Farewell everyday life. For the next month we are visiting family in Japan again. Yes. You read it correctly: four complete weeks in Toyko. It has been a busy time since January 1st. Running a business as a one-man-show can make your life really busy. But in this case busy in the sense of a really good, very intense time. After figuring out how to spend my precious time I am looking forward to experience an exciting year. The last months were amazing and all the things which are queued to take off right after the trip are causing great vibes already.

I don’t want to spoil the surprise so be sure to check for updates in mid/end of may. In the meantime (while I am enjoying tasty asian cuisine and colorful sunsets at Odaiba beach after relaxing in traditional Japanese Onsen for hours) you are invited to take a look at a recent “just for fun” project: topsellerblog.de. The German platform for brand clothing gives you a high quality listing of brand clothes available online directly at the selling companies. Third party services like Google friend connect allow you to easily share your thoughts on the products.

About two weeks after getting rid of most of my online community accounts I just read a great summary of another person feeling the same. The article really sums up things nicely in words I never would have been able to put so well together.

From a webdeveloper’s point of view I am truly amazed by the great facebook framework. Seeing the great success of the platform does not make me feel anything than admiration. But from a social point of view I am really concerned about the ongoing abstraction of internet communities from the real world. It just makes me sad that I did not wake up earlier. At the moment I am just happy to have stopped this social nightmare.

The dilemma I am in right now is that my profession is webdeveloper. I am earning money by producing online systems. To not follow the mainstream is quite risky for a one-man-show company and might create a bad reputation at business partners who do believe in all buzzes. I hope those people too will one day find out that not everyone is happy with information overflow and real social isoliation created by online worlds.

My current quest is to find a way back to reality for online services. I want to use online technology to enhance my social experience in real-life… not to replace it. Today I was attending a NFC (near field communication) conference and was amazed by the possibilities this technology has to offer. That could really be a way to connect both worlds in a manner that will make me benefit from the online connectivity in a more satisfying way. Of course the internet still is holding a lot of useful ressources and services for me too. At the moment there is just the feeling that I want to spend more time with real people around than in online channels.

No matter if it will be NFC or any other kind of new technology… I am just curious about the future of the technological part of our lives.

It was a long journey to this point. Since 2001 (more than 7 years) IE6 was the webdevelopers constant companion. Within the last years it more or less transformed into webdevelopers constant nightmare. Countless hours went into “fixing” modern CSS layouts to render correctly in IE6.

Over time you somewhat get used to the IE6 quirks but then there is the fact that IE6 natively does not support alpha channel transparency in PNGs which make the realization of nowadays webdesigns a real torture. Spending endless hours on integrating IE6 only hacks and applying PNG hacks.

Not anymore.

From this day I will not support IE6 with IE6 specific / IE6 only acks anymore. Of course I will test layouts for full compliance with IE6 in terms of functionality but don’t expect any additional CSS rule for IE6 only.

I am happy that during the last months I seldomly had to apply any IE6 hacks on new templates. But from time to time there was just no way around an ugly “fix”. This will stop now.

Maybe it’s too early.

The statistics of my websites tell me that depending on the website topic there are between 10 and 25 % of users still using IE6. I think that number is not quite accurate. My guess is that there are some bots/spiders sending IE6 browser info.

I know at least one big enterprise forcing staff to use IE6 and I just don’t get it why. Waiting for some months for adopting new software is even recommended in most companies but not rolling out at least IE7 when IE8 gets already shipped with Windows7 is beyond my comprehension. There must be some reason but don’t ask me for it. I just have no clue.

If offending about every 10th visitor with an inferior rendering of transparent layouts is the only risk then I guess I’ll take it. At least google already decided to start the dropping of IE6 (although it’s only a recommendation – I don’t think they don’t care about IE6 at all). I hope many other big web outlets are following soon.

In the past months I spent quite a lot time on building up my web profiles, always keeping them up-to-date, opening groups, searching for new people. Today something happened. Something big. Just like with hanging out in online chatrooms in the late 90s I decided to get my real life back and to quit most of the platforms. It turned out that sometimes to make the decision is easier than the final execution of it.

My experience so far:

• MySpace: Perfect. They have a fully automated process of deleting the account permanently. After verifying the wish for deletion via email myspace says it will take up to 48 hours until my account is gone.
• Facebook: Seem pretty straight forward too. The automated process says that my account is in deactivated state for another 14 days. If I do not login in the meantime it will be removed permanently automatically.
• Xing: I guess the deletion process would be quite easy for non-premium-members. In my case I had to contact the support team. My premium account still lasts until the end of april. But I want my life back now. Let’s see when I get feedback.
• LinkedIn: I always hated the clumsy interface and I even hate the process of account deletion even more. The only way to delete the account is to send an email to the support team. Funny thing is that I got an error when sending the support form. I tried a second time and the system said there was already a message from my email address within the process queue. So I guess my first request got delivered although there was an error message. We’ll see.

To find the “delete account” option on the platforms I mostly used google to get hints faster on how to do it. For every platform there are good pages online giving the right directions.

Before deleting your account be sure to remove all your personal information. On some platforms it seems as if not all your information gets automatically purged. Especially LinkedIn seems to be kind of funny. I don’t know if it is true but it is rumoured that they remove your login but keep your data publicly. So please remove everything personal and change what is not removable to something different.

Especially on LinkedIn again there were several things I was not able to remove. Maybe you can remove everything somehow but with my constant struggle with the interface I decided to overwrite some entries. Luckily removing the connections to other people is pretty easy. On Xing for e.g. you have to remove all your connections manually. Removing about 150 links eventually takes up to 3 minutes.

I am still keeping my twitter account. I really like the concept of the global shoutbox and I am using it’s content on some mashups. Also all my instant messaging accounts are still valid. I expect to gain an additional one to two hours per day which I will redistribute to my own online projects and my real life.