The thing is, even though I know how much more difficult Jason's routine is and how skilled he is, the very ease of his delivery makes it less likely an audience would give him that same ovation. Interesting how important effort seems to be.

Seth Godin

In university, I was involved in "Jugglers Against Homophobia" (which I gather has since become the less interesting "Jugglers Against Oppression"). I taught a lot of people how to juggle. I learned to give different advice to people learning how to juggle and people learning how to perform juggling. I would tell jugglers how to avoid dropping a ball (throw the next ball when the ball in the air is at maximum height, giving yourself the most time to react to the falling ball).

I would tell juggling performers the same thing, but then I would also tell them to start any segment of a juggling routine by dropping something. This establishes the difficulty of the activity and makes success more impressive. It seems a bit deceptive at first glance, but juggling really is hard.

 

It's often difficult to convince someone that meaningful URLs are important. "No one will be typing it anyway. They'll just be clicking on a link." is a common response to suggestions that http://somewebsite.com/avenue/pennsylvania/number/1600/ is a better address than http://somewebsite.com/?id=21376

Today I was looking at some PHP code snippets at http://www.bigbold.com/snippets/tag/php and I decided to subscribe to the feed. So I clicked on the feed button (because there are no autodiscovery tags), and was taken to http://www.bigbold.com/snippets/rss/tags, which isn't an actual feed. The link is broken. (I already sent an email.) I noticed that the URL doesn't describe the content of the feed I was looking for.

So I typed in what I thought would be a descriptive URL for a feed of items tagged with 'php': http://www.bigbold.com/snippets/rss/tag/php. And sure enough, that's where the feed was. In a world full of perfect people and perfect markup with no links to the wrong URLs, meaningful URLs don't matter as much. In the real world, they can make the difference between someone using your website and not.