# We Need to Improve Internet Literacy ## Facebook is not the internet ## Modern web design hinders (created Thu, Mar 4, 2021 - updated Tue, Mar 9, 2021) --- Mar 9, 2021 update: After my long, stream of conscience-like spew below, I've concluded that Facebook is probably the best option for obtaining important health info. I cannot believe that's the reality, but state and local government websites fail because of poor design choices, lack of support for basic open web tech, and a lack of regular updates. The second best choice would be local or regional newspaper websites that offer email newsletters, feeds, and, of course, timely information. But Facebook users could follow the Facebook pages of media orgs and local government agencies, assuming that those entities maintain and update their pages. --- Mar 4, 2021: I get it. The media despises Facebook, mostly for bogus reasons, based around advertising. Facebook created services that people enjoy using for utility and entertainment, and the advertisers followed. It's not Facebook's fault that the media industry has used failed revenue models that have relied upon advertising. Normally, I like TheMarkup.org's content, but this article feels like Facebook ankle-biting. => https://themarkup.org/citizen-browser/2021/03/04/official-information-about-covid-19-is-reaching-fewer-black-people-on-facebook I don't use Facebook. In the summer of 2016, I deleted my Facebook account because I rarely accessed it. I have all social media sites blocked in the /etc/hosts file on my laptop. I have no need for any of the silos. I'm not defending Facebook, but I am criticizing The Markup for what appears to me as failed journalism. If the media want to help, then they need to stop whining about Facebook and try to illuminate the public about how to use the internet more efficiently. From the article: > Official information about COVID-19 safety and vaccines is reaching fewer Black people on Facebook than other demographic groups, according to data from The Markup's Citizen Browser project. That's all that I'll excerpt from that shoddy piece of journalism because nowhere in the article did The Markup writers suggest that users should visit the public health services' websites directly, instead of relying on Facebook for all info. I have never understood why people "get" their news from Facebook when news orgs have their own websites. And now I don't understand why people would try to get important health information from Facebook. I cannot access Facebook, but I can access Covid-19 info. How does this happen? Based upon how the media think, it would seem impossible to get news and health info from anywhere but Facebook. I live in Toledo, Ohio, which is located along the border of Ohio and Michigan. Ann Arbor is about 45 minutes away and Detroit about an hour. My Stepdaughter and her family live about 30 minutes north of Toledo. My Stepdaughter works as an ICU nurse in Michigan, and my Son-in-law works as a nurse in Toledo. Because of all this, I have followed the Covid-19 news for northwest Ohio and southeast Michigan. In the spring of 2020, I signed up for a free Covid-19 email newsletter from the Detroit News that was sent daily or nearly every day. I continue to receive that email newsletter, which is now sent a few times per week. I used to receive a daily Covid-19 email newsletter from the Toledo Blade, but for some reason, the Blade ended it last summer, which seemed early. At the Blade's homepage ... => https://toledoblade.com ... a link called "Newsletters" exists in the upper right part of the homepage. A couple minutes ago, I clicked that link, and I logged into my Blade account to see what email newsletters were offered by the Blade. The Covid-19 newsletter was not on the list. I no longer have a paid subscription with the Toledo Blade, but I can still log into my account. When I logged in a few minutes ago, I chose to receive the Blade's email newsletter called "AM-PM Daily News Briefs." I want to see if the Blade will send me the newsletter, despite letting my digital subscription lapse. [Update: The Blade sends me the email newsletter twice a day. It's free like their RSS feeds. Only snippets of articles exist in both formats.] Sadly, the Blade's website is like most media org websites: ad-polluted, slow-loading, and clunky to use. That's why I created my own Blade web reading app about two years ago. => https://sawv.org/2019/08/17/how-i-read-the-toledo-blade.html If The Markup and other media orgs wanted to help the public, then the media should focus on the media's reader-hostile web designs. But to the Blade's credit, their newsletters link was shown prominently on its homepage. I'm guessing that The Blade stopped its dedicated Covid-19 email newsletter because the Blade's normal daily email newsletter was enough. At the Detroit News website ... => https://www.detroitnews.com/ ... a user has to scroll to the bottom of the homepage to find a "Newsletters" link. I did not scroll. Since I'm using my laptop, I typed Ctrl-F to pop-up a search text input field within the web browser, and then I searched the homepage for the word "newsletter," and that's how I found the link. Most people, however, read the web on mobile devices. But if they do use a desktop or laptop computer, I wonder what percentage of the public knows uses Ctrl-F to search for text on the current webpage being viewed? I use Ctrl-F often. And when I'm reading websites on my old iPhone, I use the page search capabilities, built into Safari or iOS. How many mobile web browser users search for content within webpages? Facebook users have email accounts. A local or regional newspaper should exist near most people, especially people who live in or near urban centers. The media should assist the public with accessing the media's email newsletters that focus on news and health information. And orgs like the Blade may do this already with articles or posts to their social media pages. The media could make the email newsletters open to everyone, even non-subscribers. The media could provide free info in the newsletters that consists of excerpts from their articles and info from the local government health agencies. Our county is Lucas County, Ohio. When I enter the phrase "lucas county health department" into a search engine, I found the Lucas County Health Department's website. => https://lucascountyhealth.com/ The homepage for our county's health department's website contains info and links related to Covid-19, including the following: "COVID-19 Vaccination Appointments Schedule Appointment" => https://app.acuityscheduling.com/schedule.php?owner=21473466 "Coronavirus Info & Data => https://lucascountyhealth.com/coronavirusupdates/ "Lucas County COVID-19 Vaccine Information" => https://lucascountyhealth.com/covidvaccine/ People should also search for their state's health department. I searched on "state of ohio health department," and I found this site. => https://odh.ohio.gov/wps/portal/gov/odh/home That's a horrible URL that hardly anyone will remember. Last spring, the state gave out this URL, which is easier to remember. It redirects to an ugly URL, similar to above. => https://coronavirus.ohio.gov/ Even the local municipality's website could be helpful. At DuckDuckGo, I searched on "city of toledo," and I found a link at the city's website. => https://toledo.oh.gov/ The Toledo government's homepage contained a link for "Covid Updates." => https://toledo.oh.gov/residents/community/covid-19 My gosh, those government websites love to use obnoxious modern web design messes. The sites are broken or mangled with JavaScript disabled. Why do I need JavaScript when I'm searching for information as a browsing-only user? => https://sawv.org/2020/03/13/the-antithesis-of-modern-web-design-is-usefulness.html The Markup should lambaste municipal, county, and state agencies for creating hard-to-use, resource-hogging websites. This was my long rant from last March-April 2020. => https://sawv.org/2020/03/26/critical-times-require-lightweight-web-designs-tldr Excerpts from that post: > Obviously, I enjoy bitching and whining about the demise of the Web of Documents type of websites. > Too many orgs that are allegedly responsible for informing the public are deploying websites that are thoughtless and uncaring, due to using bloated web designs. Their web design choices lack empathy. > These website owners do not consider that some people may have poor eyesight, use low resolution screens, slow CPUs, old versions of browsers and operating systems, and have slow or spotty internet connectivity speeds for various reasons. I saw a few stories last spring and summer that mentioned government websites being slow and at times, unresponsive, which should not happen if sites were designed to be useful. I always trot out this site as an example of using brilliant web design on a site that informs people. => https://text.npr.org Our municipal, county, and state websites should function more like text.npr.org, instead of functioning like applications, unless the sites are providing forms for users to complete or offering services that require users to create accounts and login. The media need to focus more time on the bad web designs used by government agencies and by media orgs. Maybe this explains why nearly 80 percent of U.S. adults who have internet access use Facebook, and why some of those Facebook users "get" their news and other important info from the platform. Maybe those people tried to use media and government websites, and they got too frustrated with the poor user experiences. That's understandable. Facebook is easier to use than the sites offered by local governments and local media orgs. => https://sawv.org/2020/09/08/websites-are-slow-not-the-web.html Back in January, our Mother-in-law moved in with us. Two weeks ago today, I took my Mother-in-law to the Lucas County Fairgrounds, which was the location of our county's main vaccination center. The vaccinations occurred in one of the large venue buildings, located on the fairgrounds. I was amazed at how efficiently the process was handled. The place was crowded, but someone devised a fantastic method for making the lines move quickly, mainly relying on a lot of health care workers and maybe volunteers. I was impressed. My wife did not use Facebook to arrange the first vaccination appointment for her Mom. She tried and failed to schedule an appointment through our county's health department website. The site kept bombing out, and it repeatedly suggested to try again next week. That latter excuse could be due to demand and not enough supply. I know that the vaccine supply is still an issue. In early February, I read a Blade article about vaccines for Seniors, and the article mentioned seeking help through the United Way's 211 number and the Area Office on Aging of Northwest Ohio. I searched for "lucas county ohio area office on aging," and I found its site. => https://areaofficeonaging.com/ (Side rant: That site was blank with JavaScript disabled. What a shock. It's yet another ridiculous modern web design. Increasingly, I'm believing that web design is one of the worst things to happen to the web for reading document-based sites, not applications.) My wife called the Area Office on Aging on a Tuesday, and it was determined that one open appointment slot was available for the next day, and that's how I was able to take my Mother-in-law to the vaccination center for her first shot. But this brings up another point that the media may or may not be addressing: the difficulty Seniors have with navigating the internet. My wife struggled at times to use the county's health department website. Recently, my wife has been working on getting her Mom setup with the health system in our area. Our local health provider provides a "portal" that my wife and I use to message our doctors, monitor appointments, make payments, etc. That's nothing unique. Most health care providers offer something similar. It's handy. My Mother-in-law, however, will use a different health care provider that's located across the line in Michigan. That company also provides a portal, but my wife has been unable to create an account. She has experienced difficulty trying to use her Mom's health portal system. We have had no issues with our health care company's portal. The manager of my favorite Toledo store, the Phoenix Earth Food Co-op, told me recently that he and his sister tried multiple times to schedule Covid-19 vaccination appointments for their parents who live in Monroe County, Michigan, located across the line from Toledo. He and his sister experienced difficulties with using that county's health department's website. Again, part of the issue is the lack of vaccines, but it sounded like they had trouble using the site too. Their parents are in their 70s. Their Dad managed to schedule an appointment, but he failed to click the confirmation link that was emailed to him, which meant that he lost the appointment. Was the information explained clearly on the site? Not everyone has the same experience with clicking email confirmation links. Access to health care can mean many things. In the current context, this means trying to find the appropriate website to schedule a vaccination appointment, trying to find the right agency to call, completing an online form, arranging transportation, and so on. What happens to Seniors who do not have younger, more internet-savvy family members to help them navigate a complex internet? I don't know how Facebook helps with this issue. This week (week of Mar 1, 2021), Ohio started allowing people aged 60-and-over to schedule vaccination appointments, and Ohio permitted more people of all ages who have underlying health conditions to schedule appointments. When people under the age of 50 are able to schedule appointments, then some of the above issues might diminish. Younger internet-savvy people will know how to find the necessary information. More people will have their own means of transportation, and more people will be mobile enough to walk to bus stops. My Mother-in-law has mobility issues, and she doesn't drive now. I dropped her off by the door where the vaccinations were given. We have a bus stop at the end of our street, about three blocks away, which is no big deal for me, but that's too far of a walk for my Mother-in-law. Taxi services, along with Uber and Lyft could help transport people. Other services exist too, especially those related with our TARTA bus system. Toledo Area Regional Transit Authority => https://tarta.com Seniors need the capability to access those services, or they need help. Religious orgs and other local non-profits could be helpful with getting appointments scheduled and with arranging transportation. Next to the bus stop at the end of our street resides a Lutheran church. If an org does not provide help, it might know of an org that does. I assume that more help exists in Toledo for Seniors than I realize. We have had no reason to think about these issues until my Mother-in-law moved in with us about two months ago, and we took responsibility for much of her care. It got my wife and I to wonder about Seniors who lack a local family support system. What do they do? Maybe this is what the media should focus on, instead of bitching about Facebook. Determine if government websites are user-friendly. Determine if the vaccine scheduling process is user-friendly. Have the sites been tested with people over the age of 60? The media should determine how easy it is for Seniors to arrange transportation for health-related appointments. The media should determine how internet literate the 60-and-over population is. Scrolling through a Facebook feed on a mobile device does not count. Can they find news at local media sites? Can they subscribe to email newsletters? Can they find the websites for municipal, township, county, and state agencies? Do they know what terms to search on? Voting. Do people of all voting ages know how to determine if they are registered and how to find their polling center if they want vote in person on election day? Do they know how to request a mail-in ballot? Another search. This time, I searched on "lucas county board of elections," and I found this site a couple links down in the DuckDuckGo search results. It's the new BOE's website. => https://www.lucascountyohiovotes.gov People have to know the terms to search on, such as "board of elections." But a starting point would be searching on "lucas county government website," which yields this link as the top result. => https://www.co.lucas.oh.us The homepage of our county website contains a link to the Lucas County Health Department's website for people wanting info about Covid-19. The county's website contains a link for "Departments" where a link can be found for the the Board of Elections website. Of course, I'm not a fan of the user experience of the county's website. My laptop's fan started whirring. Oh yeah, how user-friendly are the media websites? In my opinion, modern web design emphasizes aesthetics over utility, and it unnecessarily makes applications out of document-based sites. Why aren't media and government websites using designs similar to what's used by text.npr.org? For one thing, designing like text.npr.org is probably a lot cheaper than creating the modern web designs used by the City of Toledo and the Toledo Blade. The City of Toledo launched a new website design last year, and it may have cost around $100,000. !!! => https://sawv.org/2020/04/16/local-bidding-irregularities-exist-for-the-100000-redesign-of-the-city-of-toledo-website.html => https://www.toledoblade.com/local/city/2020/11/18/City-of-Toledo-launches-new-website/stories/20201118104 From the Blade story: > The city contracted with Madhouse Creative LLC for $100,000 to build the new site. Officials said the city and Madhouse worked with the Ability Center of Greater Toledo and the Sight Center of Northwest Ohio to ensure the new site is accessible to all. > The site took approximately 12 months to create and transfer information from the previous city website, according to city officials. The Blade won't bash its own web design. It's unlikely that the Blade will criticize the web designs of local government agencies. The public is forced to endure clunky websites. Again, maybe that's a reason why most of the public uses Facebook. Assuming that the Lucas County Health Department and the Area Office on Aging maintain Facebook pages, and if those agencies publish news twice a week to their Facebook pages, and if a Facebook user follows those pages, will that Facebook user see ALL of the news items, published by those agencies, or will the Facebook user only see a subset of the items, based upon Facebook's algorithm? If the latter, then I will never understand why people use such a service for important information. If I used a social media silo, and if I followed someone or some thing, then I would expect to see all of their posts. This is why feeds and feed reading are superior. My feed readers see all of the info that's contained within the feeds. My feed readers don't choose to show me only a subset. But feeds are probably too geeky for most people of all ages. Modern web browsers have dropped feed reading support. Modern web browsers should help non-tech people find and use feeds. But if websites don't create feeds, then this idea falls apart. A couple weeks ago when Facebook prohibited the sharing of Australian news to Facebook users in Australia, the media framed the incident as Facebook shutting down all news in Australia. When I read the media stories, it sounded like Facebook closed down all TV stations, radio stations, newspapers, other media orgs, and government agencies within Australia. I inferred that none of those orgs maintained their own websites, or Facebook had somehow shutdown their websites. That's how the media spun it. The headlines and the Twitter reactions attached to the Mediagazer.com links made it appear that without Facebook, no news existed anywhere in Australia. What happened to society? I think that we were more internet savvy 20 years ago than we are today. For a few years back in the aught years, I volunteered for the Read for Literacy program, offered by our county library system. I tutored adults on how to read and do math. I gave some help about the internet, mainly the web, but I mostly taught reading, and I mostly taught "older" adults, between the ages of 40 and 75. The library system might be a good place to help people become more internet literate. If someone asked me how to use Twitter "better," then I could not help them because my answer would be, "Don't use Twitter." I'm unsure, however, what an internet literacy program would look like. Teaching about URLs would be a good place to start. We should remind people that other websites exist besides social media. The internet literacy program could help people use email and web services offered by government agencies and the library itself. The program could teach people how to use the web browser more effectively. The program might need to help people with basic mobile app usage. How many Seniors are aware of Safari's Reader Mode option? If Seniors use Android devices, do they know how to install something similar for other web browsers? I would think that controlling basic typography would be helpful for Seniors when reading web pages. When using mobile devices, how much time is spent with web browsers versus other native apps? All of the big silos and services offer their own native mobile apps. Reader mode in mobile web browsers may be irrelevant. => https://sawv.org/2017/10/17/my-favorite-app-is-the-web-browser.html Most "alternative" or non-mainstream web browsers only work on desktop/laptop computers. My Mother-in-law uses her iPhone a lot. She has a laptop, but I don't think that she uses it anymore. When I need to log into a website to complete tasks, sometimes, I prefer to do that work with a laptop, instead of a phone. I'm faster and more comfortable using a keyboard and a mouse. The media and the government whine about Big Tech, but of the three entities, it's possible that only Big Tech has managed to create websites that Seniors can use. I listed multiple media and government websites above. Do people remember the URLs or store them in some kind bookmarks manager? Do they search for the sites each time that they need to access them? That's what I do. I cannot remember the names of most government sites. But accessing the media and government websites directly means encountering a different user experience for each site, which could be cumbersome when the goal is to find information. And this is probably yet another reason why people prefer to use Facebook and other social media silos, since allegedly "all" of the information will appear on one site with one familiar user experience, assuming that the orgs syndicate their content to the silos, and the silos' algorithms don't hide the content from users. Back to our county's Read for Literacy program: => https://www.readforliteracy.org Sigh. Another modern web design site. It's faster to load the site and easier to read the content with every disabled, except for HTML. => https://www.readforliteracy.org/literacy-programs I saw nothing about teaching internet usage. The Read for Literacy program is for adults of all ages. The Internet Literacy program should also be for adults of all ages. Most of the tutoring would occur at the main library downtown and at all of the branch libraries. That way tutors can be closer to the students. But transportation could still be an issue for some students. Tough. My Father-in-law passed away in December 2020 due to Covid-19. He also had rugged underlying health conditions, which made him vulnerable to the virus. During his final years, he liked to say, "Getting old ain't for wimps." Instead of worrying about the open web vs silos and Gemini vs a non-existent SmallWeb, maybe my time should be spent trying to make the internet more user-friendly, accessible, and humane for people who are only a littler older than me. Actually, it's unlikely that the web part of the internet will get more user-friendly. It will only get harder and more discriminatory by requiring users to operate new computers and operating systems in order to read text. Modern web design makes a 500-word text article as big a download as a 1000-page novel. => https://sawv.org/2019/05/16/with-newspaper-website-design-this-atrocious-its-hard-to-respect-the-news.html => https://sawv.org/2019/07/13/webpagetestorg-testing-sat-jul-13-2019.html => https://sawv.org/2019/12/19/newspaper-industrys-hideous-modern-web-designs.html Not only does this design lack empathy, but it's also environmentally-unfriendly by being a resource hog. => https://sawv.org/2018/07/12/ecofriendly-web-design.html => https://sawv.org/2020/11/06/save-earth-with-better-web-design.html Web pages that consist of mostly text that are meant to inform people should not be obsoleting user software and hardware. Not everyone gets a new mobile device every one or two years. Not everyone gets a new laptop every two to four years. I should spend my time learning how to navigate the overly complicated web so that I can explain it to less tech-savvy people. Or I should punt and do nothing, since the battle for the open web is lost. I have no idea if this Mar 3, 2021 local news story made it to Facebook, but this Blade story exists on the Blade's own website. No need for Facebook. => https://www.toledoblade.com/local/Coronavirus/2021/03/03/coronavirus-vaccine-appointments-open-up-in-lucas-county/stories/20210303115 > A number of appointments are open this week to get the coronavirus vaccine, and anyone newly eligible as part of Phase 1C and Phase 2 of distributions can sign up. > To sign up, visit the health departments vaccination webpage => https://lucascountyhealth.com/covidvaccine > Among other locations and sites, Walmart will begin administering doses of the Pfizer vaccine at six locations in Lucas County on Thursday: > Walmart Supercenter, 2925 Glendale Ave., Toledo. > Walmart Supercenter, 1355 S. McCord Road., Holland. > Sams Club, 1300 E. Mall Drive, Holland. > Walmart Supercenter, 10392 Fremont Pike, Perrysburg. > Walmart Supercenter, 3721 Navarre Ave., Oregon. > Walmart Supercenter, 5821 W Central Ave., Sylvania Township. > To sign up for one of those appointments, visit Walmart.com/covidvaccine => https://www.walmart.com/cp/1228302 That story seems like important and official Covid-19 information for local residents. This Blade story was posted today, Mar 4, 2021. => https://www.toledoblade.com/local/Coronavirus/2021/03/04/with-phase-1c-2-vaccinations-underway-there-is-light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel/stories/20210304102 > At least 16 percent of the community has received their first dose of the coronavirus vaccine, more people became eligible for it this week, and Ohio is starting to loosen restrictions on gatherings and entertainment all signs that were inching closer to a more normal life, Lucas County Health Commissioner Eric Zgodzinski said during his Thursday news briefing. That's an uplifting story that might encourage people to get the vaccine shot if they were considering not doing so. It's unfortunate that the Blade kiboshed its daily Covid-19 email newsletter and so soon too. Feeds. For grins, let's see how many sites that I mentioned above offer RSS or Atom feeds. => https://toledoblade.com I know that the Blade provides feeds because that's how I read the Blade. Here's their local news feed. => https://www.toledoblade.com/rss/local May main web browser is Pale Moon, which is a fork of an older version of Firefox. Pale Moon still contains basic feed support. When I visit websites that provide at least one feed, Pale Moon will display the orange RSS or feed icon at the right end of the URL window if Pale Moon can find the feed info for the site. Firefox did this many years ago, but Firefox dropped feed support for some asinine reason. This is why I use Pale Moon and not Firefox. Anyway, kudos to the Blade for continuing to offer feed support, especially after each new web design. => https://www.detroitnews.com Pale Moon does not display the feed icon. I'll dig around on the site. Ah, at the bottom of the site is a link for RSS feeds. The link points to this page: => https://static.detroitnews.com/alerts-rss/ The Detroit News offers many different RSS feeds. Here is their Metro/State News feed. => http://rssfeeds.detroitnews.com/detroit/news Unfortunately, text.npr.org does not provide a feed that points to articles hosted at text.npr.org. That site would be easy enough to scrape and parse with regex to create a feed of the homepage. When visiting the main site at ... => https://www.npr.org ... Pale Moon displays the orange feed icon. When I click the icon, a drop-down list displays, showing all of the feeds either provided by NPR or listed on its homepage. This is NPR's home page top stories feed. => https://feeds.npr.org/1001/rss.xml Now to the government sites. => https://lucascountyhealth.com I assumed that it would offer feed because the site uses the WordPress logo for its favicon.ico. Of course, the site was built with WordPress, and WordPress provides feed support by default, I think. When I visit that site, the orange feed icon appears, and two choices exist. This is the main feed. => https://lucascountyhealth.com/feed/ Unfortunately, it's not updated much. These are the two most recent posts: > Black History Month Event > 02/04/2021 04:27 PM > COVID-19 Vaccine: Now Scheduling for those 80 years of Age & Older > 01/16/2021 10:41 AM Ohio is now vaccinating people 60-years-old and over. [Mar 9, 2021 update: 50-and-over people will be able to schedule appointments, starting late this week.] This is an epic failure by the Lucas County Health Department. Are they updating their social media pages and not updating their website? How is this allowed, since the county health department is suppose to help the public? This should be called out by the county commissioners and the city councils of the towns and cities in Lucas County. The last Covid-19 related post contained within the county health department's feed was from nearly two months ago. This is appalling. And it's another reason why people use Facebook, instead of the open internet. When accessing these sites, Pale Moon did not display the orange feed icon for any of them. => https://odh.ohio.gov/wps/portal/gov/odh/home => https://coronavirus.ohio.gov/wps/portal/gov/covid-19/home => https://toledo.oh.gov/ => https://areaofficeonaging.com/ => https://tarta.com/ => https://www.lucascountyohiovotes.gov/ => https://www.co.lucas.oh.us/ => https://www.readforliteracy.org/ I did a view-source on all of those websites. I saw a lot of messy and ugly markup. I searched for feed, xml, rss, and atom within those homepages. I found feeds for three sites. This is an info page: => https://www.co.lucas.oh.us/rss.aspx The Lucas County government site provides dozens of feed options. This is the All feed. => https://www.co.lucas.oh.us/RSSFeed.aspx?ModID=76&CID=All-0 The Read for Literacy site uses WordPress. This is the site's feed file that is not being updated. It contains only one entry, and it's date Nov 10, 2020. => https://www.readforliteracy.org/feed The TARTA site uses WordPress, and here's its feed, and it's being updated. The feed contained 10 entries, one thus far for March and the other nine were from last month. => https://tarta.com/feed/ TARTA posts updates regularly or when required in a feed, but the NEW city of Toledo website does not offer a feed. Of course, TARTA uses WordPress, and it's possible that the site owners don't realize that they offer a feed format. The state of Ohio sites are horrendous poop piles. => https://webpagetest.org/result/210305_AiWJ_c73e1008843ea9aca191039fb69808d2/ Web Page Performance Test for https://coronavirus.ohio.gov/wps/portal/gov/covid-19/home From: Dulles, VA - Chrome - Cable 3/4/2021, 11:04:07 PM First View Fully Loaded: Download time: 12.812 seconds Web requests: 136 (!!!) Bytes downloaded: 6,600 KB (!!!) It's the homepage for the state's Covid-19 info, and it requires unsuspecting users to download over 6 megabytes of crap. 3.9 megabytes of the download were for images with most being useless stock images. What the hell, Ohio? 1.1 megabytes of the download were for JavaScript, which for modern web design in 2021 is a "small" amount of JavaScript. These are revolting design choices, made by our government agencies. This was my Mar 31, 2020 version of the Ohio Covid-19 homepage. => http://sora.soupmode.com/coronavirusohiogov.html Even when I disable EVERYTHING except for HTML when viewing the state of Ohio version, it's still slower to load than my version. I'm guessing that the state of Ohio Covid-19 homepage is dynamically generated. The city of Toledo website failed because as far as I can tell, it does not offer a feed. The Lucas County health department failed because it rarely provides updates that appear in its feed, despite new Covid-19 info being released weekly. The state of Ohio websites are massive failures because I don't see any feeds available, and their sites are massively bloated. If the sites were designed like text.npr.org, and all of the sites provided feeds that were updated at least weekly, then maybe, just maybe some people would get their info from these websites, instead of relying on the silos. But obviously, that won't ever happen in my lifetime. It's not Facebook's fault that website owners maintain horrendously designed websites and don't support the open web. ### Fri, Mar 5, 2021 After stewing on this some more, these websites are criminal, in my opinion. They should be illegal. These are government (taxpayer-funded) websites that are failing. => https://odh.ohio.gov/wps/portal/gov/odh/home => https://coronavirus.ohio.gov/wps/portal/gov/covid-19/home => https://toledo.oh.gov/ => https://lucascountyhealth.com None of those sites offer feeds. It should be a law that government websites in the U.S. must provide feeds, regardless of the number of people who access those feeds. It should be a part of the accessibility requirements. Apparently, accessibility guidelines say nothing about making sites easy to use, which is why these government sites should be forced to provide feeds. And since these are taxpayer-funded websites, then the feeds should contain the entire content of each post, unless the post is massive in size. Users can READ the government websites within their feed readers in what will probably be a more user-friendly experience than visiting each website separately. The Lucas County Health Department's website is the worst offender of all, since it has provided only one Covid-19-related post in 2021. I went to the site's "Latest News" section to see if it was possible that the site was adding new content that was not appearing in the feed, but that was not the case. => https://lucascountyhealth.com/news-events/latest-news/ These were the most recent posts on that page. Black History Month Event February 4, 2021 COVID-19 Vaccine: Now Scheduling for those 80 years of Age & Older January 16, 2021 Health Department Issues Stay-at-Home Advisory November 19, 2020 This site is doing a disservice to the public. Obviously, it does no good for a local resident to monitor our county's health department website for the latest news about Covid-19 vaccinations. This department made threatening commands at us last spring. Follow their guidelines even their stupid ones, such golf course owners banning Michigan residents, or else. The city of Toledo website uses an awful web design (duh), and it provides no feeds. The site has a latest news page that IS being updated regularly, which is nice. => https://toledo.oh.gov/government/mayor/news Then why not provide a simple feed with the feed containing the entire contents of each post? The city of Toledo website provides an email newsletter option, which could be handy. One of the infuriating aspects of modern web design is that EVERY page contains the same pile of links at the top and bottom of each page. This is moronic. All of that navigation cruft should reside only on the homepage. A link to the homepage and maybe a link to the search page can exist at the top and bottom of each article page, and that's it for header and footer cruft. This would keep the article pages focused on ... the content. For that Toledo mayor's news page, I had to scroll down about 95% of the page to find the content. I viewed the page in Pale Moon with everything disabled, except for HTML to make the web experience palpable. SO MANY websites function in a similar manner with tons of cruft at the top of the page that displays when CSS and JavaScript are disabled. This is wasteful web design. => https://webpagetest.org/result/210305_AiYR_9c86f94d489e1919325f4b5e0e576acf/ https://toledo.oh.gov/news/2021/03/01/toledo-ranked-no-1-for-new-business-investment From: Dulles, VA - Chrome - Cable 3/5/2021, 10:22:14 AM First View Fully Loaded: Download time: 4.497 seconds Web requests: 48 Bytes downloaded: 1,511 KB Cost: $$$$ Nearly 1 megabyte (984 KB) of the download went for JavaScript. Wow, only four dollar signs. That's probably better than 99 percent of the media websites. 1.5 megabytes is on the light side for today's modern web design. But it's a simple text article. Here's my version. => http://sora.soupmode.com/2021/03/05/toledo-ranked-no-1-for-new-business-investment.html The word count of the article totaled around 530 words. I saved the raw text of the city of Toledo article to a file on my laptop. The file size was 3,586 bytes. The size of my HTML version was 5,664 bytes. Here are the webpagetest.org results for my HTML version. => https://webpagetest.org/result/210305_Ai8D_2a91d7bf52dcd458eeea1297f6b99260/ From: Dulles, VA - Chrome - Cable 3/5/2021, 10:30:50 AM First View Fully Loaded: Download time: 0.337 seconds Web requests: 3 Bytes downloaded: 4 KB I store my CSS in a separate file for my Sora test site. The uncompressed size of my CSS file is 2,709 bytes, but CSS is not needed. The download size of the City of Toledo version of the article was 1.5 megabytes for 530 words. My version was 4 KB. The state of Ohio websites are criminal for its lack of feeds, horrendous web designs, and its sluggishness even with everything disabled. Governments like to pretend that they care about accessibility, diversity, and inclusiveness, but it does not show in their web design choices nor in their lack of support for basic open web tech, such as feeds. The Lucas County Health Department's lack of updated Covid-19 information on its website could be viewed has harmful and definitely viewed as a disservice to the public. Even if the county health department is posting regular updates on its Facebook page, then it's still a disservice to maintain a taxpayer-funded website that lacks important info. It's the county health department. I'll ask my wife to check the county health department's Facebook page for info. If their Facebook page is updated, then why maintain a website? The county should save the taxpayers money by shutting down an unused website. Deleting the website would serve the public better than providing a website with no useful info. ### Mar 9, 2021 I still need to seek my wife's assistance with conducting the Facebook test for the Lucas County Health Department. Regarding local orgs helping people schedule Covid-19 vaccination appointments, I learned about another option. Two days ago while shopping at the Phoenix Earth Food Co-op, I spoke with a friend who will receive his first vaccination shot this week. He used our county library system to help him schedule the appointment. I'm unsure how that process worked, but the library helped him. I don't know if he called or visited one of our branch libraries. I don't see any Covid-19 info on the library's website. => https://www.toledolibrary.org Maybe the library knew what sites and/or agencies to contact. Regarding TheMarkup.org story that caused me to create this post, I changed my mind about not excerpting any more content. Here are some excerpts: > Our panel consists of more than 2,500 Facebook users across the country who automatically share information about their news feeds with us. The Markup examined 4,104 sponsored posts containing COVID-19 safety and vaccine information on the platform ... Sponsored posts?!?!? I don't understand. If our Lucas County Health Department posts Covid-19-related updates to its Facebook page (while not updating its website), then would those posts be sponsored posts, or regular posts that followers would see? Would the followers see the posts? More from that paragraph: > ... between Dec. 1 and March 1, of which 464 came from regional, national, and international public health agencies. We included any sponsored post containing the word "vaccine," "vaccination," "COVID," or "coronavirus" from a public health agency. Regional does not seem local enough. Why not include county public health agencies? The Markup story focused on sponsored posts and ads, which seems odd. Why would Facebook users rely on ad impressions to learn about Covid-19 vaccine information? Why wouldn't Facebook users follow the pages of municipal and county health agencies? The story is important, but in my opinion, The Markup's approach was misguided. The journalists should have focused their efforts on other areas related to the dissemination and consumption of Covid-19 information. -30- ``` dir : 2021/03/04 ```