Time to shake up the look here! The previous theme was a Drupal staple at the 6.x level, "Marinelli." This is "Impact." It's a "responsive" theme, meaning it does better with mobile device support.

Having our smartphones with us at all times is a blessing and a curse. We're always in touch, we're always wired. We can respond to whatever comes our way immediately.

But is that really necessary?

Of course not. The elegance of SMS messages, Twitter, and stuff on your facebook wall is you can do something else in between reading those messages. It's why so many people just let voice calls roll to voicemail--they don't want to commit 100% of their attention on one thing.

I was signing my new book at Maple Street Book Shop on Saturday, and naturally my Nexus 4 phone came with me. When I first got there, the phone was my friend, enabling me to check-in on Foursquare, answer messages that had accumulated, that sort of thing. But as people started looking at the book and talking to me, the phone was more of a problem than a tool. I kept wanting to check it! There are times when giving someone your full attention is not only good for business, it's just plain polite.

To combat the check-the-phone temptation, I've resurrected something from the early 00's: a PDA case. I used this one for my old PalmPilot, all the way to my Palm Treo phone. For the Nexus 4, it's going to do a number of things for me:

• Protection-Having the case affords more protection against drops. Putting a sleeve or otterbox-style case around a thin-line phone ruins the elegance of the device, even if it protects it.
• Invisibility-Out of sight, out of mind. With the volume up, I can still hear when various messages come in. Facebook? Twitter? I can pass on it. SMS? Voicemail? they have different ringtones, so I can check quick if it's important. The big thing is that I have to un-zip the case to see the phone. That extra action gives me a moment to remember my manners.
• Accessories-The case has room for business cards and a dollar bill or two.

There are times when we're hanging with other social media geeks, and everyone's heads are buried in their phones. That's OK. Not everyone does this, however, and eye contact in a conversation is important. Resist reaching for the phone!

It's a fair question, given that Ms. Long asked on Wednesday, "Is Randi Zuckerberg A Twitter Bully?"

In case you haven't been following the earth-shattering story of how Sister of Zuckerdood (and Zuckerdood in her own right, until 2011), Randi Zuckerberg, went off on a friend of a friend who tweeted a photo that Ms. Zuckerberg thought was set with tighter privacy restrictions. The photo ended up being passed around the Internet, much to Ms. Zuckerberg's anger and chagrin.

Naturally mediabistro picked up on the incident, and the intrepid Ms. Long explains why she commented on it:

People are saying it isn’t news (though it so obviously is)
or they’re having fun focusing on the hilarious irony of the slip-up
and her reaction to it – but what about the poor woman who
unintentionally shared this “private moment?”

What's news about a rich woman with a weak professional resume getting upset about her personal stuff ending up all over Teh Internetz? It's not even as if the photo was really all that interesting or salacious in the first place.

No, the irony is the story, since Zuckerdood himself was also caught with his pants down by changes in the site's Byzantine privacy policies back in 2009.

The incident reinforces the notion that there are fundamental flaws in Zuckerbook's infrastructure. Given the amount of money invested in the now-publicly-traded company, this should give the Zuckerdoods pause. It should be something discussed by the likes of Ms. Long and her colleagues.

But no, how Randi Zuckerberg reacts to a friend-of-a-friend is the real story here. According to mediabistro, this is a case of cyberbullying. Ms. Long doubles-down on news value of the story with the thesis of her article. Ms. Long thinks Ms. Zuckerberg should have been smart enough to realize that asking the original poster to delete the original tweet would be closing the barn door after the horse was let out. After all, lots of people no doubt have screen-shot the original tweet and saved the original photo, so there's not much point in taking said tweet out of Da Twittah, is there?




I'm trying to find the threat in Zuckerberg's request to delete the tweet that transforms this from a request to bullying. There's no "do this or else" involved here, either explict or implied. She's actually quite polite here, and it's natural for someone caught out in public like this to want to stop the bleeding.

Still, Ms. Long sees this as bullying.

Looks more like phoning in your column from here.

Flash-based websites are popular with restaurants and bars, but they are brand-damaging disasters that ignore mobile device users.

Attiki Bar and Grill looks like a good place to go for a kebab and/or some hummus in the French Quarter. It's got an 85% approval rating on Urbanspoon and 3.5 stars (with several raving 5-star reviews) on Yelp. They've got good beer specials, too. Love the belly-dancer avatar!

But their website is a hot mess.

This is what you see from a desktop PC with a flash-enabled browser. See how the overwhelming majority of the screen is empty? That's because the site is designed to present a "flash block." It puts up graphics based on Adobe's Flash product. Flash developers have a lot of creative flexibility, so long as they work within the dimensions of the fixed block of space they've allocated for their work. On a low-resolution screen, it doesn't look so bad, but on a monitor that supports a higher resolution, you can see the extent to which the developer short-changes the customer. Look at the dead space out there! Imagine if a restaurant went to a radio production company to have a 60-second radio spot made, and 15 seconds were dead air. So much could be done with all that unused space.

Then there's the issue of aesthetics. Flash-based sites may appeal to the developer and the client, but if they don't appeal to the prospective diner, the restaurant's wasted their money. This is a typical comment one finds when soliciting opinions about this sort of site.

Negative feedback is only the half of it. You have to be able to see the website to criticize it. On Apple's mobile platforms (iOS/iPhone/iPad), Flash is not supported, so you see an empty or black screen. On Android-based phones and tablets (the major competitor to iOS), the situation is the same. Adobe originally planned to support Android (particularly since the late Steve Jobs point-blank refused to pick up Flash for iOS), but the development was dropped by Adobe almost two years ago. With 40% or so of those clicking through to a restaurant website from Twitter or Facebook doing so from mobile platforms, this is what they see. Attiki's website detects that these users are coming in on a mobile device and the server wants to re-direct them to m.attikineworleans.com, but there's nothing there, so the default domain/site is presented. Since iOS doesn't support flash, empty screen.

If you haven't ever asked a friend or colleague to check your website out from an iPhone/iPad/Android device, do it soon!