Hey local-to-me ppl - anyone else seeing something busted about the City of Kitchener's web site? Is Kitchener on any of our fediverse TLs?
I'm getting the home page loading "greyed out" and entirely inoperable for me, same result across multiple cache-clearings and reloads in 3 different browsers.
I'm also beginning to doubt my sanity over the volume of tech malfunctions and incompatibilities I'm seeing in front of my face that don't seem to be notable to anyone else (WARNING: not the spot to wave your pro/con advocacy flags for some tool or other, thanks)
It's like every digital tool is gaslighting me right now because I'm finding on a daily basis that software update A correlates with some new dysfunction in apparently unrelated application B.
Another one that happened: Mac OS and Safari updated this past week ... and suddenly the Google apps I've been using all semester are spewing "Authentication errors" and I cannot access my work, and the error is blaming "old" versions of Safari or Internet Explorer. 😤
Stop breaking other fucking tech to ram your tech down everyone's throat.
Very much not lost on me right now!
Spouse is dealing with "AI or else" mandates and even though he's found occasional utility in it - it's making a lot of work miserable.
This makes as much sense as demanding every manufacturing or assembly business equip each employee with high-end chainsaw as their first-line tool for all tasks, regardless of whether the task is cutting up wood, fine-carpentry finishing, or graphic design and marketing. Everyone's output is woodchips.
@uxMark Appreciate the reassurance that I've not hopped timelines again to a universe where I'm fundamentally incompatible. 😁
Tech is becoming more and MORE a barrier to figuring out what is going on in my cities, yeesh. I'd contact the city about it but ... ???? I'm sure the phone number is searchable on that home page ... 🤣
@johannab
Their HTML/CSS is causing it.
If you hit F12, go to Console and paste this in, it will fix it:
document.getElementById('site-footer').style.display = 'none';
Chrome will tell you not to do that and you shouldn't trust me! But it works. You'll have to do it page by page but using the up-arrow in Console will save you re-typing it.
thanks! That's more clear how-to than I had at my fingertips, though I knew I could probably hack my way to something I specifically wanted.
Unfortunately that doesn't fix what is actually my concern is that how does a civic gov't portal manage to break itself like this for more than like, the 30 seconds it takes between "deploy that change" and "oh shit, our verification immediately caught the problem".
I literally went there to explore the UX and searchability of one of these "NEW! Try our AI Agent help tool!" promos that everyone and their crabby uncle is trying to slap in front of their users for ... <mumble-something> reasons.
So this is quite the laugh.
@johannab
Oh sure it's ridiculous that a municipality has something this broken for so long. I would guess they have no actual web devs, just people using a framework someone else set up ages ago.
Glad to hear it works anyway.
Yup, https://kitchener.ca/ is broken for me in exactly the same way.
Note that I'm running #uBlockOrigin (adblocker). I'm not about to turn it off for the likes of them.
And I know of no #Fediverse presence for any local municipality.
Johanna, CanCon variety
Cyberlyra
Mark Connolly
Negative12DollarBill
Bob Jonkman