I’ve had a bit of an unintended break from blogging, despite my best intentions. But even though alcohol and pretending to be a tourist in London hit my productivity, I didn’t escape social media entirely. Main because I spent the week with a very good friend I hadn’t seen in 10 years, having lost touch shortly after I returned to the UK after time studying in the U.S. And the only way we got back in touch was via Myspace at the start of the year! Strangely within a couple of weeks, my friend had already converted to Facebook, and I can only guess Twitter will be next…

It was actually quite funny coming online today to find my lack of social media information streaming at me meant I was quite challenged to start writing. There’s definitely a benefit to having 100s of contacts and RSS feeds – the struggle is to use them for something more original than copying and pasting…

Luckily, there’s always something irritating enough to be worth posting about. In this case, it’s Coca Cola seemingly running an online loyalty scheme which has some serious usability issues. As someone who drinks Coke to excess (I don’t do tea or coffee!), I was quite interested to see what I could get by entering the codes on empty bottles – even more so when I realised that enough time could net me an Xbox game. And yet there’s one slight problem.

The chuffing site never lets me log in! I thought it was a Firefox problem at first, but it’s also b0rked in Internet Explorer. It refuses my password, and then strangely starts asking me to enter my email address in the password field! So I have about 30 empty coke bottles sat around waiting for me to redeem them…thanks Coke.

(It appears that this seemingly simple to spot problem isn’t the only one people have with Coke zone).

N:B: Oddly enough, I retried logging in to verify the fault exists, and now Firefox allows me in, whilst Internet Explorer stops me…