can fairly easily find a good intralinear Bible, and to some people this looks like practically all language learning solved at once. However, I would pass on a caution: unless you have already learned multiple languages and already have that discipline, it's not perfect and you can easily create a habit of your eyes jumping to the intralinear English words and not really spending that much time, or making much progress, with Hebrew or Greek itself. However, one bit of discipline that I am using now is as follows. Use a specially cut rubber jar opener to only let you see the partial or complete line in the ancient language, and don't unveil to yourself the English term until you have stopped to ponder the ancient language's term and tried to figure it out without (intralinear) help.

Making a jar opener into a study tool (skip)

In earlier versions of this page, I recommended using index cards to hide and show things in a way that would be optimal. After working with them, I found that unless you have the luxury of a page that is completely level, they slide around the page whether you want it or not. That problem was solved by making a cover out of a carefully cut rubber jar opener, which I obtained at a local grocery store.

Good Cook rubber jar openers include a circular jar opener, and a larger squarish jar opener. Either of them could be cut to be useful; I used the more square model but if I made too bad a mistake cutting it I could have used the other one. The unopened package looks like so:

A pair of jar openers that will be used to cover a text line by line and word by word.

I made a first cut; mine was too deep and I cut a slight distance off the top. The point of the cut at the top is to be placed on top of a page, at the line of text you are working on, and to reveal a line of text, up to a point, and conceal what hasn't been revealed further.

The first basic cut in making a useful cover out of a jar opener.

The full vertical height is too much; go to the bottom of the page on at least some intralinear Bibles and the rubber will fall over the bottom of the page. It was cut to height that was much less but still appropriate:

Note that at the top the top borders are closer.

Here are three examples of reading a line of the text. In all cases, the point is to place the whole Hebrew line in view, while hiding the intralinear English translation until the Hebrew has been given primary attention:

A first step in reading Hebrew in an interlinear text.

A second step in reading Hebrew in an interlinear text.

A third step in reading Hebrew in an interlinear text.

These specific images are adapted to Hebrew, as a language that reads right to left. If you want to work with an interlinear Greek New Testament you can use the same covering in almost the same way; you'll just pull the cover left to right, after first flipping the cover horizontally so it conceals what is to the right instead of what is to the left.

Mega Memory

I am here mentioning something that has served me powerfully in the past, and works with multiple languages, but may not be as much needed in our setting.

The Elements of New Testament Greek, the Greek textbook I was taught from, told you what you needed to learn in vocabulary, etc. Greek to Me does one better by providing a practical means to learn the vocabulary above rote memorization; it applies the classical memory technique in the first half of Kevin Trudeau's Mega Memory (I have a much shorter page and training tool online in Memory and Prayer), and it has been a tremendous accelerator in offering a five-times-faster alternative to looking things up in an old-fashioned print XYZ-English dictionary.

The reason I consider this to be optional now is that there is a faster alternative to avoid repeatedly looking up a term in a thick paper dictionary. You can go to translate.google.com, set it to translate from Russian to English, and spell things phonetically, or set your computer to let you type in Russian, and maybe buy keyboard stickers (or just post-it notes) putting Russian letters on top of your keys. There are two major Russian keyboard layouts both of which should be supported; there is one that is the standard layout (stickers are available), and one that is roughly phonetic for English speakers (I couldn't find any stickers). If you are going to Russia, you will want the Russian standard keyboard layout; if you are not intending to go to Russia, you will probably find the phonetic layout to feel easier and more natural.

That stated, the memory technique has its uses, especially in getting a new alphabet down. It acts as scaffolding; you first remember XYZ through a vivid mental image from what is called "pegging", and then with repeated use the provisional mental image fades out of significance and you more quickly remember the word itself.

I will briefly comment that some people develop a strong initial impression that the memory technique is too much work for what it tries to do. I personally have found it not to live up to its hype, but I don't know anyone who has become proficient and still retains the initial bad impression. I would place it as one tool among others, and less decisive given today's technology offerings than it has been for me in the past.

A quieter memory technique

The business world has come to recognize that multitasking is not a good thing, and divided attention is needlessly diluted attention. (The Orthodox Church has known this for much longer.)

There is a less striking memory technique of, when you discover or rediscover something or come across something worth keeping, stopping and pausing for a moment to simply give it your full attention. No mental images needed: just the studious slow, focused, and present attention Orthodoxy gives to anything worth keeping. This memory tool is something that combines well with many other techniques and resources.

Language classes

Language classes aren't available to all of us; but they can provide another tool. I wanted to take a course in conversational Russian, but it didn't work out.

DuoLingo

There are multiple computer training systems; Rosetta Stone is far from the only option. I don't have informed opinion about all of them, but DuoLinguo comes highly recommended, and I respect it myself.

Subtitles

I have had difficulty locating edifying Russian-language film or video with English subtitles. However, if you do find something, it can be worth its weight in gold to try to make connections between the Russian you hear and the English you read. However, please note that there is not a complete correspondence between speech in the video and subtitles in another language. (You can have a few people talking but only the essential part is relayed in subtitle.)
Two gems I am aware of are Ostrov and The Tale of Peter and Fevronia.

Conversations with native speakers (if available)

Having a conversation, on a very basic level, can be helpful.

One note from Wheaton's Institute for Cross-Cultural Training: in dealing with a native speaker, you may be working and working and working on improving your language, and it remains just as hard to talk to that person.

There is a reason for this, and it is really OK. Some people who are sensitive to others' imperfect language abilities simplify what they say to match the proficiency of the person they are speaking with. This may mean that when you start they speak very simply, but they simplify less and less when they see you become more proficient. You are making progress talking with that person; it just doesn't feel like it.

Reading books in Russian

This is not a first step in working on a foreign language, but when you are able it is tremendously valuable to read books in that language. What may come to mind first are the proverbial nineteenth-century Russian novels, but beside them there is a vast collection of spiritual literature available in Russian. When you are ready to read books in Russian, reading books really pays off.

Listening to liturgical music

This also can be invaluable.

Experimenting

Different techniques work best for different people; what works best for one person may not be best for another.

This point is worth experimenting on, and it is worth being in some sense watchful by paying attention for what works and what doesn't.

Enjoy!

Memory and Prayer

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Surgeon General's Warning

When I first started to explore standard memory techniques, I had a couple of concerns. Guarding your internal state has been part of Christian ethics from the beginning. Not that this is uniquely Christian; it was a standard concern in ancient Rome, and the same or similar concerns are usually not too difficult to find in world religions. And to those concerns, which might as well have been from Plato or the Buddha, the specific technique used is a way to make your mind suffer a cutting blow from a forceful image where a key ethical concern is bringing mental images under control, especially forceful ones. It's a way to achieve results at the expense of spiritually polluting your interior landscape.

I retain some variant of the technique as I have simply found nothing like it for learning words in new languages. (The book Greek to Me applies the skill to learning New Testament Greek, but I have heartily recommended it to people wanting to learn almost any language.) I also believe that as an optional skill it continues to make sense for people like Toastmasters who give speeches, don't have the benefit of teleprompters, and want to maintain eye contact without looking down to read (external paper) notes. In antiquity, the skill was considered a part of rhetoric, and some millennia later using it for that purpose still makes sense.

Nonetheless, I use the skill little and believe few of us should be using it too much. And for the driving purpose for this web posting, as a tool to support prayer, is one I have used in the past, but I've found better. The freeing nature of prayers from a liturgical prayer book dispenses with the need to keep composing words as long as you're praying; and a good prayer book like the Jordanville prayer book is an invitation to pray with the saints. If you're looking to pray better, you might consider the Jordanville prayer book.

CJS Hayward

Note to people searching for "please pray for me right now": I pray for all of my visitors each day. I am already praying for you. Please send me an email, if you like, so I can pray for you more specifically.

What is this odd gadget?

I'll explain that in just a moment. Before I explain what it is, I want to explain why it is here. That is something deeply connected with prayer.

For much of my life, I have irregularly prayed one simple prayer. What is it? I'll skip the first minute. After the first minute, it goes, "Um, God, let's see... I want to talk with you... um, uh, help me to be a better person... and help my friend's knee to get better... um, uh, I really want to pray more..." It would start whenever I remembered to pray, which was inconsistent, and continue for as long as I could stand praying without anything to say, which wasn't long. Even though I have much experience with this prayer, it's not one I recommend.

If you pray that prayer, I do not want to criticize you for it. What I do want to do is give you a real alternative, so you can pray something else if you want. There is a connection I made which allows me to have an hour of good prayer each night. I'd like to share it with you. There's a little bit of a story.

One time at lunch, my best friend Robin gave me a pen and a piece of paper, and asked me to name twenty items (whatever I wanted) for him to write down. He looked at the paper for about a minute, and then handed it back to me. Then he recited all twenty items. Then backwards. Then he invited me to quiz him. If I gave a number, he gave the corresponding item. If I gave an item, he told me its number.

He explained that he was reading a book of powerful ways to apply a simple memory technique. That particular book wasn't magical; any of several others would have worked just as well, but there is useful memory technique that isn't taught as widely here as it has been. Later, I asked for the title, and read the book. I stopped partway through, but the portion I read and acted on was very useful.

When I go to a library, I no longer need to write call numbers down. It's quite a convenience not to have to hunt for pencils and paper. It's nice, when I'm falling asleep and remember something for tomorrow, to know I can remember in the morning without writing it down. I've learned to read Latin in a month, which may help me get into a good graduate school.

Before I go further, I want to address one concern a friend raised. In essence, she said, "You can use this, but you're brilliant. Will it work for the rest of us?" The answer to that is a resounding yes.

This works on the same principle as material that is taught in special education so mentally retarded students can helpfully interact with the rest of us. It doesn't require an abstract mind because it works very concretely, and I had to work a little harder to use them than most other people would. You don't need to think like me to use it; it works for all kinds of people.

There's a way of linking two things together, called pegging: you have some pegs that you can hang things on. To do that, you represent each one with an image, and imagine some vivid, ludicrous, surreal, dreamlike image combining those two. Suppose that you want to peg the word 'transcribe' to your toes. How can you do that?

Remember when you were a child, and played with rebuses. You see an image of a hat next to several ones. Does it make any sense? At once! Or, more properly, you looked at it a little while, and then realized that "hat ones" sounds almost the same as "At once!" And you solved the rebus.

I want you, after reading this, to close your eyes and imagine something. We're going to break down the word 'transcribe' into 'train' and 'scribe'. To put them together, imagine that there's a commuter train rushing by, and on top of it is a giant scribe, sitting so he straddles the train, writing great, flaming letters on top of the train. He starts at the front, and slides back until he falls off the last car. Close your eyes and imagine for a moment; that's the representation of 'transcribe'.

Now imagine that your big toenail is a tunnel, like a train's tunnel into the mountain, and imagine that just after the scribe falls off the train, it vanishes into that hole. Imagine it vividly.

Or for another example: suppose you need cucumbers for your kid's project, and want to remember them when you stop by the grocery store. Imagine an inch-long black spike growing out of your heel, pointed down and back. Now imagine you are kicking and puncturing a cucumber with your heel again and again, until the cucumber looks like Swiss cheese—and then you use the spike to cut away one end of the cucumber and hollow it out, and slide the end over the spike so you have a Swiss cheese cucumber peel sticking to your foot.

Now imagine that you also need butter, so you imagine that you have a stick of butter on your knee, which you are using like an ice skate, kneeling, to move around a giant frying pan.

Think about your toes. What do you remember? Your heel? Your knees?

That's the basis for pegging. You can use different parts of your body to store things, and now when you think about your toes, you'll remember the train with flaming letters disappearing, and the scribe, and you can solve the rebus to remember the word: transcribe.

I suggest the following list of parts of your body to use as pegs. Stand alone somewhere and say, "One, toes... Two, heel..." aloud while touching that part of your body. I felt sheepish when I did it, but that gives you and me a solid place in memory to put things, and it's well worth it:

  1. Toes
  2. Heel
  3. Ankle
  4. Knee
  5. Thigh
  6. Waist
  7. Ribs
  8. Spine
  9. Fingertips
  10. Knuckles
  11. Palm
  12. Wrist
  13. Elbow
  14. Shoulder
  15. Neck
  16. Chin
  17. Lips
  18. Nose
  19. Eyes
  20. Ears

Print this page out if you need to. It's worth it. If you'd like a book that explains this more easily, something meant to be doable and practical, I've found Kevin Trudeau's Mega Memory to be an excellent introduction. Pick up a copy and give it half an hour a day.

Each day, add to that list one thing to pray for. I knew well enough that prayer was good. I wanted to, but when I found something I wanted to pray for, I forgot it; when I wanted to pray, I could never remember what I had to pray for. You can avoid that. I now have a nice, long list of things to pray for—that God would bless certain people, or that he would make me the sort of person that will make Heaven real to others, or that people around me would sense God's presence, or simply enjoying God's presence myself. I pray for an hour before falling asleep at night. What about waiting? I don't fidget as much; I can use unexpected waits as a time to pray. I count myself much better off that way.

There are other ways as well. Jerry Root, a teacher at Wheaton, mentioned that you can pray for one person when you brush your teeth, another when you turn on a light switch, another when you open a door. When you have a time to pray and have learned to pray for that list, add to it. One day decide what you will pray when you put on your shoes. Add your own list of daily activities. When that's in place, why don't you pray when you see certain things?

The contraption at the beginning of this page is a tool I created to practice this pegging. You can create a list, commit it to memory, and be quizzed on it. If a twenty item list is too much to start off with, start with three: you can choose how many items are on the list. Add one more each day. Before you know it, you'll be able to handle twenty items. Bookmark this page so you can come back.

I've heard people say a lot of good things about prayer. They've said, for instance, that prayer is not just a celestial vitamin, something good if unpleasant, but a great kindness. They've said it's a privelege to bring requests before the King of Heaven. They've said it's part of how God works with us, and makes us ready to be with him. All of this and more is true; Richard Foster's Prayer is one of many books if you wonder, "Why do Christians say prayer is good?" I have written this especially for people who want to pray but have trouble praying when they can't remember what to say. Now you can.

Thanks to V.V. on Sun's Java forum and all my beta testers.
 

A Personal Flag

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A flag, loosely a mirror image of the French flag, with a red cross on the white strip in the middle, and numerous smaller pictures; it is described in detail below.
When I was poking around the web, I found Steve Scheussler's home page. Among other things, it mentions that Steve has a personal constitution.

There was something that bothered me about the idea of a personal Constitution. I respect Steve and enjoy his acquaintanceship — I didn't feel a nagging doubt about him, only a disagreement with the idea of a personal constitution. The basic idea of lex, rex — "the law comes before the king" — is foundational to American government, runs so deep that justices who violate it invariably acknowledge its place by paying lip service to it, checks many of the abuses when a ruler is permitted to do anything he wants, and strikes me as fundamentally flawed. What you know is always more than you can write down, and living by a personal constitution makes a creation greater than its creator. The principle that can be written is not the ultimate principle.

I felt an objection, but I also felt something worth imitating. I followed my intuitions for a while, and came to a flag. I hold objection to the way flags are treated in American culture — the only physical object I have ever been asked to pledge allegiance to. I was required by law to pass a school test on the Constitution and on the flag, and the flag is the only item I have been told to never let touch the ground. Nobody objects when I (quite frequently) put a Bible on the floor, nor does anybody object when I am roughhousing with friends (human — created in the image of God!) and push them into the ground — but the American flag is to be held in such high respect that it may not touch the ground, not even when it is being respectfully folded. The proper term, I believe, for an object of this veneration is: 'Idol'.

That is what American culture makes of a flag, but that is not what it must be. I choose to make it something else — a way to share who I am to other people. Like many symbols, it holds meaning, but does not explain itself. So here is an explanation of its symbolic side:

Legend

Basic design

Most flags are very simple, with perhaps one true picture at the center; my flag is intended to be at once both simple and complex. I will treat the simple aspects before going on to the little details.

The two obvious allusions are to the French and British flags. Why does the French flag appear reversed? I am left-handed. There's been a lot of silly stuff written about left-handedness, but there are some serious aspects as well. My brain has an unusual wiring pattern that appears in some left-handers — the pattern is only found in 2% of the world's population. If you meet me in person, you will find that I speak slowly, after a pause — but when I do speak, my words are as carefully chosen as those I write. I think differently, by nature.

I chose the French flag as the main model, because I have spent time in France, and because there are ways in which it is more home than America — French people often think and discuss ideas where Americans often watch television. I enjoy speaking French a great deal. But why is America not represented at all?

It is, only in a way that is not obvious.

The common mental model of American history is that there was England, and then English colonists came and settled in America, and then they broke off and formed their own nation, and now the U.S. is the U.S. and England is England. How else could anyone think of it?

One of my professors argued that Martin Luther King was essentially a conservative: his "I have a dream" speech did not try to attack, change, or replace the fundamental principles of American government, but instead asked for a more consistent application of American principles. When he said that the bank of justice did not have insufficient funds, he was not asking white America to write a new check; he was trying to cash a check that had already been written. In a similar manner, the United States was in large part founded by English colonists who had been promised certain "rights of Englishmen", rights that were not forfeited by colonizing faraway soil, and rebelled when these English rights were violated. "No taxation without representation!" was an English cry. Another analogous situation would be the Reformation. The Reformation did not start when people decided that they wanted to break off from the Church and do something else; it started with criticisms from people who believed, rightly or wrongly, that the Roman Catholic Church was failing to live up to Catholic standards. Reams of anti-Catholic invective came later, but the initial idea was to help the Church be more properly Catholic. Something of the same is at work with America's independence. In contradistinction to the idea that the colonies split off from England and became different, I would suggest that a bifurcation occurred — and that the two sides are not very far apart. A friend who grew up in France commented on the similarity of spiritual atmosphere between France and the United States; both France and the United States are part of the West, and England and the United States are closer still. Now the U.S. has economic and military distinction, and (for good or for bad) is drawing much of the world's technical talent — but there are strong similarities, and some of the intellectual movements that have been pointed to as America distinguishing itself from Europe are things I'd rather forget: pragmatism, behaviorism, etc. The English flag, in a non-obvious way, represents America, along with the basic colors of red, white, and blue.

Red

This third of the flag might be titled, 'Eclectica' — not named for this website, but including various eclectic aspects of my interest or my person. Red was my favorite color when I was a boy. Specific things listed, loosely from top to bottom, are:

  • The world. In this case, the world is not a symbol of the environment per se, so much as of cultures the world around. I am interested in cultures, and find them to be objects of fascination and beauty.
  • A climber. I love to climb, and I am very happy that Wheaton College recently opened a climbing wall. I'm hoping to learn how to climb up a thick tree trunk without using branches.
  • A hand, showing the bones inside. A skeleton is not necessarily a gruesome part of a corpse; it is also part of a living, breathing human body. In Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, Paul Brand talks about how a lobster has a hard skeleton on the outside — and how a man has a skeleton that's strong as steel, but covered with soft flesh. I don't know how well I live up to this standard (I know one person who's said that I don't), but I want to live to the standard of rock hard, unyielding principles inside, but a soft touch that meets things on the outside.
  • A paper target, viewed through a competition rifle's sight. I don't get to do riflery very often, but I enjoy it a great deal. Marksmanship is not about the machismo that Hollywood shows; it's about concentration and growing still.
  • A Swiss Army Knife. I carry a thick Swiss Army Knife, and use it for all sorts of things. After watching MacGyver as a child, I came to value resourcefulness, tinkering, and jury-rigging; I still find the knife to be quite useful.
  • A place called "the Web" at Honey Rock Camp. Honey Rock is a place that has been special to me from childhood; it is easier to know other people there, and there are beautifully eclectic physical facilities. One of these has a World War II cargo net strung up to make a place for children to romp around in: the Web. It is now, so far as I know, closed — the fabric is deteriorating, and it is a legal liability. The camp retains its beauty, and provided the home setting for A Cord of Seven Strands.
  • A clock with no hands. After spending a summer in Malaysia, I changed my time sense to move more slowly, to not need to have things happen quickly and try to let go of the number of minutes elapsed when I am with a friend. Something of this basic insight is captured in Madeleine l'Engle's description of kairos in Walking on Water, Neil Postman's description of moments (before the clock ruled) in Amusing Ourselves to Death, and by an anthropologist in The Dance of Life. Why? It's not that I wanted to lose awareness of time, so much as to gain a more effective focus on things that are lost. There are other facets, but I do not wish to expand here — the interested reader is encouraged to look at the mentioned titles.
  • A roll of duct tape. Same basic meaning as the Swiss Army Knife; I used to also carry that, too.
  • Swimming underwater. I haven't done much swimming in the past few years, but I was quite often in the water as a boy — and, more often than not, swimming under the surface. I cherish those memories.
  • A television with clothing on top and books in front. It's hard to portray the absence of a television per se, but I can portray one that hasn't been used in a long time. I generally try to avoid watching television, and I do not have one in my apartment. Not only is an hour of television an hour not spent doing other things, but watching television subtly alters — impairs — our experience of the external world. How does it do that? Read Jerry Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television.
  • A cave. A cave is a quiet place to rest and think; it is a symbol of withdrawing to meditating. My apartment is such a place.
  • A graveyard. A graveyard is not necessarily a symbol of the macabre; it is a place symbolic of continuity between the living and the dead. This is why many old churches and cathedrals bury people under the sanctuary; it is a symbol of connection with those who walked before. I do not believe in the modern concept of progress, nor the postmodern rejection of progress and everything near it; I believe in a human and a Christian continuity with those who walked before.

White

The center of the flag, and the connection between the other two portions, is faith. The Cross is central and defines what else is there.

There are innumerable symbols that could be used, but I chose to restrict myself to four. Those four are:

  • Grapes. Grapes are a symbol of wine, one of God's blessings to man. It is a blessing so special that Christ chose it to become his blood, and when we drink Christ's blood, we are drinking the divine life — something hidden and mystical, and close to my heart.
  • A candle. There is something a candle symbolizes that is not in a light bulb. It is a softer light. There is a reason couples want a candle for a special dinner, and it is a reason not confined to romantic love. I cannot explain what it is, but it is something like faith.
  • Me, sitting in my blue armchair, praying. There is an interplay of light between God and me.
  • Friends hugging. Touch is also important to me, and with it, more broadly, kything — I identify strongly with Charles Wallace in Madeleine l'Engle's A Wind in the Door, a work whose resonance has pierced my heart like few other.

Blue

The last third of the flag, blue, is devoted to reason. A particular emphasis on the mind is not catholic and universal like the claims of the Christian faith, but it is one part of the broad corpus of human and Christian work, and it is important to me.

I should note that the word 'reason' has shifted meaning in the last few centuries, and it is an older meaning that I wish to invoke. Now the term 'imagination' is used very broadly for human brilliance; a person might say that a plan shows "real imagination" as a way of saying that it reflected insight and understanding. In the Middle Ages, however, the term did not have its present meaning. It meant the faculty that formed visual images, and little else — the term 'imagination' has expanded in meaning. The term 'reason', however, has shrunk in meaning. At present, it does not mean much else besides logical thinking — but in the Middle Ages, 'reason' referred much more broadly to human faculties, including many things we would now call 'imagination'. 'Reason' is an alternate translation to the Greek logos that John used to describe God the Son. 'Reason' does not mean 'rationalism' ("Among intellectuals, there are two types of people: those that worship the mind, and those that use it." — G.K. Chesterton), but a special effort to love God with all of my mind.

From bottom to top, here are the symbols represented:

  • A book, open, with light flaring out, and things coming from that light. The book is a symbol of learning in general, and the Book.
  • A hypercube (tesseract) — mathematics, which provided discipline for my mind, among other things.
  • A storm of blue and orange flame, by a burning tree: Firestorm 2034 as the image of literature, both read and written.
  • A networked computer, coming in part through the hypercube. Math and computer science are tightly linked, and computer work is putting bread on the table.
  • A magnifying glass, and a cadeceus: "You must study the ways of all professions." (Miyamoto Musashi, A Book of Five Rings. As well as the basic academic disciplines, I have tried to understand other areas that would stimulate and broaden my thinking: emergency medicine, forensics...
  • Deep waters. The thought that can be stated is not the ultimate thought; the worded thoughts give way to things that cannot be explained, and the symbol into which others recede is formless, deep waters. Most of my thoughts are now in words, but my deepest thoughts are never in words to begin with.

Your Site's Missing Error Page

Own C.J.S. Hayward's complete works in paper!

I looked through my search logs and decided to put in a custom-made redirect for "porn" or "xxx". This decision was, to put it politely, motivated by data. Decisively motivated by data. [N.B.: This has since been on my site when I migrated to a search solution that doesn't provide that flexibility.]

My site has so far as I can tell zero SEO to advertise porn, unless you count sporadic uses of the word "porn", which should appear waaaaaayy down the search results list compared to real porn sites, but...

I would tentatively suggest that handling of searches for porn be treated like professional 404 / 500 / ... pages on sites run by people who care about people trapped by porn, and people assaulted by people trapped by porn. In the abstract, coding for every search for porn and only searches for porn is probably as hard as solving the artificial intelligence problem, but in the concrete it's easy. Someone searching for "xxx" is not really searching for a letter signed with kisses! You'll catch much more than 90% of attempts to search for porn simply by filtering for "porn" or "xxx", and less than 1% of people genuinely searching your site (who could still possibly be accommodated by this "missing error page.")

So if you're running a website, do your best to have an appropriate error page for people searching it for porn.

Feel free to forward this on to other webmasters who care about possibly reaching a few of the people searching for porn on their sites. Those visitors are in a deep trap.

"Concept Demo" Awards Program

Purpose (Required) - About and Awards (Optional) - Ethics (Optional) - Disqualifications (Required) - Criteria (Required) - Winners (Suggested) - Self-Test (Suggested) - Application (Required) - Privacy Policy (Optional)

This is not a real awards program. This is an experiment into how an award program can presented in a way that both protects the award program's interests and provides a more graceful experience to applicants. You cannot apply to this program and get an award, even though it looks like you can.

Text that is part of the demo, part of the model of how to present an award so it protects reviewer interests while being kinder to applicants, has a standard white background. Commentary that is not meant to be included in a real program, has a khaki background. This text is an example of commentary.

But why streamline the awards process at all? Isn't streamlining the awards process just awarding lazy applicants? I'd like to remind you that many applicants aren't just applying to your program; your award program isn't the only one out there. It's important, yes, but I'd like to invite you to step into your applicant's shoes. Your applicant doesn't just see your program; your better applicants are probably applying to several programs. And seeing the same things again and again, often things which insult a good applicant's intelligence, can frustrate applicants.

So what's the point? Why is this needed?

I'm an award applicant. I have worked for years on my website, CJS Hayward. It's not perfect; there are still problems I'm trying to fix. But it offers something of genuine value.

An integral part of working on my website and making it the best I can is applying to awards programs. Awards programs are the #1 reason my website now receives over five thousand hits per day. I would not have anywhere near that traffic without awards programs. And I wouldn't know as much about making a good website.

And I've applied to a lot of awards sites. I'm asking award reviewers to read what I wrote, so it's perfectly fair for award reviewers to ask me to do some reading too. Especially as people who won't read criteria submit terribly inappropriate sites and waste reviewers' time.

So what am I asked to read? Some of it is distinctive. I'm asked to read about a program's purpose, and that's as it should be. Different programs have different purposes. Each site also wants me to read its criteria. Web awards criteria vary so much, or so I'm told.

Or so I'm told. I've read over a thousand awards criteria—yes, a thousand—and there are some things that aren't unique. For example, the request not to submit porn. Or the request that I be kind to blind/text-only visitors and use ALT tags. And, well... I've lost count of how many sites seemed to think I didn't know that an internal broken link is a faux pas, and I wouldn't know unless they told me. There are real differences in criteria, but the difference is not between sites that don't want racist material and sites that want racial slurs on every page. That's not the kind of difference I encounter. There are differences, but not that kind. And another thing that happens a lot is that awards programs treat me as if I don't know that if my website is excellent it won't cause browser crashes. They treat me as if I don't know a whole lot of basic things. If I'm going to apply to dozens of award programs, dozens of people want to sit me down and make me read that I shouldn't submit porn, hate speech, coarse language and the like.

I don't think I'm the kind of person awards reviewers had in mind. I think awards reviewers are frustrated by an unending stream of people who submit inappropriate sites. Very inappropriate sites. Porn. Browser crashes. Sites with no coherent theme. Exactly the kind of sites that the criteria are supposed to say, "Stop! I don't want this! Don't submit this to me until you've cleaned it up!" And it is this stream of people who are foremost on a reviewer's mind.

But what about another stream of people? What about people who have read awards criteria carefully, and worked to polish their websites as much as they can? What about people who have taken advantage of the wisdom in awards criteria, and have squeaky clean websites with no porn, no JavaScript errors, no popups at all? Is it OK for them to apply to several different awards programs? And if they apply to twenty different awards program, do they need to read twenty different times not to submit porn, racism, pages that will cause browser crashes, and dozens of other items that I'm not going to ask you to take the time to read? What if they want to submit their awards to hundreds of awards programs? Do they really need to read hundreds of lists that tell them that porn is a no-no?

It seems that the awards criteria, as they are written, are designed to deal with people who shouldn't be applying, but aren't trying to be kind to the people they want. Most programs feel a need to bury a password somewhere... and there's a reason for that. If you don't see what that reason is, I'd encourage you to read The Administrator who Cried, "Important!"

The point of this "concept demo" program is to demonstrate something different, something better. The point of this "concept demo" is to demonstrate a way that a program can communicate clear expectations, and screen out people who shouldn't be applying, while being much kinder to the kind of people you want to be applying—the people who build a site that's fit to win awards... and the people your program exists to recognize. It can be done, and I invite you to read on and see just how it can be done.

To explore the first difference, let me repeat the navigation:

Purpose (Required) - About and Awards (Optional) - Ethics (Optional) - Disqualifications (Required) - Criteria (Required) - Winners (Suggested) - Self-Test (Suggested) - Application (Required) - Privacy Policy (Optional)

At the opening, which is just navigation, we see the first real difference. What is it?

First let me ask, is your time valuable? If I drone on and on without telling you anything new, will you keep on reading in the hope that it will get better? Or would you like to only read things that you find helpful?

If you'd rather only read things you find helpful, let's extend that same courtesy to your applicants. Most good applicants are trying to do two things:

  • Find out whether their site matches the award program.
  • If it seems to match, apply.

There was one site that insisted that I needed to read their privacy policy before applying for their award. I still don't understand why. It was an ordinary privacy policy, and I think that person was just thinking, "Well, I wrote it, so I expect people to read it." But that's not a common problem, right?

Well, I can only remember one program that expected me to read their privacy policy. But I've lost count of how many programs have expected me to read their ethics code—an ethics code which happens to be copied on hundreds of other sites.

In many programs, something is made required reading if it could be useful to the applicant. Here I'm following a different principle. The principle is this: Only make something required reading if it helps the applicants in the two steps above.

I'm not hiding anything. It's still easy for the applicant to read the ethics, for instance. But I'm trying to treat my best applicants kindly. My best applicants will have read other awards program's criteria and used them to build an excellent site, and they'll be familiar with the boilerplate code of ethics. And I've used bold, italics, and plain text to underscore which is which. I'm showing respect for the applicants' time by making the least justified claim on their time. The principle is that instead of saying, "If it might be relevant to some applicants, the applicant should read it," I say, "My time is precious. So is my applicants. I won't require them to read things they don't need to read to know if their site should be submitted. Each thing I require applicants to read is a claim on their time, and it needs to be justified."

Purpose

Program temporarily closed.

This program is closed until the end of January 2005 to deal with a personal emergency. If it is February 2005 or later, please contact us.

If a program is temporarily closed, it should say so on the front page, and it should be unmistakable. (If there were no khaki comments, "Program temporarily closed." would be near the top of the page.) Most visitors don't read webpages the way we were taught in school, and the notice above is optimized for how people read webpages.

Furthermore, this requests contact if the notice is still up after the program should be up and running.

In a nutshell, we're looking to award sites that do two things:

  • Present great content.
  • Let people enjoy that great content with a minimum of distractions.

We believe that good web design is like good acting: instead of thinking about it, you're drawn through it into something else. And so we want to award sites that have great content, and that employ user-friendliness (usability) to let people focus on the content without the site getting in the way. (Our disqualifications and criteria spell out exactly what we mean by that.)

Purpose (Required) - About and Awards (Optional) - Ethics (Optional) - Disqualifications (Required) - Criteria (Required) - Winners (Suggested) - Self-Test (Suggested) - Application (Required) - Privacy Policy (Optional)

About and Awards

Several remarks:

  • This section is optional because an applicant doesn't need to know all this to submit a great site. On my own website, I have an "About" section, but I don't require people to read it. What the applicant needs to know is what we're looking for, and the history of this program may be interesting to the people who run the program, but it does not help them in that task.
  • I am not including a sample "About" section because most people do a good enough job that I don't see how to sharpen it.
  • In this case, I am combining this with the sample awards, also not included. It's nice to have that information available, and people who are curious about what the logos look like will find them easily enough.
  • If there is a process page, that section should be made optional. It's good to make that information available, but it doesn't help applicants tell if the program is right for their site. If an applicant wants to know how many times you'll visit their site in evaluation, they don't need to be forced to read your process page.
  • If there is a rules page, it should be broken into general and program-specific rules, just as I have done with the disqualifications and criteria.)

Purpose (Required) - About and Awards (Optional) - Ethics (Optional) - Disqualifications (Required) - Criteria (Required) - Winners (Suggested) - Self-Test (Suggested) - Application (Required) - Privacy Policy (Optional)

Ethics

I, CJS Hayward, owner of all Awards Programs held at the Jonathan's Corner web site, do hereby declare on behalf of myself and any other evaluator/s who may be contracted at any time by Jonathan's Corner to evaluate for any Jonathan's Corner sponsored Award Program, that we agree to advance and promote the website evaluator Code of Ethics in order to ensure fairness to all applicants and to maintain the honor and integrity of applicants, evaluators and awards.

We agree that all critiques given will be constructive in nature as positive comment is productive. We will refrain from criticism unless specifically requested by an applicant, and in such instances, will remain positive where possible in an effort to promote goodwill and advance the level of quality among Internet sites.

We agree to allow eligibility to all applicants who meet the posted online criteria of any particular award. We agree to be uniform in our eligibility requirements (criteria) and will fairly evaluate all sites/pages meeting our criteria which are submitted by any applicant. We further agree to clearly post these criteria.

We agree not to discriminate on grounds of race, gender, nation of origin, religion, profession, age, mental or physical handicap, or any other reason which is not globally viewed as an illegal trait or manner of conduct.

COPPA was written after websites targeted children with cartoon characters and the like, lured them into giving their email addresses, and sold the addresses to lists. So it made a very modest requirement: U.S. websites that:

  • Were geared towards children, or
  • Knowingly collected personal information from children under 13.

must obtain parental consent before collecting personal information from children under 13.

That's it. That's quite a modest claim. More specifically, it doesn't require any age verification from 99% of awards programs I've seen. The awards programs I've seen aren't geared towards children, nor (unless they ask age) are they knowingly collecting information from children under thirteen. But people have this vague idea of COPPA—linking to it without doing research on it, and something happens.

Some websites go above and beyond the call of duty and require parental consent for applicants under thirteen.

Others go further above and beyond the call of duty and require applicants to be over thirteen (if they don't have parental consent).

Others go still further and jack up the age to fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, or eighteen.

Somewhere along the line, the parental consent gets dropped, and in the end, if you're under eighteen, you can't submit even if both your parents sign and fax a letter saying explicitly:

Dear Web Awards Program;

We hereby notify you that we give our full consent for our seventeen year old Pat to apply to your award program. If you have any questions, please call us at the above number.

Sincerely,

Oh, and one more thing. COPPA is not an international law. It's a U.S. law affecting U.S. websites. COPPA has no jurisdiction over a Spanish site on a Spanish server. But just like parental consent drops out of the picture, any connection to the U.S. drops out of the picture. An overly sensitive reader could think that these awards programs assume that the U.S. is the center of the universe and the rest of the world is just the 51st state. (After all, they clearly assume that U.S. laws apply to everyone...)

COPPA is a fish story. Like "the one that got away," it seems to get bigger and bigger. COPPA gets bigger and bigger the more I see people trying to go above and beyond the call of duty. I'm trying not to think about a scenario a couple of years down the road when I try to apply to an award program and am told, "We're sorry, but some sociologists say that thirtysomethings are still basically like children, and in the interests of COPPA adherence, we can't allow you to apply to our program."

Perhaps you wouldn't feel comfortable deleting all age discrimination. But it might be nice to stay close to the law (parental consent for applicants under 13) instead of telling brilliant teenagers, "We don't care what the law allows! We're discriminating against you because of your age!"

We agree to set forth awards criteria and to adhere to same. Proposed time frames for changes will be posted for one (1) week prior to the final publishing of same with notices posted on site so all potential applicants can view and understand the proposed changes.

We agree to evaluate web sites under the criteria which were in place at the time of any and/or all application/s. If changes are made to criteria after application/s is/are received, the submitted site/s will be evaluated using the criteria that were in effect when applicant/s initially submitted the site/s.

We agree to immediately inform any criteria compliant applicant in writing, of a 'Refrain to Evaluate' if it is found that a conflict of interest would occur in evaluating their web site - e.g. Such may occur upon being requested to evaluate the web site of a good friend. We will offer such applicant a choice of evaluator taken from CEM/CEMA membership listing.

We agree to maintain a professional, friendly and positive manner in any and/or all correspondence and/or communication held with any applicant/s.

We agree to evaluate all submitted sites within ninety (90) days of receipt of submission. If this deadline cannot be met, we agree to suspend submissions until we can again work within this timeframe.

We agree not to divulge any information about any applicant to persons, groups, or agencies not directly connected to our Awards Programs, and only then for the purpose of evaluating submissions and notifying winners. All information received from applicants via e-mail submissions or submission forms will be deemed private.

We agree to encourage and promote the use of original material for Awards Programs criteria and evaluation processes. We agree to assist any person requesting advice concerning ethical evaluation for and disbursement of awards. Please note: The awards evaluation processes in use at CPSnet Web Awards are copyrighted material and written authorization is required for their use.

We agree to maintain any owned individual web site/s that includes Awards Program/s to a standard that meets the criteria of the Award/s given. In the case of any Award/s offered that is/are outside the main subject of our web site/s, any and/or all such web site/s will be maintained to a high standard of integrity in all its/their main areas.

We agree to maximum dimensions of awards given in courtesy of web sites that will use them. If the maximum dimensions cannot be adhered to then a text only link will be permitted for graphics larger than maximum size; maximum size dimensions offered from this web site are: no more than 80 pixels height and 100 pixels width.

We agree that there will be only one obligation for winning awards from this web site beyond meeting the criteria. It is not, and never will be, mandatory at this web site to sign a guestbook or to join a mailing list. It is a requirement that any awards granted from this web site must be linked back to our web site in a method that will be outlined in award notification e-mails.

We agree that we will not grant awards to, or in any other manner endorse or promote, any web site that endorses, promotes or contains content which is considered globally to be illegal or discriminatory against humans.

Another minor change. I've changed the ending, "...discriminatory whether same be against humans or wildlife." to "...discriminatory against humans." That means that I don't have to discriminate against Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, a good many atheists and agnostics, etc. who discriminate between humans and wildlife. (Even most strict vegans recognize that there is an important moral difference between killing a human and killing an insect. That's because they discriminate between humans and wildlife.)

I am slightly puzzled why "...whether same be against humans and wildlife." appears unaltered in so many awards criteria. Sometimes it's left me wondering if the awards program actually have actually read and thought about the ethics code, or just copied it and required me to read it. If you'll think a bit, this doesn't present the best image to applicants.

(But I'm nitpicking. I'll stop.)

We agree that we will not accept favors of any sort in exchange for preferential treatment of submissions. We will at all times maintain a high standard of honesty and integrity.

We agree that we will take all measures necessary to maintain the honor and integrity of our Award Program.

We agree that we will use an application process that respects the applicants' time.

This last item is new. And it adds something that I, as an award applicant, value.

Submitted on this day, 16 February 2005

CJS Hayward

Purpose (Required) - About and Awards (Optional) - Ethics (Optional) - Disqualifications (Required) - Criteria (Required) - Winners (Suggested) - Self-Test (Suggested) - Application (Required) - Privacy Policy (Optional)

Disqualifications

The disqualifications and criteria are each broken into two parts, with an important difference between the two parts. The first part has rules, such as no porn and no browser crashes, that are important, but they're things you probably expect if you have read the criteria for several of the top Award Sites! programs. If you know your website meets all of those requirements, you can safely skim them, or skip to the program specific disqualifications. If you don't know what I'm referring through, I ask you to read through all the disqualifiers. One disqualifier, on either list, will bring the evaluation to a screeching halt.

Common Disqualifications

  • There may be no rude, offensive, or dangerous content, or content that incites dangerous, offensive, or illegal activity.
  • There may be no pirated software (warez) or links to sites with warez.
  • There may be no cracking (breaking into people's computers) or materials that encourage or help cracking.
  • No occult (Wicca, Satanism, New Age, etc.)
  • Your site may not cause a browser crashe at any point in the evaluation.
  • Your site may not contain any internal broken links. (I will check it with Xenu Link Checker.)
  • Your site may not contain porn or nudity.
  • Your site may not defame or promote discrimination against any people or group of people.
  • Your site may not contain plaigarism, copyright infringement, or bandwidth stealing.
  • Your site may not contain or promote malware, including requiring Comet Cursor, which is spyware.
  • Your site must have a clearly visible, child-save privacy policy.
  • Your site must be rated with ICRA/PICS, and must give a child-safe green light on validation.
  • Your site must contain at least 10 pages of actual content, excluding guestbooks, collections of links, awards sections, and administrative pages like privacy policies, copyright, and terms of use.
  • Any page that fails to load in under 30 seconds on my broadband connection, after three attempts on my part, will disqualify your site.
  • If you have a Flash introduction, there must be a "Skip Intro" link.
  • No spam.
  • No scams, multi-layer marketing/pyramid schemes, etc.
  • Your site must be in English or French, or have a complete English or French version available.
  • I will visit your site at or above 800x600 navigation. If I see a horizontal scrollbar, your site will be disqualified.
  • I will visit your site at or above 800x600 navigation. If I see a scrollbar after 7 clicks, your site will be disqualified.
  • Your site must make use of alt and noframes tags (if appropriate).
  • Your site must not have popup windows. This includes i.e. GeoCities popups; popups are annoying, and if your web host uses popups, you should consider moving to a host that doesn't make your website seem offensive.
  • Your site must not contain copyright violations.
  • I must be able to reach you and your site with the information you provide, exactly as you type it.
  • I must not need a password to access your site. It is not enough to give me the password because you're still excluding almost everyone else.
  • If you run an awards program, your website must meet the standards of your highest award.

Program-Specific Disqualifications

Both the program-specific disqualifications and program-specific criteria draw on knowledge that many awards programs do not incorporate. Especially in the area of usability (user-friendliness), there is a lot of good knowledge that awards programs do not yet incorporate. If one of my disqualifications surprises you, please read the stated reason. You may learn something new.

What do I know about usability? Well, I have two master's degrees, and both of them involve heavy lifting in issues related to usability (making software user-friendly). And I know who to pay attention to. If there is one usability author I wish web awards people (and webmasters) would read, it is Jakob Nielsen. And I'm not the only person who respects him. Even if I have two master's degrees, he knows a lot more about usability than I do. The New York Times calls him "the guru of web page usability." U.S. News & World Report calls him "the world's leading expert on web usability." Stuttgarter Zeitung calls him "the world's leading expert on web usability." And the Chicago Tribune says he "knows more about what makes web sites work than anyone else on the planet."

Note that I am visually separating the criteria from each other and from the reasons. An applicant who doesn't want the rationale, but just wants to see if their site qualifies, can scan through and skip the reasons. This is a minor feature intended to save applicant time.

  • Every link, including external links, must open in the same window.Reason: It's common to require that external links open in a new window. And also wrong for a couple of reasons. First, it's handicap inaccessible. Opening a link in a new window is much worse than a missing alt tag. Because of the limitations of nonvisual browsers, opening a link in a new window often causes blind people so much trouble that they can't get back to your site if you want. Second, it's confusing to inexperienced visitors. It causes problems on lower-end computers, and some people may wonder why their back button is greyed out and they can't get back to your lovely site. This is why Jakob Nielsen not only says not to do it; he ranks it as one of the top ten mistakes in web design.
  • Most text, including all navigation links, must be the default font size or larger. On all pages, the user must be able to control the size of the text by normal browser mechanisms.Reason: Most web designers have excellent vision. That is a good thing, because it means that graphics are crisp and clear. But it's not so good when web designers forget that their vision is above average and design as if everybody can see as well as the designer can. What is meant as a good way to save space and makes the pages smaller means that, for many visitors, the entire page is hard to read. (This happens on many awards sites.) Before linking to more of Jakob Nielsen's articles, I would point out that his site uses the default font size. This is not an accident, nor is it an accident that my site uses the default font size.
  • Do not destroy the browser feature of making visited and unvisited links different colors.Reason: As others have said, making visited and unvisited links the same color to achieve an aesthetic effect is like painting a stop sign green so it will match the color of a nearby building. Making visited and unvisited links the same color is one of the easiest ways to mess up visitors' navigation abilities by confusing them about where they've been and where they haven't been.
  • Your URL must not contain a tilde (~).Reason: Large numbers of users do not know how to type a tilde.
  • Your website must work under any browser I try to visit it with and must not tell me that I should use a particular browser/version/resolution to see it. Furthermore, all navigation must work with Flash, Java, and JavaScript turned off.Reason: My site is not so good that people are going to download another browser so they can see it, nor are they going to buy a larger monitor. Neither is yours. Flash, Java, and some JavaScript navigation has been called "mystery meat navigation" because if you don't have the technology installed—for instance, if you're blind and your browser doesn't show cool-looking Flash menus—then you can't tell what you're selecting, if you can use it at all. Add to this many people in the first, second, and third world who do not have state of the art computers and who do not feel comfortable enough with technology to upgrade their browser and install plugins, and what you have is navigation that includes people. Standard HTML navigation is inclusive. Mystery meat navigation is inappropriate because it excludes people. (An exception is made if there is alternate navigation so visitors can move about the site even if their browsers won't let them use the mystery meat navigation.)
  • Your design must be similar to that of some other sites I've seen, including major sites.Reason: Why am I reccommending this when most programs want a distinctive design? The answer to that can be seen in my own article, The Case for Uncreative Web Design. A new design is one that users will have to figure out. An old, or in other words, familiar, design is one that users already know how to use. Besides bluntly saying, "Zero learning time or die," Nielsen observes, "It has long been true that websites do more business the more standardized their design is. Think Yahoo and Amazon." He's talking about commercial websites, but for the same reason personal pages work better if new visitors already know how to use them. Instead of trying to invent a navigation system that no one has thought of before, it adds value to a website to learn to make effective use of things that are proven to work well, things that your visitors will already know how to use.

This list is just where these disqualifiers are written down. It is common practice to have an awards program meet the criteria of its top award; this site is meant to do far more than tell about the criteria. This site is meant to put the pieces together and show what they look like in action. Are you wondering why this site employs a standard design? Couldn't I think of something more creative? The last disqualifier explains why, and I try to practice what I preach. And to show what it means to practice what I preach.

Purpose (Required) - About and Awards (Optional) - Ethics (Optional) - Disqualifications (Required) - Criteria (Required) - Winners (Suggested) - Self-Test (Suggested) - Application (Required) - Privacy Policy (Optional)

Criteria

The disqualifications and criteria are each broken into two parts, with an important difference between the two parts. The first part has rules about content, design, and the like that are important, but they're things you probably expect if you have read the criteria for several of the top Award Sites! programs. If you know your website meets all of those requirements, you can safely skip to the program specific criteria. If you don't know what I'm referring through, I ask you to read through all the criteria. If you pass the disqualifications, you will be scored from 0-100 points as listed below.

These criteria are quite concise. In a full-fledged, functioning award program, the criteria would be much more extensive, and the difference in applicant frustration due to reading the same thing over again would be significant.

Common Criteria (50 points)

  • The HTML should be hand-coded and should validate. Any JavaScript should be free of errors (5 points).
  • There should be a balance between text/images and whitespace (5 points).
  • There should be no music unless I specifically request it (5 points).
  • Your content should be at least 90% original, with explicit attribution of non-original content (5 points).
  • No disabled right click, including photography and fine arts pages, no full screen mode, and no unethical use of JavaScript to keep me on your site (5 points).
  • You have a separate awards page, even if it is empty at the moment (5 points).
  • You have no blinking text and no more than 2 animated GIFs per page. (Both of these can cause problems for viewers with epilepsy.) (5 points)
  • I will visit your site at or above 800x600 navigation. If I see a horizontal scrollbar, or I have to click down more than 7 times, you will lose points. Long pages (or, if you prefer, all pages) should have a "Top" link at the bottom (5 points).
  • Correct grammar, spelling, and nO teXt liKE ThIS or 133+ ("leet" speak). You may find ordering The Elements of Style to be well worth the price in knowing how exactly to do this (10 points).

Program-Specific Criteria (50 points)

Usability Criteria

  • Your site should have an intuitive overall information architecture (5 points).Remark: This is a fundamental issue in making a website that people will use and come back to. If you're not sure how to do this, you might order Information Architecture for the World Wide Web.
  • We should be able to easily navigate each page without stopping to search for navigation elements, without guessing, and without using the browser back button (5 points).Remark: If we have trouble navigating your site, the average user may have trouble as well.
  • Not only should the text contrast with the background (2 points), it is preferable to have dark text on a light background (3 points).Reason: As the eye ages, seniors lose photoreceptors and everything seems to darken. This means that light text on a dark background is much harder for an older adult to read than it is for someone younger.
  • Does your web design draw attention to itself, or does it smoothly draw our attention to focus on the content? Do we leave your site thinking about web design or thinking about what you said?

Content Criteria

The secret phrase, which will be requested on the application, is "I respect your time."

Some of these appear subjective, in that they're hard to quantify. I believe they're important enough to include even if you can't measure them with a ruler.

  • Your website is about at least one major subject. (5 points).
  • Your website shows deep thought about that subject(s) and tells me something I didn't know (5 points).
  • You communicate difficult concepts in an understandable way (5 points).
  • Your content is a joy to read (5 points).

At my option, I may award up to 5 extra points for something special when a website goes above and beyond the call of duty in a way that my criteria do not anticipate.

Purpose (Required) - About and Awards (Optional) - Ethics (Optional) - Disqualifications (Required) - Criteria (Required) - Winners (Suggested) - Self-Test (Suggested) - Application (Required) - Privacy Policy (Optional)

Winners

I have no suggestions for improvement here, because people already do a good job. I haven't include a sample Winners section.

Purpose (Required) - About and Awards (Optional) - Ethics (Optional) - Disqualifications (Required) - Criteria (Required) - Winners (Suggested) - Self-Test (Suggested) - Application (Required) - Privacy Policy (Optional)

Self-Test

I have three basic comments to offer.

First, if an applicant reads the criteria and still needs the self-test to know if they're eligible, the criteria have failed. Self-tests don't tell anything new; they just mean that the candidates you want have more work—after they have read the criteria and confirmed they have one of the websites you want to honor. What about the people who ignore the criteria and want to submit porn? That's simple. They'll ignore the self-test too. A mandatory self-test is one more thing that adds to the time taken but doesn't add any value from an award applicant's perspective. And doesn't stop people you wish wouldn't apply.

Second, this is an HTML self-test instead of a Flash self-test. There is a reason for this. HTML loads quickly and most people can read it quickly. Not to mention that it's handicap-accessible. Cool-looking special effects make a Flash self-test slow. Flash is cool the first time, but most serious applicants have seen a Flash self-test before—and the impression it makes is not, "Cool!" The impression it makes is, "Slow! I want to take the test without being slowed down."

Third, I have used radio buttons () rather than checkboxes () for "Yes" and "No". It is very common for awards criteria to have two checkboxes, one for yes, and one for no. It is also wrong. (You don't need to let your applicants answer "yes" and "no" to the same question.)

You want to be able to answer as many of these questions "Yes" as you can.

Question Yes No
Is your site child-friendly?
Is your site free of illegal and offensive material?
Is your HTML hand-coded and well enough done to pass validation?
Is your site free from browser crashes, JavaScript errors, popups, etc?
Is your site handicap accessible, including use of alt tags and opening links to the same window?
Do you try to use a standard design well instead of reinventing the wheel?
Do you try to have design that is like good acting? Does the design draw people into your content instead of drawing attention to itself?
Is your site intuitive to navigate?
Does your content reflect expertise and serious thought?
Does your site express that thought well?

Purpose (Required) - About and Awards (Optional) - Ethics (Optional) - Disqualifications (Required) - Criteria (Required) - Winners (Suggested) - Self-Test (Suggested) - Application (Required) - Privacy Policy (Optional)

Application

Thank you for reading this far. This is the last "real" page; the privacy policy doesn't have any further comments. I would like to close by addressing an objection.

I'm being a bit hypocritical, aren't I? I mean in what I say about time. I'm asking reviewers to look at websites, and a good review is a very involved process—much more than applying for an award. Isn't it hypocritical of me to say all this?

A fair enough question. Let me answer by giving you another question: Would you rather read ten pages of an interesting story or one page of the phone book?

I know how I'd answer. I'd rather read ten pages of an interesting story than one page of the phone book. For that matter, I'd probably prefer to read a hundred pages of an interesting story than one page of the phone book.

There's a difference here, a difference between taking time and wasting time. An award applicant that submits a site with major HTML errors is wasting the reviewer's time. Period. An award applicant who submits a polished and fascinating site will probably end up taking much more of the reviewer's time (instantly disqualifying a site is a much faster process than reviewing and granting an award)—but reviewers don't resent those applicants for wasting their time. Those applicants are asking them to read ten pages of story, not one page of phone book. And the same thing is true for applicants.

I'm not sure if you noticed, but the program described here would have more reading that is requested of an experienced applicant. It takes more time. It doesn't ask the experienced applicant to reread that browser crashes, porn, and internal broken links are disqualifiers, but it does say several things about user-friendliness. These are things that the applicant may not have learned from any other program, and they're something new for the applicant to learn. It's OK to ask the applicant to read things. It's even OK to ask for a password or secret phrase to confirm that the applicant has read what good applicants should read. I've done that too. But please, pretty please with sugar on top, only ask me to read things that will tell me something new. Please, pretty please, if I've done my homework, don't treat me like I need to do it over again. Telling me something I don't already know is using my time appropriately. Telling me things I've read hundreds of times over (literally), and treating me as if I don't understand those ground rules is wasting my time. There is a difference, and it is important.

It could make a world of difference in how you present yourselves to those webmasters you want to meet.

Name:
Email:
Website Title:
URL:
Age: I have my parent's permission
(If you are under 13, you must get your parent's permission to apply because of how we interpret COPPA.)
Secret Phrase:
Brief Description:
(Submit button here.)

There is no real submit button because this is not a real award program.

If you are unable to use this form, please e-mail the requested information (your name, email address, website title, URL, age and your parent's permission if you're under 13, the secret phrase, and a brief description of your website) tochristos.jonathan.hayward@gmail.com with "Award application" in the subject.

Two basic comments:

  • I have intentionally not added a "clear form" button. Many web awards programs seem to take this easy step so they can provide a nice extra. To an applicant, a "clear form" button doesn't say "Here's a nice extra we've provided." A "clear form" button says: "This looks like the submit button you want to press, but if you press it, you'll lose all your typing and have to start over again." However well-meaning the intent may be, it functions as a nasty decoy. Applicants don't need this kind of decoy to fill out your application.
  • Because most awards programs feel they're not doing their job unless they add "something extra" to comply with COPPA, I've requested the name and parental consent. But please, if someone is 13 or has parental consent, there is no additional COPPA compliance if you add additional discriminatory measures. You're not being more legal if you refuse applications from any applicant under 18. You're just being more discriminatory.

Purpose (Required) - About and Awards (Optional) - Ethics (Optional) - Disqualifications (Required) - Criteria (Required) - Winners (Suggested) - Self-Test (Suggested) - Application (Required) - Privacy Policy (Optional)

Privacy Policy

This is a sample privacy policy and may not be the current privacy policy for Jonathan's Corner. The real privacy policy for Jonathan's Corner is available here.

I hate spam as much as you do. I respect your privacy, and will not give out your name, e-mail, or any other information to anyone without obtaining your permission first. I will use personal information provided only to respond to feedback and perform log analysis.

If you are under 13, you must get your parents' permission before giving any personal information.

The Facebook fan community linked to from The Jonathan's Corner Community is governed by Facebook's privacy policy and practices.

Email Jonathan Hayward.