currybetdotnet Daily Mirror archive

'Sorry - this page cannot be found': How newspapers handle 404 errors - Part 1
A comment when I started my recent 'Newspaper Site Search Smackdown' series of posts prompted me to go and have a look at which British newspapers use sitemap.xml files. As it turned out, it was only the Daily Mail and The Scotsman which did (well, and The Telegraph and The Mirror and Metro), which meant that I got to have a close look at the 404 error pages generated by the others. I thought it might be worth running through...

Read the full post - Published May 5, 2008 in Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Daily Star, Newspapers, The Guardian

Newspaper "Site Search Smackdown": Round 3 - The Guardian vs The Mirror
I'm running a series of smackdowns between British newspaper site search engines, to test how fresh their indexing is. In Round 1, The Sun was put down by The Mail. Yesterday's Round 2 saw a perfect 10 from The Independent, and the lowest score so far, from The Telegraph. Today it is the turn of The Guardian and The Mirror to face the test. The rules The rules of the contest are quite simple. Go to a newspaper homepage...

Read the full post - Published April 10, 2008 in Daily Mirror, Newspapers, Search, The Guardian

'Achtung! Surrender' from The Mirror - Get your Euro 96 newspaper xenophobia here
The other week when I was looking at the websites of the Africa Cup of Nations semi-finalists, I mentioned in passing that were England to ever reach such a stage of a tournament again, you could guarantee the press and the official FA website would be in a patriotic frenzy. It called to my mind the coverage of the Euro96 semi-final between England and Germany at Wembley. In Mark Christopher Watkin's excellent 2002 analysis of the relationship between hooliganism and...

Read the full post - Published February 25, 2008 in Daily Mirror, Football

How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 3 - Daily Mirror
This week I'm looking at the level of accessibility built into British newspaper websites. I started with the Daily Express and Daily Mail, and today I want to look at The Mirror. I'm assessing the paper's homepage and top story page against a number of accessibility criteria. Text resize One of the simplest tests for accessibility is to see whether a site uses relative font sizes or fixed font sizes. Relative font sizes means that users can control for themselves...

Read the full post - Published November 8, 2007 in Accessibility, Daily Mirror, Newspapers, Product review, Web

Is Britain's brightest A-Level student a boy or an anonymous photogenic teenage girl?
This one is as regular as clockwork on the currybet.net site - the A-Level results come out, and I start moaning about the depressing and sexist coverage of it - here's one I made earlier in 2003. Who'd think that boys even took A-Levels these days? And if teenagers do manage to perform well in the exams, well, then they are obviously worthless bits of paper anyway. And everybody wonders why teenagers in Britain appear to suffer from low self-esteem...

Read the full post - Published August 16, 2007 in Children and Teenagers, Daily Mirror, Media

Newspapers 2.0: OPML files for The Telegraph and The Mirror blogs by author
Interesource (not Intersource as I kept calling them) have been very pro-active in responding to my comments about the blogs on The Telegraph and The Mirror that they provide. One of the team was quick to point out some innacuracy in my table of newspaper blog features, where I'd missed out, amongst other things, that they offered navigation by tags. He also pointed out that some of the blogs, like Shane Richmond's, did offer blogrolls, and not only that, that...

Read the full post - Published June 5, 2007 in Daily Mirror, Daily Telegraph, Newspapers, RSS

Newspapers 2.0: How Web 2.0 is The Mirror?
I've been looking at the extent to which the online versions of British newspapers have adopted the technologies of web 2.0 - things like RSS feeds, blogging and social bookmarking. So far I've looked at The Express and The Times, and today I'm looking at The Mirror. The Mirror's most recent redesign on the web has been without doubt one of the ugliest attempts yet to spray-paint a little web 2.0 gloss on a postively web 1.0 user experience....

Read the full post - Published April 25, 2007 in Daily Mirror, Media, Newspapers, Web

Add nothing to your basket at MyDailyMirror.com
When The Mirror recently redesigned their website, it looked like someone had just broken out the crayons in a box marked "Crazy Web 2.0 Photoshop Gradients". As you can see, the effect has also spread to MyDailyMirror.com. This is the Mirror's site where customers can purchase copies of famous Daily Mirror front pages from throughout the paper's history. Or not, in the case of recent titles. Despite the fact that you'd expect it to be easier to lay your...

Read the full post - Published April 18, 2007 in Daily Mirror, Usability

Searching The Daily Mirror
Over the course of the last week or so I have been looking at how search works across various different British newspaper websites. Yesterday I looked at The Independent's search systems, and today I am going to return to red-top tabloid territory, with a look at the Daily Mirror. Mirror.co.uk didn't get into my good books to start with, as an invasive advert for Currys prevented the page from rendering properly in Firefox, which meant that I had to fire...

Read the full post - Published July 4, 2006 in Daily Mirror, Media, Newspapers, Product review, Search

Another one bites the dust
First Greg, and now Piers. Another Editor-in-Chief in the UK loses their jobs for allowing allegations of mis-doings in the "War-in-Iraq-affair" to be broadcast or published without sufficient fact checking to prove the stories are correct. Without wanting to rake up old ground, it's just a shame the same standard of fact checking doesn't seem to apply if you publish front page stories supporting the official line on the war. For example, The Evening Standard on 24 September 2002...

Read the full post - Published May 15, 2004 in BBC, Daily Mirror, Evening Standard, Politics, The Sun