Wednesday, November 18, 2009

This is how business is done?

After hearing about Sally's paper scheduled for the APA next month (see below) and strategizing my holiday plans, I was thinking that I might swing by the conference for a day or two, even though I'm not presenting (and not--hooray!--interviewing or being interviewed). New York can be fun, even if expensive.

BUT, not having the print program to hand (it's at home--I do pay my dues!), I thought I'd do it the 21st century way and pull up the website.

No doing. The undated message on the website says:

The APA National Office is in the midst of transitioning our website and its services to a new hosting facility. Due to the transition, some features of the APA website may be temporarily down for a few days.

Wasn't this supposed to be accomplished in October? Is there another site that Google isn't finding?

3 comments:

Matthew J. Brown said...

Looks like the website is still functioning, despite the weird message. I found the program here:

http://apaonline.org/divisions/eastern/V83_1.aspx

Evelyn Brister said...

Odd. Thanks for the link, which works OK--or as well as I guess it's supposed to. The program is not searchable? Hmm...that's not very 21st century, is it? It's not even downloadable as a searchable pdf? OK, I guess I can use the find function in my browser, but only by searching day by day. Inefficient.

And also, I wouldn't be able to get to this page on my own if you hadn't sent it to me, except perhaps by a Google search. It looks like there are links on the left hand side, but they don't link to anything. Not quite true. By hovering my cursor in just the right place, I can get to a version of the homepage that doesn't have that lefthand sidebar on it at all.
Now, that's just obstructionist!

Evelyn Brister said...

OK, so it works with Firefox, but not AT ALL with Safari.

Safari is not SUCH an odd duck browser: about 5% of market share. But significantly higher among academics who are, after all, the visitors to the APA website.

To take visitors to this blog as an example, 38% of hits are by Firefox users, 32% are by Internet Explorer users, 23% are by Safari users, 4% Chrome, and 1% Opera.

So what if Internet Explorer has 65% of the general market share? It's simply not as popular among philosophers. Perhaps we have more awareness of and control over our choices than typical computer users.

Oh, but good to know that the APA website is optimized for Netscape Navigator. You know, just in case.