This has been the case with Esurance, who's ads appear to be every. From print to online radio to the TV I am barraged with at least 25 advertisements per day. This has led to me having one of the most severe afflictions that can happen to a person, over-advertised. I have seen and been annoyed by so many ads from Esurance that I have come to hate them with an extreme passion. If they went into bankruptcy I would probably start jumping in the air and clicking my heels. What makes it worse is the lack of quality in the their ads and their overuse of a horrible slogan. "Quote, buy, print"? There's absolutely not verbal flow between the words, they crash up against each and start an advertising fusion reaction that utterly destroys any chance of my actually buying a policy what-so-ever. Coupled with their failed attempts at striking my "save the dang planet" key, Esurance has risen to the ranks of the top 5 things that I wish never existed. (They're below George Bush but above logging companies.)

The "Element has no properties" problem with Prototype.

I wrote a post about this earlier, and simple stated that I "thought" I had solved the solution and provided a very poor explanation of how I had solved it, anyway here's what I did.

After seeing the error I tried many thing, many things did not work. I then tried doing a simple document.getElementById, which did work. Knowing this, I moved the calling of the function into the body.onload event and what do you know? It worked!

This is just another example of my unprofessional "magic touch" with JavaScript. Or not.

I have now gotten questions from multiple people about the left-aligning of my new theme. My main response is that I like it that way. Also we read from left to right, so I feel that what we want to read most would be at our left, with a gradual movement from left to right as we read. In my mind this shows preference towards the left in layout. Heck, look at A List Apart, Smashing Magazine, Google Results, 37signals' products, and a host of other sites. If you look a Google results, the padding on the left is just slightly less that with my own design; it also has almost exactly the same amount of whitespace on the right as my site. (If you have AdBlock Plus to remove the ads.) If Google's allowed to do that why can't I? The only big difference between my site and all the others listed above is that I've cut out the sidebar.

Firebug recently gave me this wonderful error, I found it quite...flattering. After about a half-hour screaming at the screen I figured out that I was trying to make a call to a JavaScript function included in the Prototype library, the problem was that the library hadn't been loaded yet, so my function call was looking for a function that did not exist. Or so I think. Anyway, the problem was solved by sacrificing a small animal to the JavaScript gods and putting the code in a function that was only executed once the entire document was loaded. I'm not sure if this workaround fully fixed it or I just got lucky with something, but I'm definitely going to look for some better ways to solve it in the near future.

Huh?

Misnamed errors can be quite frustrating, even more so when there obviously isn't an error. This is often the result of negligence, bad design, or the lack of the proper tools for feedback. In the image to the left, it is obvious that an error message isn't necessary, but there wasn't any other good way of giving feedback that the operation did run successfully than to display an error.

Combating This Problem

Until the proper tools come out, it seems kind of like we're stuck with misleading error messages.