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WTF is Twitter?
brian on 2008.07.08 at 06:40 pm
I haven’t posted about Twitter in a while. I think Twitter posts make, like, half of my content on this blog over the last calendar year. Clearly, I can only post consistently if I talk about Twitter.
That’s why I’m pleased to show you WTFisTwitter.com
The problem: try explaining Twitter to a non-geek family member. OK, now try to do that in a sentence or two! Did they understand after either take?
WTFisTwitter is short videos of people trying to explain what Twitter is.
BTW, none of these explanations will remotely help you explain to someone what Twitter is. But they’re entertaining.
(via Whitney)
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Tumble-hooked
brian on 2008.04.23 at 10:19 pm
As if I didn’t have enough blogs (four, at last count) I post to, I began experimenting with Tumblr a few months back. It started out as a way to entice someone into posting more often. Then it became research on how to integrate that sudden flurry of activity into something importable into her normal blog (which, I hear, is being re-designed). Then it became something to investigate extending for a loved one to start using as she wanted to document an important time in her life.
I got to really appreciate it’s elegance and simplicity, even if I didn’t have a need for it. Well, “need” is rarely a qualification for something I start using, at least when it comes to technology.
Further experiments showed that Tumblr really excelled at video, mobloging, and with it’s stark modern aesthetic, it makes an excellent frame for photos.
So if you want to see some photos I take from my phone, videos I make or just generally entertaining rubbish, have a look at briandigital.tumblr.com
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DHH at Startup School
brian on 2008.04.23 at 07:56 pm
Have 5 minutes to spare? Start watching this:
David Heinemeier Hansson at Startup School 2008
Oh, the video is 30 minutes long, but you’ll have lost track of time and not realize that you didn’t mean to watch the video for that long.
What is it about telling people looking to make a quick buck to get their heads out of their asses, that is so enjoyable to watch?
The story never gets old for me: forget taking other people’s money, and other people’s expectations and their definitions of success. Find something you’re passionate about, something you enjoy doing. Balance it with a life. Solve problems, charge a reasonable fee, and keep it simple. If you’re living comfortably, that’s success. You don’t need to be the next big thing, or be totally original. You just have to do one thing better than other people, and find people that’s valuable to. Treat them well, and you’ll succeed.
People forget the “Internet industry” isn’t a moneybin. It’s a place to conduct business. Businesses have been around a very long time, and almost none of the successful ones have ever taken the rocket trajectory to success. They score small wins, reinvest the profit and grow within their means.
Like in almost anything, becoming a star by working hard, not by trying to be a star, is the best path to follow.
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Flickr Vids
brian on 2008.04.10 at 10:08 pm
Flickr has added video clips. This is great and long awaited. However some Flickr die-hards think that video on Flickr is somehow blasphemy.
My message to them is:
Get a grip. If you need something to protest, go find that Olympic Torch. People are actually being oppressed in Tibet. You are not being oppressed by Flickr.
End transmission.
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More Twitter coverage
brian on 2008.03.12 at 10:36 pm
I’m thinking of making a Twitter category. Here’s today’s helping:
Our friends at Common Craft have made a Twitter in Plain English video. Excellent for attempting to cajole your non-geek friends and family onto Twitter.
Second, a story of getting your family (or Nivin’s) onto Twitter.
And lastly, a story of a New York Times writer unsuccessfully trying to get her three daughters to communicate with her more efficiently through Twitter than through other channels.
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Disrespect via Twitter
brian on 2008.01.31 at 10:43 pm
I’ve written here before about the misuse of Twitter. I write a lot about Twitter here, both because it’s an interesting new avenue for communications, and because it’s earned a place in my life. Sadly, I’m bringing it up again.
Tonight the Democrats running for the the office of President of the United States held another debate, this time in Los Angeles, California. I was watching, as were many people on my Twitter stream. However, one person took it upon himself to completely force everyone else off of my stream. I follow only 46 people as of this writing. Some people follow thousands, I realize. Heck 108 people follow me (I’m sure a handful are bots, but still). But I couldn’t read most of their thoughts tonight because one person wanted to dominate the conversation. Actually, conversation is a poor term here. One person turned hijacked my Twitter stream for his personal commentary on every twitch of each candidate.
After two hours of the debate, this person twittered 38 times.
Not one to shy away, I explained my feelings to the verbose one.
And that’s when things got iffy. Read on for the full story.
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Twitter Makes Me Cry
brian on 2008.01.31 at 12:03 pm
Poor Twitter has been offline a lot in the last week. I wish them the best in getting the service back up and running smoothly. It makes their bandwidth partners Joyent and their Sun/OpenSolaris servers look weak, too. Anti-Rails people blame Twitter’s Rails roots, as well. However, it’s most likely that Twitter’s user’s demands are simply outstripping what they’ve purchased from Joyent, but in the end it still looks bad.
It’s a real shame, because the unreliability prevents Twitter from being a very useful communications channel that can reach your friends where ever they may be: email, IM, client, website, and especially mobile via SMS.
I’m also worried that they have VC funding, but no (publicly announced) business model yet. How long can something exist without paying the bills? (or in their case, the investors)
I’m looking forward to a future with a stable and available Twitter!
BREAKING UPDATE!
The news came only an hour or so after this blog post!
(source & wording stolen from here)
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Word of the Year 2007?
brian on 2007.12.12 at 09:45 am
w00t!
This is the word of the year? Surely, you must be kidding.
I guess this cements the Internet’s place in influencing culture.
(Had that not already happened?)
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The Facebook is Following Me
brian on 2007.11.12 at 11:14 am
This morning I went to get doughnuts at a local bakery. After I was done enjoying them, I went to yelp.com to review the place, since I had read good reviews there and wanted to reciprocate.
When I was done with the review and hit publish, I got a strange AJAXian popup crawl up on the bottom right corner of my browser window, in a familiar light-grey and blue hue.
Yelp has sent this story to your Facebook profile.
Oh, really? And how does Yelp know I have a Facebook profile, and when did they ask me if I was interested in allowing this in the first place?
I headed to Facebook directly.
At the top of the page, there was a notification in my news feed that Yelp wanted to send the story to Facebook. So it seems it had not yet made it on my page. There was a learn more link, so I did:
You do all sorts of interesting things on the internet […]
There’s no reason that actions like these wouldn’t be as interesting to your friends as the fact that you added a new photo album to Facebook. This is why we’ve created a mechanism by which other websites can, with your permission, publish stories into your Mini-Feed, and potentially into the News Feeds of your friends.Oh, really? The good news I found was this:
If you are logged in to Facebook and take an action on an affiliated site, the website will alert you that it has a story it would like to send to your Facebook profile. You can then choose to take the following actions…
Which include opting out of sending the story right then and there. Every time a site wishes to send a story, it must ask you first. In fact, there are two layers of privacy here, you can set a global Yes or No on Facebook for the sites that can send data, plus, you’ll always be notified by the affiliate site the moment they are about to send the story (which can then actually be detained by Facebook for your second approval if you so choose). So there are lots of controls to this possibly very cool and/or very invasive new feature.
My take: Facebook may have another news feed fiasco on its hands. I was pretty startled by the unanticipated popup telling me some random site I was just on was reporting my actions to Facebook. My reaction was, in fact…
Excuse me?
Without letting me know ahead of time that this affiliate site program had begun, I had a strong sense of Big Brother. How did this site know I had a profile? Why is Facebook following me around the Internet? I’m thinking others may have a similar reactions.
The second connection to the News Feed drama is that it is still a very cool feature – but the initial release was a communications failure!
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Daring Fireball is a Deadbeat.
brian on 2007.05.01 at 06:10 pm
UPDATED below
What can you do when a favorite blogger breaks your heart?
There’s been a recent trend: bloggers going full time, supported by their loyal readers. But what do their supporters get? For the most part, they get some quality content. But what happens when the bloggers let down their readership?
Sadly this is happening to me. Someone whose opinion I respect greatly, John Gruber has let me down. Its clear that his business acumen is not what his Mac punditry is.
I signed up to be a supporter of Daring Fireball’s during its first pledge drive. For the first year, John’s writing was of high quality, but poor frequency. He talked about various features (comments come to mine) that never materialized. I was disappointed in my investment. Additionally, I had originally signed up with an old AOL email address, because it was what was hooked up to my PayPal account. Attempting to leave that address I asked John to change my account over to a more current address. It took several months for that to occur. This was a bad omen. I continued to have a couple issues with the authenticated feed.
DF’s frequency picked up dramatically about a month or so before his first year was up. It was reminiscent of a baseball player in the last year of his contract— batting average jumped 20 points.
In response to this, I decided to re-up my membership. Additionally, I invested in one of his t-shirts, to say “I appreciate your new dedication, keep heading in this direction.” This was the end of October 2006.
Today is the end of April of 2007. What can I do?
Tonight, I sent John yet another email. I’ve been writing every few months. I’m very patient. But come April, I had had enough. Seeing him post about other blogger’s t-shirts, designing special editions of his t-shirts and selling those, reading Twitter posts about him sending out batches of aforementioned shirts. But yet, he can’t return my emails?
Actually, John did respond to one email, March 25… to an email I had sent exactly one month earlier. It said,
Ends up I never did add your order to the list. I’m sorry, it’s
totally my fault.I’m printing a shipping label for you tonight. Size Medium,
classic gray shirt…
I’ve also added an extra year to your membership, extending it
through October 2008, as a token of my thanks for your patience
and support for DF.Well, half of that wound up to be true. If I log into his website, I can see my subscription was extended. This tells me that I’m at least in the database. I’ve sent at least three follow-up emails since then, asking what happened to the shirt that was suppose to ship. Dead air.
But what can I do now? support@daringfireball.net is just a busy signal for me.
Has anyone considered the business practices of subscription bloggers? It’s one thing to try to eek out a living via Google ads and maybe the occasional speaking engagement, but when you openly solicit readers’ money, what recourse do readers have?
Is anyone else having these problems? Is John, or any other for-pay bloggers, mistreating their customers? If so, how would anyone know?
I’ve sent one final email to John before contacting my Credit Card company and PayPal to register a complaint. Since John’s a member of the Deck, I’m considering contacting them as well. They should know that his poor business practices are not reflecting on their brand and their advertiser’s brands well. I really don’t want to do this over $29. But it is simply insulting to take my money and then screw me over.
UPDATED May 2
My strategy was this: Write a final letter to JG Apr 30. Publish a blog post May 1, and if by the end of the night I didn’t hear anything, email various higher-profile bloggers to point out my post, in the hopes of gaining some attention, along with dropping a note to The Deck, his advertising network. If nothing happened by tonight, I would send a second round of emails to the various Apple blogs.
Interestingly I found a priority mail envelope in my mail this afternoon containing one Daring Fireball T-shirt. No note saying “sorry about all this” or anything. It’s a shame JG couldn’t have responded to my email with the heads up before I sent out those emails. Not that this invalidates any of those. It’s still ridiculous that I had to go through all of this to get a stupid t-shirt. But at least I didn’t have to go to the second round.
End Update
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Bad behavior in the blogosphere
brian on 2007.03.29 at 06:40 pm
An excellent summary and analysis the awful situation that has been surrounding Kathy Sierra this week.
It’s truly sad that some people are still stuck in the stone ages. And not even that is an excuse worthy of this kind of filth.
Here’s hoping Kathy can come back strong from this. Good luck Kathy.
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Don't expose yourself on Facebook.
jake on 2007.03.18 at 01:04 pm
One of Facebook’s most exciting features is the news-feed. Whenever someone updates their information you get a little notice in your feed. Myspace on the other hand requires you to visit every friend’s page individually to find out one little tidbit of information has changed. Perhaps I’ve just been spoiled by RSS/Atom but I find that to be a big deal.
The one issue that might crop up is that different people want to share different information. When the feature was first released many users grabbed their torches and pitchforks. This struck me as funny since all this information was already available.
Luckily there is a solution to this imaginary conundrum. Change the security settings. The information covers more than just the mini-feed and I’d recommend evaluating how much you want to share before following it verbatim.
Personally I left plenty of things exposed but who wants a secret getting to the wrong people?
Found at Lifehacker
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Still Hate MySpace
brian on 2007.03.11 at 09:40 am
When last I left you, I had decided to join the social website evolution, and sign up for both Facebook and MySpace. Tellingly, MySpace was so broken that day that I never signed up, and I wrote a lengthy post to both whine about that and praise Facebook, which is a worthy waste of time.
Time has past since that post, and now the update. I’ve endured every roadblock that NewsCorp has laid in my way, and joined MySpace too. And it sucks every bit as much as I thought it did before actually using it. I’m not surprised.
What does surprise me is the level of suckiness that comes from MySpace’s IT. Their servers really suck. I wouldn’t be surprised if they ran on Windows. Every third page I attempt to load fails due to a server gasping for air. You’d think NewsCorp could spring for a couple extra 386 boxes for Tom to cram into his studio apartment. At least, that’s where I think this shit box is hosted. Unbelievable.
OK, now that I have that out of my system (you know, “I’m right, but they’re billionaires anyway.”) I’d like to say I have reconnected with some old friends on there and I’m happy about that. However, the communications have already worn thin. So this may just have fizzled out quickly.
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Now with Twitter
brian on 2007.01.14 at 11:53 pm
I’m now a Twitter user. Thus far I’ve set it up to display on the front page of my homepage, briandigital.com and I’ve setup IM updating, so I can IM a twitter bot and have it automatically update. Very cool.
Twitter people: you should totally set this up to integrate with Facebook, because your whole service does the exact same thing as their “status.”
I hope to integrate my Twitter status on this and my other blog, as well. For now, I don’t see me using it on my cell phone. Do you have Twitter? If so, leave a comment and I’ll add you to my list!
Update:
Got the second blog up and running already. :-)
Update 2:
Apparently the Mac world is in love with Twitter. Example one, Twitterific, a little psuedo-app for Mac OS X allowing interactivity with the Twitter service. And Example two is Chitter, a plug-in to iChat that combines your away messages with your Twitter status, which is frankly brilliant.
At the moment Twitterific is at 1.0 but a lot of people can’t seem to get it to post, although they can read from it. And Chitter is pre-1.0. Nascent. But very promising.
Plus Twitterific has the cutest icon, ever.
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Making an Appearance on Facebook
brian on 2006.12.23 at 08:44 am
Many of you out there may have heard me proclaim, “MySpace? Yuck! Never.” Quite simply, it offended my design sensibilities. Actually, strike that. It still does. It’s a freaking mess. I also lumped Facebook in with that. Not because it was ugly, but because it was a walled garden that came out after I could have signed up from college, and it was sort of like MySpace, and I couldn’t really see in, so I just assumed.
Well two things have happened since then. One, Facebook opened its doors to everyone, and two, I now work at a web think tank, where we tend to mention MySpace or Facebook daily. Finally, the other day I caved. Research, of course. Actually, I’ve decided that there are enough good things about the social networking sites that outweigh the bad (and in MySpace’s case, the awful). Mainly, I wanted a place where old friends from high school or college could stumble upon me. I’ve come to realize very few of my in-contact friends have ever visited my blogs, which is what I reasoned was my substitute for these sites. Thus, I doubted anyone would want to stumble over me so much that they would Google me, but there’s a significant chance that they would find me when browsing one of these sites for classmates. I attempted to sign up for both MySpace and Facebook.
As if trying to sure-up my opinion about it, MySpace shit the bed while I was trying to sign up. “A Message was sent to our technical team.” Jake says “Their technical team is a bunch of 12 year olds.” So are their designers. Listen up: any site that auto-plays music deserves a good punch in the developer’s face.
That sent me to Facebook.
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Hitting it big on the Internets
brian on 2006.11.12 at 05:22 pm
A friend of mine from Apple is friends with a bunch of young guys. These guys made a website. People liked it. Most people have never heard of it, though. These guys came in several times to the store, and I helped them with their Macs a handful of times. They were all very pleasant. I didn’t recognize them at that point, except Aaron, who I had met at a Berkman meeting with Dave Winer.
One day, my friend Emilie brought back a 12” PowerBook to me with some Reddit stickers on it. She asked if I could make some small repair to it, saying it was for a friend. I did, of course, and handed it back to her. I asked “Hey, what’s your friend’s connection to Reddit?”
“Oh, he and a couple of my other friends made it. You’ve heard of it?”
“Yes. Of course, I’m a web geek.”
“Cool! They’ll be so happy you’ve heard of them, I’ll tell them!”
When I came out of the back, trailing Emilie on her way to hand the machine back, I then realized I had helped the other guys a handful of times in the past.
Of course, now a few more people have now heard of Reddit. Those pleasant people were acquired by CondeNast on Halloween.
Good for them. Nice to see nice things happen to nice people. Of course, many of you would cry if you knew how young these guys are. Then again, Aaron was the co-author of the RSS 2.0 spec at age 15. He’s an old man now compared to then.
Here are two of Aaron’s blogposts on the acquisition:
and a summary of the news from around the techworld:
Good Luck to them.
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Great way to Not Work at Work
brian on 2006.08.03 at 11:28 am
I count myself as extremely lucky to have a job where a) I don’t have to use Windows, and b) where I’m not bored enough to need to surf the web for junk in secret. In case a and b don’t apply to you, may I suggest you check out WorkFriendly.net I think you’ll find it useful.
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Save the Internet - Save Network Neutrality!
brian on 2006.04.23 at 10:42 pm
I hope to bring your attention to something that’s kind of important, but is gliding under the radar right now. It’s called Network Neutrality, and it’s essentially the first amendment of the Internet…
Congress is pushing through a law that would permit large telephone and cable companies, like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast, to control what you do, where you go and what you watch online.
Right now, these companies who are net work operators and internet service providers (they hook you to the net) want to give priority to certain packets of data from certain interests. What’s that mean to you? Barnes and Noble can pay AT&T to make sure their site loads faster than your local library’s site, or your favorite web bookseller’s… that’s under handed, but we’ve come to expect that from certain companies.
But how about if you bought Internet Protocol phone service from Vonage for use over your broadband internet connection? Works now, because network neutrality exists. However, if this bill passes, you can guarantee that Verizon’s IP phone service will be the clearest on their wires… Comcast’ll have the best IP phone on theirs…. and Vonage’s will suck everywhere.
So without network neutrality, your ISP will decide who you get to associate with on their wires. They don’t like AOL? Say good bye to your buddy list. Google doesn’t pay their tax? Bye bye useful and fast search and GMail…
Get the point? Great, now go complain to your appointed congressional representative. I suggest visiting…
SaveTheInternet.com for info on how, and a nice form that’ll allow you to write your rep with little or no effort. They’ll link you to this form here:
If you support Network Neutrality, you’ll continue to reap the amazing benefits of innovation that has been fostered on an open internet. If you sit on your hands… then the net will become TV with a keyboard… you pay for it but what’s on it is their choice, not yours.
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NewsGator First Look
brian on 2006.03.18 at 09:40 am
I signed up for NewsGator yesterday so that I could try out the new syncing features of my fav app NetNewsWire.
The initial sync brought all my stuff over successfully, and this morning I took a look at the web version for the first time.
Unfortunately, only the negative stands out at this initial point. First thing I noticed is that my finely-crafted hierarchy of folders is instantly undone – everything is now in alphabetical order. Not good.
Second, the subscription list is not separate. So, when you scroll down, your list goes away, too, killing any chance of switching quickly to another sub quickly. A little, simple CSS could solve this.
Also on the subs list, when you click on the name of a folder, it shows you all the contents of the folder’s feeds – as it should. However, there is not much visual feedback in the subs section to tell us we’re indeed looking at everything.
Third, every time you click on something, the whole page refreshes. It’s time for some AJAX.
Lastly (for now) it does not observe my refreshing preferences, thus folders of feeds I’ve not read for 6 months, but want to keep around for various reasons, there full of active stuff. I wish it was just left alone. (maybe it’s just me — I just don’t like it)
These are just my initial thoughts, more may follow.
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Local News Blog
brian on 2005.11.15 at 01:35 pm
Local blogger Lisa Williams, author of H20Town has a great write up on her experience producing the local news site for fellow suburb Watertown. Long and interesting. Love to see someone with this kind of time start up in Medford. It certainly could help newbies like myself learn more about my surroundings.
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OpenCourseWare continues growth
brian on 2005.10.05 at 11:35 pm
I’ve been lax posting here for a while. Tonight, I’ll break that.
I am a proponent of Open Content. I’m very interested in educational technology (truth be told I’ve thought about graduate study in this field about once a week since college). Certainly, there are cases and audiences for paid content. However, education is a basic human right, and whenever possible, that type of content should be available. Education benefits everyone. If your neighbor gets smarter, you benefit.
On this topic, MIT bust on the scene a while back with the OpenCourseWare initiative. Others have come out to offer their courses, including my neighbor, Tufts. The downside of these, however, is that the majority of the courses are pretty high-end. Great if you’re already studying one of these topics in a doctoral program. Anyone up for Introduction to Applied Nuclear Physics? Not so great for the rest of us paying a mortgage with a 40-hr a week job.
Today I discovered the Sofia Open Content program from Foothill and DeAnza Colleges. They have freshman-level courses. Two that have caught my eye are and Introduction to Programming Java, and Physical Geography. Outstanding.
I’m interested in Introduction to Java Programming because I hear that java is a good programming language to learn first, both for its importance and ubiquity, and for it’s C-like-ness, and many other languages, like PHP are C-like. Versus say Ruby, which is supposedly easy to learn, but not terribly applicable to other languages… since many languages are C-like.
Unfortunately, I am unlike Jake in that I just can’t find half-written tutorials on the web and be a zen-programming-master in two weeks. I need some structure to my learning.
The intro to Physical Geography reads as such:
Physical geography is the study of the earth’s dynamic systems – its air, water, weather climate, landforms, rocks, soils, plants, ecosystems and biomes – and how humans interact with the earth’s systems.
Since I’m a weather geek, you don’t need me to tell you why this appeals to me.
What could be better? A course to teach me to write a weather program that takes live data from a weather station, and do something cool with it, like archive to a database and show the observations live on the web.
Anyhow, I’m glad to report that someone is making Open Courseware content for the rest of us.
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More Google Product Goodness.
brian on 2005.08.24 at 08:54 pm
Not only has Google come out with another innovative product, Google Talk, but they’ve also added a key feature to an existing product, GMail.
Perhaps you loved the features of Google Mail but have your own domain. If you forwarded your email to GMail you could use their innovative webmail interface and large storage, but you couldn’t use GMail to send mail, or else you’d loose your domain name in the replies.
Now you can set the ‘From’ field as well. Thanks Google. I don’t see using this personally, as I have both dotMac and pretty good squirrelmail interfaces. But it’s nice to have options.
A little more on Google Talk, if you haven’t seen it. It utilizes the open-source Jabber protocol, and can be used with any client that supports it. I’ve used it in Apple’s iChat and it works well, and you can be online with your AIM network at the same time.
It also has voice chat. Hope to try that out soon. Rumor has it that it works through iChat as well.
Of course, all of this isn’t without a downside. Whereas I would probably always use this with iChat (if I have any use for another IM network) it is unfortunate that yet again Google has launched a piece of software that is only written for Windows. As with all their other software, they make vague claims of other OS compatibility (I for one have stopped holding my breath for Google Earth for Mac).
If Google’s pushing for the Internet OS, they’re doing an awfully good job of supporting their major competition.
Update: See this from Scott at Salon. He agrees with me on that last point.
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J.K. Rowling(.com) trips...
jake on 2005.07.22 at 09:52 pm
I’m still waiting for my brother to finish his copy of Half Blood Prince, he won’t let me near it till he’s done. In the meantime I’ll give some thoughts on Rowling’s “personal” web site.
Zeldman has a lovely post about the flash side of JK Rowling’s web site. They just put out a new accessibility add-on to help visitors get around the site. It’s really top notch and I’m a fan of the flash portion of the site.
The text-only version of the site is not quite so polished. In fact it’s pretty gruesome. It has a small amount of semantics, but no style. It needs a bit more structure. A while ago I started building a proof of concept but never got past the starting HTML. I planned on building a PHP app to grab the content and give it some more structure.
Of course I’m not interested in getting lawyers sicced on me right now so I’ll just leave it be. At least till I get some inspiration to tackle it again.
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Thursday Night at Berkman
brian on 2005.07.14 at 10:09 pm
What follows is a first draft of my impressions of going to the Berkman Center Thursday night for their Weblog meetup. This post is subject to change as I am still trying to get my head around some things I want to say… but as someone once said… artists ship…
This got very long, so I will invoke the rarely used, but exciting, Recently “Excerpt” mechanism…
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How to game Google.
jake on 2005.07.10 at 05:16 pm
It's not what you think...
Not a very busy day around here. I went and saw Fantastic Four, definitely a good superhero movie. Batman edges them out but mostly for it’s beautiful style.
Tom’s linkdump from today has a lot of good content. I’m going to try and separate my thoughts on each one.
The first is a page of pointers on how to get high Google rankings. SEO is a tricky thing. At least it seems like it is. In reality it’s pretty simple.
- Step One: Have quality content. – No matter how much you try and push your content to the top if it’s all fluff to game the system it won’t matter.
- Step Two: Don’t try to cheat. – It seems the biggest reason to game the system without content is to continually game the system in the future. Without content you’re in an arms race with Google. And they’ll win, by removing you and affiliated sites from their database.
- Step Three: Build with structure and clean code. – By using good code and building with structure you are giving Google more to work with. The more junk, the less useful it is for their Googlebot.
- Step Four: Don’t forget the technical. – While having good content and structuring it is the most important. It helps a great deal to also do the little technical parts too. Don’t use long urls with twenty variables. Keep it simple. Also using robots.txt can help too. For telling what Google to grab, and what not to. I also didn’t know that using “?id=“ in your urls actually tells Google to ignore your pages.
Finally I’ll leave you with a quote that hits close to home. I get regular calls at work asking if I’d like to pay someone to optimize our site.
Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
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Javascript: Insert text at the cursor point
jake on 2005.05.22 at 08:34 pm
One of the things that’s more difficult than it ought to be around here is adding images to posts. At least when it comes to remembering the steps.
What I worked up the other day is some javascript to make it a little simpler. First I added a little call to only show the alt and title fields when adding images. And I added a little link to put the correct image tag into the textarea.
The only problem was the simplest script can only throw the element in at the end of the text or replace the text completely. Through good old Google I found a script that Alex King discovered and posted to do exactly what I wanted. So now we have a script to insert the image element where your cursor is.
But I had already built a variable along with adding in
onfocus="lastFocus=this.id;"to all the textareas to set the variable. In this case the main article and the excerpt. So I modified the javascript to use the variable andgetElementByIdto paste the code into the correct textarea.It’s not a very complex little group of scripts but it adds in a nice little feature to our home grown system. And hopefully this can help someone else out there.
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Saving Blogging's Rep
brian on 2004.12.21 at 09:46 pm
I have a friend, let's call him "Dave." Today he says to me "I hate blogs, and bloggers. They're always bitching and they should shut up." I had two thoughts race instantly my mind. 1) Hey, I'm a blogger. 2) Has he seen any other blogs than the three links I sent him? Reading my mind, he then continues "Not that I ever read blogs, just those links you sent me, but they pretty much turned me off."
Well, I am responsible for the bad name blogs (I hate that word, from here out, "weblogs") have with him. I sent him three links to dopes who were complaining about our employer, who we happen to like.
Tonight, I aim to reverse his opinion by finding some excellent links to good bloggers who aren't a) big bitches b) not web developers. The latter is mainly because something like 75% of the weblogs I read are by web geeks. OK, well if they post general interest stuff, they can squeak in. This post is for to all my non-blog-initiated friends...
* Daring Fireball
- Mac Punditry done right, by John Gruber.* "The Unoffical Apple Weblog":http://apple.weblogsinc.com/
- A pretty generic Apple-centric blog, but entertaining* "Signals vs Noise":http://www.37signals.com/svn/
- Leaning toward web-geeks, but often just web and tech centric.* "AutoBlog":http://www.autoblog.com/
- Excellent for auto fans. Dave'll appreciate all the new Mustang coverage.* "Alternate.org":http://www.alternate.org/
- Very infrequent posts nowadays, but I think he'll appreciate the attitude.* "Acts of Volition":http://www.actsofvolition.com/
- A web geek that doesn't often get into web geekery, good music info, and open-source and Mozilla stuff. Also, Canadian.* "Matt Haughey":http://a.wholelottanothing.org/
- Matt made "MetaFilter(MeFi)":http://www.metafilter.com and I also read his "PVR weblog":http://www.pvrblog.com/pvr/, which is a great resource for TiVO fans.* "Lawrence Lessig":http://www.lessig.org/blog/
- If you're interested in what the government wants to do in regards to the law and the internet, this is _the guy_ to listen to.* "Engadget":http://www.engadget.com/
- One of two of the definitive geek-toy blogs.* "Gizmodo":http://www.gizmodo.com/
- Two of two of the definitive geek-toy blogs.Those, hopefully will get you started.
Any other thoughts for good "starter" blogs for getting people hooked on blogs? Slight geek tilt OK for our purposes...
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Can you find a job?
brian on 2004.10.12 at 12:13 am
• Go to amherst.edu
• Find the employment section (as in to get a job at the college, not like career help for students).
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If Google Makes a Browser...
brian on 2004.09.22 at 01:10 pm
If Google makes a browser, it should follow this formula: It should be based on FireFox. It should be available from Google via download, and all of Google's special features that would be in addition to the built in functionality of FireFox, should be simply extensions and theme sets pre-installed and activated. All of which should be user-disable-able.
Why? Easy. It takes the most advantage of excellent, existing, popularly-supported code. It makes friends in the OpenSource community because bug fixes would be available to the public. It means the least work for Google, and would build upon the tremendous momentum FireFox is enjoying right now, growing from a geek audience to the general public.
FireFox will benefit from the Google brand's validation of the browser, Google will benefit from having a lot of talented help to produce a product clearly superior to that of it's closest competitor, Internet Explorer. If Microsoft were to try to leverage its monopolistic position to nudge Google to the fringe on systems running the WinOS, by trying to steer people to IE and MSN Search, this would be another tool for Google to nudge back. Certainly, computer makers would be interested in providing an IE/MSN Search alternative, if that alternative came from the popular icon Google. Google on the desktop has a nice ring to it, if you're stuck in a Windows world. Speaking of a Windows world, if Google leveraged FireFox/Mozilla/Gecko, even ThunderBird, it would already have ports to every consumer platform. No extra cost!
If Google makes a browser, let's hope they don't call it GBrowser. Let's do hope they give us all sorts of cool ways of utilizing Google's technology to sort through the mess and gold mine that simultaneously is the Internet. These additional abilities would have a precursor competitor in A9. Competition is good, since it can breed creativity as necessity.
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My day with AudioBlogs
brian on 2004.09.17 at 06:39 pm
Last week, I listened to "Live from the Formosa Tea House" recorded by
threetwo of the guys from SilverOrange, and one from Reinvented (sorry, Pete!). I listened to to it while I had a day off and was sitting at the computer doing my normal blog readings, writing, etc. It was nice, since I was the only one home, it was as if I were out to lunch with my buddies. I don't tend to get lonely, but this could have been a nice accompaniment should I ever find my self so.Today, a second experiment in consuming AudioBlogs. I had to work late and would not be riding my bike to work as I usually do, since my pathways are not lit sufficiently to commute home at 10:30pm. Thusly, I knew I'd be on the T (Bostonian for public transit, light rail and bus) for at least an hour, so I had some quality iPod time. When I saw that a sequel to Live from Formosa had been posted, I downloaded that. I also noted that Dave Winer had something new called "Trade Secrets" and I decided to give that a whirl, too, although the audio file was unnecessarily enormous.
Formosa: 1:03:26, 11.8mb 25kbps (VBR) 11.025kHz Sample rate Mono.
Trade Secrets: 1:06:20, 60.8mb, 128kbps, 44.1kHz Sample Rate, Joint Stereo.To be honest, the only reason I downloaded Trade Secrets was because of the tagline: "This is a bad place for fans of George W Bush." More on "Secrets" later.
Off to the train, iPod loaded and on. Formosa first. Listening to three guys get lunch while standing on a crowded trolley is an unusual experience. As unusual as hearing someone talk about "FireFox 1.0 Preview Release" while I glide down the middle of Beacon Street.
It was quiet enjoyable. The guys improved their schtick a little from the previous week, in that they had some prior laid plans this time. This helped keep things a little more focused. They improved their seating arrangements as well, so that the ambient noise (esp the background music) were less intrusive. I don't even recall hearing them start to eat.
To be honest, I haven't listened to Acts of Volition Radio at all. Acts Radio is by Steve Garrity, one of the voices on Formosa. Perhaps when I start riding the train more in the winter I'll be looking for new content.
I missed the last few minutes of the show when I got to work. But oddly enough, work was short lived. I apparently was supposed to be off today, to make up for some extra work I had put in the previous week, but apparently everyone was in the loop except for me. So once I left work, I had another hour to kill, and another hour log audioblog/ radio program (Maybe they should be called RadioBlogs... oh wait... how about BlogRadio?) to listen to.
When the last ten minutes of Formosa wouldn't play, I skipped ahead to Winer/Curry's Trade Secrets, and was promptly caught off guard by some 90's hip hop intro music. I wasn't sure if I would enjoy the show, I don't always agree with Winer, and although I'm familiar Curry's name, that was about it. After the overly long intro music, they transitioned into some politics talk, and then to some technology talk. And of course, talk about the upcoming BloggerCon.
It was incredible the quality that Adam was able to record at utilizing iChat AV. In contrast, it was sad the low quality the Dave achieved on his PC. Was it simply the better hardware used by Adam, or was it that he was doing the recording locally and Dave was the remote end. Eitherway. the quality was passible. But "for Murphy's sake" if you're going to use MP3, you need to whip out the variable bit rate encoding. The file size is ridiculous.
But what I wanted to touch upon here was the audioblogging format, not so much a review of the content of these two shows. I was really against audioblogging when it first started trickling out. I want to read your comments, not to be inconvenienced by listening to your voice in your file format of choice. However, I never viewed in another light. Throwing it on an iPod allows me to take blogging somewhere I previously could not enjoy weblogs... in a train tunnel. When viewed in this light, audioblogging is downright brilliant. Plus there is a sheer cool factor that one minute you're having lunch in a maritime Canadian province, or your chatting with a friend in Seattle from your home in Belgium over the net, then a day later, some guy is listening to your voice and idea on his iPod, in a train tunnel a country or continent away. When viewed in this light, audioblogging is actually pretty cool. Just so long as I don't always have to listen to you... I can mostly read about you in NetNewsWire.
The other thing that's key is that if you have something really important to say, instead of just analyzing something already known about... what's important is that it's written somewhere, and not just in an audio file, because I don't think this will catch on quite as wide as written text. Audio and video will likely remain icing for the near future. But hopefully it'll be growing, improved icing.
Posted in: Web
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Web biz
brian on 2004.09.08 at 10:10 pm
When I was searching for a position in web development, I had two major interests. Interacting with clients so that they could get the most out of a project would be a natural fit for me. I have an unusually uncommon ability to discuss technical issues in meaningful ways with non-technical people (this is why and how I have my current job). In the new media area its so important for clients to have good communications with their developers, to get the most out of their investment they need to truly know what's going on, and communicate their needs and desires, and get the proper content out.
Point one is illustrated in this blog post by Drew McLellan. I believe that good client liasions are hard to come by, and why I thought I'd have an easy time getting a job in the field. In contrast, I had a terrible time even getting interviews, where I could then demonstrate that talent. Of course the state of the economy was pretty awful, too, so I'm sure that didn't help.
The second big interest I had can be generally called Information Architecture. Basically, I had the belief that there are plenty of pretty (from a design standpoint) websites built by the "best" studios in the world. But they were also plenty ugly when it came to actually use by humans.
It is my theory that better forethought and planning (along with usage of web standards, so everyone can play) would make pretty sites usable. Organizing information is another strength of mine, but I struggled to show that in my portfolio. I have a keen knowledge of what makes a site successful in comparison to other sites that are unusable, but couldn't figure how to demonstrate that knowledge in a portfolio.
Michael has a great blog post on how to set yourself up to apply for these IA-types of positions. Info I could have used two years ago.
Problem with the post is the whole experience to get a job to get experience to get a job to get experience... the vicious circle is so difficult to penetrate. That's where networking and luck come into play.
There are still so many shops making pretty sites for big dollars, which ignore standards, IA, usability... but these shops have connections and relationships with clients... and the clients don't know any better, so the entrenched continue to get paid while the clients keep getting sub optimal work, and the real losers are the public who are trying to spend money with the aforementioned clients.
It goes to show, the more technology advances the more things stay the same... companies continue to invest in poorly deployed technology, because they think technical innovation can exist in a vacuum from basic communications principals.
What's the connection between my two points here? Easy. An IA who plans the basis of site who has great client communications can better lay the groundwork for a successful site.
But as long as the job application loop stays closed, the more the workers in the pool stay the same...
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Meet the Bloggers
brian on 2004.09.08 at 08:24 am
It's been "Meet The Bloggers" week for yours truly.
Last Thursday I had the pleasure of meeting Dan Cederholm of SimpleBits at a Web Standards Meetup, along with a few other local web geeks. Good time, look forward to doing it again.
Yesterday, none other than noted author and bOINGbOING's own Cory Doctrow saddled up to the bar at work.
If you're a blogger, you should swing by and shake my hand. It's only right. Of course recently, it's been so phenomenally busy that you may have to wait an hour to do so.
Posted in: Web
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New Mozilla.org
brian on 2004.08.31 at 08:30 pm
Congrats on the new website, Mozilla. They got awesome talent to build it, and it has come.
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Junk Mail attack!!
brian on 2004.08.03 at 06:53 am
I awoke this morning to 1084 Junk emails. Usually, after sleeping for 7-8 hours, I would get 40-60. Wow. Luckily, Apple Mail's junk filter caught every single one, without a false positive (I scanned through the folder). Normally, I'd bounce all of that straight back to sender, but I didn't want my ISP to mistakenly tag me as a spammer for trying to return almost 1100 junk mails at once. What could of happened to nail me this bad? Well, I tried out Acquisition overnight, first time I've ever done that (and not to steal music, mind you). Is Acquisition spyware? Could it have gotten my email address? My email app has four active addresses, but most if not all the junk was addressed to only one.
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BugMeNot
brian on 2004.07.27 at 06:39 pm
A blessing. Bug Me Not. Allows you go to sites that are registration-only access, most notably the New York Times.
Don't miss the bookmarklet on the front page which you can have in your bookmarks bar and fire up when you hit a registration site. The bookmarklet will query the BugMeNot database for the site you're at, and show you a user name in a pop up window for instant access. Beautiful. Also, Mozilla/FireFox extensions for similar usage.
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New iPod Crashes Websites...
brian on 2004.07.18 at 11:05 am
It seems Windows Server is no match for the new 4th Gen. iPod. Maybe you can get through by the time you click this link...MSNBC's Newsweek Section. No wonder Steve is smiling on the cover... that and he gets all the best toys first.Posted in: Web
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Ben and Mena Interview, MT pricing commentary
brian on 2004.05.18 at 12:54 am
I downloaded and enjoyed this audio interview that was conducted with Ben and Mena Trott of Six Apart. It accompanied me to work on the train via the blessed iPod. The interview was recorded just prior to their Moveable Type 3.0 licensing announcement that stirred up such a storm and has ruled the web development world over the last week or so.
For the record, these guys deserve to make a buck after giving away their excellent product for like 3 years. Forget the rest, and pay up. Even if you qualify to use it for free, pay up, in my opinion. Could their commercial pricing schemes use a little reconsideration? Yeah, I would say so. But are there plenty of alternatives on the market, many excellent and free? Yes. Will the market eventually determine the legitimacy of the price? In this market, free from unusual instances that exist in, say, the desktop operating systems market, I would say the market will lead to their adjustment, but as a nod to Six Apart's unique personality as a progressive company, one day after their price announcements, they published clarifications, realignments, etc. when the announcement met with questions. That shows that they really care about the community that's grown up around their software. I think the people crying that the Trotts are bowing to the commands of their investors who are handing down this pricing structure simply don't understand what these two are about. If you don't like it, don't upgrade, or move on. It's simple.
By the way, thanks to Jake for not making me pay for using this weblog. If Jake hadn't hand-forged this place, I'd likely be on TypePad or something. Actually, I'd probably be hand coding in the style of Zeldman. You should be as lucky as I to have a talented coder whom you can persuade to build you software under the guise that when it was done, he might enjoy using it, too.
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People's Court Meets Web Design
brian on 2004.01.19 at 10:35 pm
It seems that a friend of mine may be making an appearance on The People's Court. (I refuse to link to the website, which just redirects to a contact form. Pathetic for a TV show that has been on since 1981, and developed a genre of show!)
She has a web client who has not paid for her site. So, she has filed a grievance in small claims court to get her client to pay up.
And yesterday, she received a letter in the mail... on "The People's Court" letterhead. That invited her to appear on the show to settle her case with her client. She suspects that perhaps the client, who's in the media industry in New York City, maybe knew the producers. Anyhow, she is considering the appearance. It pays, win or lose. Will it be good exposure? Does she want that kind of exposure? What kind of potential client would be watching The People's Court?
Posted in: Web
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Add Your Own
brian on 2003.12.01 at 04:20 pm
What happens when the Zagat Guide meets Craigslist?
A: BYO restaurant reviews at AddYourOwn. Boston section is quite new, and hopefully linking it up will lead to some reviews. Help it out!
Posted in: Web
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Cool Tools: site find of the day
brian on 2003.12.01 at 12:48 pm
Cool Tools by Kevin Kelly is a site not unlike Gizmodo: a blog-esque site detailing cool gadgets. There's one important difference. When you write in, the gadget must be one you've used extensively and evangelize strongly. That's the point: good stuff, well liked, that stands up. Also, the gadgets don't have to be electronic.
Bonus points for nice clean site layout (powered by MT) and the BIG bonus: RSS feeds!
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Web Standards on NPR
brian on 2003.08.20 at 11:27 pm
Paul Ford had a commentary on NPR's All Things Considered August 7th regarding the messed up language of the web and how it really should follow web standards. Wonder how many people driving their cars at that time fell instantly asleep? (It made sense to me, at least, nor did I doze off...)
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Blogs at Harvard
brian on 2003.08.10 at 02:53 pm
Since I'm in Boston, should I make some attempt to attend BloggerCon?
I've long been muling my Thurday night activities, and whether they should include a trip to the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, at Harvard Law School. The Berkman hosts Thursday night sessions on weblogs with blogging-famous name/ fellow Dave Winer.
Perhaps if Jake would take a Friday off, we could check it out.
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Google Mozilla
brian on 2003.07.17 at 09:27 pm
An excellent idea from Anil Dash: Google should become Mozilla's new philanthropic crutch. In return for some excellent browsing code that would benefit the industry.
"...a free, open-source browser with built-in hooks to Google services and APIs would be good enough to push increased usage of Google's revenue-generating services and advertising."
Will it happen? Probably not. Would Google want to piss off Microsoft? Eh. But would I have guessed they would have bought Pyra/Blogger? Nope.
Posted in: Web
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Type Pad compliant!
brian on 2003.06.09 at 10:13 am
Yes, today in an article on A List Apart (for people who make websites) Six Apart, the makers of the smash hit Moveable Type weblog/website software, have announced that their new product, TypePad, will be focused on adhering to W3C Web Standards. This is great news, seeing that the product, which is essentially a hosted Moveable Type, is targeted to folk who don't have any knowledge of making websites, or even know what standards are. It just does all the heavy lifting for them. Bless Six Apart.
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