Hello. I specialize in graphic design and development for web applications.
(The “either” is a reference to my last post about CAPTCHAs.)
This is more of a personal preference. I’m not a huge fan of WYSIWYG (”what you see is what you get”) editors. Personally, the control afforded by these things is horrible, and the code they produce is even worse. Don’t get my wrong - Microsoft has made great advances in Expression Web from Frontpage.
What benefit do they really have, though? They don’t save me any time, I’ve never seen one which solved the weird things about HTML and CSS for you, and they often have odd quarks of their own. Also, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a full graphical website editor that didn’t have browser compatibility issues.
I feel the same way about Photoshop mockups, for much the same reasons as 37signals. Maybe I’m just not a real graphical person, but I’d rather be writing code than designing graphically and then trying to convert to valid, working code.
Or maybe the reason I’m opposed to both CAPTCHAs and WYSIWYG editors is that deep, deep down I’m morally opposed to ridiculously long acronyms. Though, why, then, would I use DNMMFAWFIAAEWSSA almost daily?
I’m a web developer. The site tagline probably makes that clear. So, I’ve come across numerous situations where spam is a problem. Yet I refuse to use CAPTCHAs to prevent spam. Even as the owner of a site with absolutely no spam filtering at all, I’d sooner write a 10,000 line spam filter than a 100 line CAPTCHA.
Why? Because spam should not be the user’s problem. By using a CAPTCHA you are doing just that, making a spam problem on your site into something which is somehow the user’s fault. That has never seemed right to me. A better solution is just a spam filter. Read more »
I’ve been adding a lot of things to my RSS Feed Reader recently, and I noticed what a collection of web comics I’m getting there. Read more »
The more observant of you will have noticed that I haven’t logged into StumbleUpon since May of 2008. Most of my friends already know the story of why I don’t use it anymore, but I figured I’d finally write it down. Read more »
I just started work on a Wordpress plugin I’ve been wanting to create for a while. Essentially, it provides a large amount of tools for Digg. You know, “digg this” buttons and the likes. Anyways, where this plugin will really excel is the caching function.
Most plugins I’ve found will cache pages to your local server when you tell them to. How useful! You can somewhat mitigate the Digg effect on your CPU provided you are monitoring these sites to see if you hit the homepage. (The statement of usefulness was sarcasm, by the way.) This plugin will take a more practical, pro-active approach. When you get more than a few hits from Digg within five minutes, the plugin will query Digg’s API to see if your site hit the homepage. This is already much more useful than the other plugins.
To make it more useful, the plugin will, upon detecting that your site is on the homepage, send a cached version of your site to Amazon S3 and redirect people thereto.
So far a lot of it is working. On the detection side, at least. I’ve got to start on the S3 side, which brings up some interesting problems: the issue of how to redirect people with the lowest CPU load, while still maintaining the Wordpress permalink structure, and the issue of caching CSS and image files. If anyone has ideas on those two, leave a note in the comments. Otherwise this plugin should be out sometime in the next month or so.
Dear Digg users,
Please stop voting up comments which took less than thirty seconds to write. Looking at stories on the homepage, comments which say things like “something awful ftmfw” and “too true.” have more votes than comments which say intelligent things, such as:
The “Official Nintendo Seal of Quality” has become the “Official Nintendo Seal” since 2003 (right after the Gamecube and before the Nintendo DS and Wii era).
Notice the difference between those? The obvious is that one of them actually had to be put in a blockquote. If you actually read the bad comments and the good one, too, you’d notice that the good comment actually conveyed information, or some form of thinking at the least. The other ones just stated the author’s agreement or disagreement with the article. Heck, even most Twitter users can convey more rational thought in 140 characters than you Digg users can given unlimited space.
So, in conclusion, stop being stupid.
Thanks,
The intelligent social media websites
So, recently Linus Torvalds (the “benevolent dictator” of Linux) started blogging, using the ever-popular Blogspot website. Blogger is an interesting platform to me. Initially, their engine generated only static HTML, so whenever a post was changed or a comment added, the blog would have to undergo a “publishing” process where the HTML pages were generated. A little while ago, Blogger added dynamic functionality; blogs hosted on the Blogger servers could connect to a database to get information, thus bypassing the publishing delay. Read more »
I know plenty of people who hate Wordpress. I’m not sure why, it’s very effective at what it does: allow you to write a blog. Wordpress was never developed to do complicated things like Drupal or Mambo. I’d even venture as far as to say Wordpress isn’t even a CMS. (It has pages, but they’re really not much more than posts without a date.) Read more »
Dear internet:
Please stop using the acronym “lol” when you’re not actually laughing. Seriously, nine of ten times I see the phrase lol used, there’s no way the person would have actually laughed out loud. I present you with a list of phrases which can be used instead, in ascending order from not that funny to very funny.
In conclusion, don’t say “lol” if you don’t really laugh out loud. Also, stop adding extra letters to the end of words likeeeee thissssss. It’s really annoying.
My high school has decided, for whatever reason, to use Zoomerang to conduct student elections. To prevent multiple votes, Zoomerang allows the creator of what will from now on be referred to as a survey, though it’s more of a voting thing, to send a one-time link to a list of people.
These one-time links, as you can probably guess, allow a user to take the survey only once. However, I have always been suspicious of such tactics, and so a while ago I decided to take a look. (Disclosure: I’m working on a free, open-source voting system. I promise not to let that skew my results.) Read more »
All lolcats aside, what do you think of the new theme? You can obviously leave a comment here, or just choose your opinion on the poll below:
Thought splogs were run by the same underground groups who send out 90% of your email spam? Meet fav.or.it, a company who seems to have adapted it as their business model. Read more »
There’s a big Wordpress vulnerability going around (see http://clasione.blogspot.com/2008/06/wordpress-anyresultsnet-hack-search.html for details). Be sure to check your wp-blog-header.php for:
Read more »
Hey, everyone. I was just reading a bunch of successful blogs today, and noticed almost every one has run a contest at some time. I would like this blog to be very successful, as well, and it seems I can’t do that without running a contest, if these blogs are anything to go by.
So, here’s my contest. It’s actually pretty cheap, but whatever.
Read more »
A lot of people I know like the game TrackMania. I’ve hosted TrackMania fan sites before. Yet before last week I had yet to actually play the game. However, I was a little bored and looking for things to write about here, so I decided to get the demo. Here’s my top reasons you should buy something other than TrackMania:
Read more »
XSS (Cross Site Scripting) is one of the main problems with Javascript. I was just reading an article on Javascript security, when an idea came to me. We could solve all these problems by allowing servers to send an Allow-content header (or something like that).
Read more »
Those who use Firefox (I hope a large number of readers, though Opera and Safari are good, as well) are undoubtfully aware of the amazing addon that is Download Status Bar. Let’s face it, the download manager built in to Firefox is annoying and clunky. But in a recent conversation with a friend of mine an interesting question was brought up: Should Download Status Bar come preinstalled on Firefox?
Is it wrong for Mozilla to preinstall addons? Or is the usefulness of certain addons worth giving up the “no pre-installed software” idea? (My opinion is “yes”.) Chime in below
Should download statusbar be in the release of Firefox by default?
Total Voters: 82
(I can only imagine the feedback I’d get if this were about Adblock!)
I’ve created a nice little PHP script to make addons compatible with Firefox 3.0b5 (or any other version of Firefox later than the addon was developed for). Actually, it doesn’t exactly make it compatible, it just changes the max-version attribute to 9.0, so that it will install anywhere. 90% of the addons still work perfectly, AdBlock, Download Statusbar, and Firebug to name a few. To install an addon which is usually incompatible, just copy the URL (this is only tested on addons.mozilla.org pages, but should work on other pages) and paste it into the box below.
This works on the fact that a Firefox extension (.xpi) is really a Zip file. Inside is an “install.rdf” file which controls installation. The script extracts this file, modifies the max-version, and repackages it.
I’ve just finished my first Spam Karma plugin. It integrates CAPTCHAs from reCAPTCHA into the system, authors who submit comments within a certain error margin are given the opportunity to solve a CAPTCHA from reCAPTCHA, in much the same way as the built-in CAPTCHA module. (Indeed, some of my code is based on that module.)
Read more »
The first reason this page will not be popular on StumbleUpon is that it’s a post about StumbleUpon. Stumblers (myself included) tend to “thumb-down” posts that talk about StumbleUpon. Quite often I don’t even read the page! If the page says “StumbleUpon” in it, it’s usually another generic “Why StumbleUpon is awesome for my site though I don’t know why you’d care” post.
StumbleUpon is a great service, which is why it makes me sad to write this post. If you’ve been around StumbleUpon even a bit, you’ve probably seen a website which is popular, but doesn’t seem interesting. Yet it receives many great comments.
“Huge base with excellent articles”
“recommended to all”
“WOW! Awesome site. You can find anything there-” (This one shows up seven times in the comments for one page.)
“That is an interesting looking radiator.” (Referring to a plain-white radiator.)
These are all examples of StumbleUpon “exchanges” - the trading of one “thumbs-up” and a review on your page for a “thumbs-up” and review on someone else’s page. Unsurprisingly, these pages are typically packed with advertisements, and short on content. A typical Stumble Exchange can be seen here.
This page crashes Internet Explorer. How? It seems just about every version of Internet Explorer has some bug that can be exploited.
To crash Internet Explorer 7, some CSS (valid, even!) is applied to all links, setting them to relative positioning. The next line sets both spans and links to absolute positioning. This, for some reason, causes IE to choke on links, where the correct action would be simply to set links to absolute positioning.
To crash IE 6 we use the code onLoad=”window()”. This isn’t really a valid action to call, but it shouldn’t really kill the browser. Yet it does.
To crash IE 5, we create an invalid form field with <input type crash>. Internet Explorer dies when it reads this. Internet Explorer is, of course, closed source so no one can be sure why.
Perhaps some of you are visiting with the Internet Explorer 8 Beta. I’m not sure if any of this code crashes it, if not I’ll add some upon the public release of the browser.
Picture the following scenario: you run a blog that posts pictures of cats. These pictures seem to get stolen a lot. You’re okay with this, because your content is licensed under a Creative Commons-style license. But nobody is respecting your copyright! In fact they’re linking to images directly from your server!
In fact this scenario is not all that uncommon. Thousands (if not millions) of blog owners are unaware of other websites hot linking to their images without so much as attribution! This tutorial will show you how to turn the websites of those copyright-discarding, hotlinking fiends into free advertising. More after the jump.
<Insert generic “Sorry for not posting…” post here> (That should be said in the voice of GLaDOS from Portal, preferably.) Maybe I’ll put some new stuff up. I’m kind of busy.
Some news for you:
Eh, that was a post, wasn’t it. I mean I’m in no danger of getting Dugg or Slashdotted for it, but it’s a bit interesting. I promise more interesting content later.
No, it’s not the competitor to IHOP. GHOP is short for Google Highly Open Participation, and it’s a new contest from Google specifically for pre-college students.
If you’re already familiar with Google’s SoC (Summer of Code) program, then this won’t seem very surprising to you. Google is now offering money to high school students who will volunteer their time to open source projects. Each project defines their own Tasks - which are almost exactly what you’d expect them to be, short tasks which benefit the project - and for completing any one task you get a Google T-Shirt + Certificate. But there’s so much more. For every three tasks completed Google will pay $100 (there is a limit of $500, though).
So far not much of a contest, per say. But at the end of the contest (late January) each project gets to pick one individual who they feel contributed the most to the project. That student will be flown to the Googleplex for four days to attend an awards ceremony (I’d assume meet some of the Google team as well).
Interested? The contest site is here. Be sure to read the FAQs; there’s not a Sign Up link or anything, the entry process is a bit abstract.
Everyone who has ever written CSS is familiar with curly brackets and parentheses. Yet surprisingly enough very few even know of a hidden power of CSS, square brackets! Learn more about how to harness this power of PHP and how Microsoft is screwing it up after the jump. Read more »
Seems that no designer’s portfolio site is complete without a blog. So here’s mine. I suppose the design of it was the easy part - now I need to figure out what to write. Hmm…