Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.
Blogchalking, which seemed to disappear at some point after I originally posted about it, has reappeared, so I’ve recreated my BC code — and here it is!
This is my blogchalk: United States, Washington, Seattle, English, Michael, Male, 26-30, Macintosh computers, movies, music, and other random bits.
A proposal for the ‘net community at large, and for Microsoft, in an effort to make complaints about/criticisms of Microsoft and its software easier to collect and analyze, with the intent of letting any concerned party at Microsoft sift through them at will for subjects relevant to their area of expertise.
Requirements: a weblog with an active RSS feed.
Methodology: The methodology from the user end is simple: include the acronym ‘YAAMR’ (for Yet Another Anti-Microsoft Rant) in the relevant weblog post; preferably in the title, though including it in the body should work also.
On Microsoft’s end, the process is also simple: create a Feedster search for ‘YAMMR’. Then, as Feedster allows one to subscribe to an RSS feed of a specific search, the MS employee could then subscribe to that RSS feed in their newsreader of choice.
End result: a real-time, constantly updated feed of issues that MS would do well to pay attention to, in order to improve relations with their current user base.
It goes without saying that this same method could be used for other companies or organizations also, requiring only the selection of a convenient acronym or set of keywords that could be used to trigger Feedster’s search results.
I don’t really expect this to get picked up, or put into practice. But I like the idea. Maybe it’d be more useable for smaller companies? In any case, there’s potential here, I think…
More random ideas connected with this: perhaps a Movable-Type powered site, with different categories for different companies or organizations (or one site for a specific company, with categories for the various software packages). These categories would be set up as TrackBack ping receivers for rant posts.
For instance, a hypothetical ‘www.microsoftrants.com’ could have categories for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc., then posts about issues with the software could ping the corresponding category. MS employees in the various software groups could subscribe to RSS feeds for the categories, enabling them to keep an ‘ear to the ground’ of what the ‘common user’ faces when using their software.
Hrm. Ideas? Questions? Comments? Words of wisdom?
I think I’ll toss this one out to the LazyWeb community. It’s not really a ‘problem to be solved’, as such, except that I don’t really have the resources (budget) to set this up on my own, and I don’t even know that the idea would catch on (not to mention that as I’m not an ‘A-list’ blogger [or even B- or C-list…probably somewhere around Q-list, I think…], there’s no gaurantee anyone would ever see this proposal otherwise). Better to toss it out to people more integrated with the various tech communities to see if any of them want to pick it up and play with it.
Robert Scoble pointed to Scott Johnson’s YAAMR post. Two hours after Scott made his post, he had an offer in his comments from a tester at Microsoft to pass on information about his crash to the appropriate team at Microsoft.
First thought: that’s cool.
Second thought: too bad things like this aren’t likely to happen for the rest of the poor shmoes battling Windows (like, oh, say…[ahem]…me, for instance). Offering high-profile bloggers help after they’re linked to by another high-profile blogger is certainly a nice thing to do, and nothing in itself to sneeze at, but all of Scott’s complaints with Windows are perfectly valid, and are the kinds of frustrations that many people have to deal with on a regular basis.
The fundamental problem itself is still unsolved — Windows is often a royal pain in the ass to deal with. Most of us have to deal with it on our own, though, and common experiences like Scott’s are going to keep happening, and Microsoft is going to continue to be perceived by many people as a lumbering, unstoppable behemoth of a company that can’t actually write decent software, but doesn’t seem to care because they’ve got such a lockhold on the industry.
Somehow, I just don’t see that happening anytime soon.
I just implemented a very nice little PHP script for my website that ties into my site search function — the end result being that my site no longer has a “404 File Not Found” error page!
In brief: if a visitor puts in a URL address that doesn’t exist, it gets shunted to my search script. If the script returns multiple hits, that listing is displayed, but if the script only returns one hit, the visitor is automatically forwarded to that page. Very slick.
As a bonus, it provides a convenient shortcut to searching my site — just put in whatever search terms you want after “http://www.djwudi.com/” and see what you get!
(script via Scriptygoddess)
Annoyed by Safari constantly giving up on pages that won’t completely load in less than a minute? SafariNoTimeout to the rescue. Now that I’ve posted this, maybe I’ll remember to download it when I get home…
(via a comment to the Safari Beta 2 announcement)
I’ve been told I need to stop posting so much information on my site, as the subsequent preponderance of tabs was threatening to take over one of my reader’s windows.
Not wanting to cause any undue stress to any of my five loyal readers, I should probably resolve that henceforth, I shall no longer blog about anything other than my pets, what I ate for lunch each day, and the annoying things that my co-workers did today.
Unfortunately, I don’t have pets, I tend to forget to eat lunch on a fairly regular basis, and now that I’ve moved to a new position at work, I’m not dealing with annoying co-workers on a regular basis.
So I’m afraid you’ll all just have to put up with the usual blather.
My humble apologies.
;)
I’ve tried to explain TrackBack in the past when asked, though I’ve never been too sure how well I did. Handily enough, I don’t have to try anymore, as Ben and Mena Trott — the creators of MovableType — have written A Beginner’s Guide to TrackBack. Good stuff!
It looks like Adam Osborne, creator of the Osborne 1 portable computer, has died. Probably.
While everyone has to go at some point, it’s a bit of a bummer — a bit of computer history fading away. My family’s first computers were Osborne 1’s, which I’ve reminisced about in the past. Almost laughable by today’s standards, they were top of the line in the 80’s.
(via Doc Searls and /.)
In an effort to speed up the response time of my site when posting new articles, or when visitors leave comments, I’m experimenting with simplifying this page a bit. I think it’s working — things seem a teense snappier so far — but I’m still banging away at it.
Unfortunately, this means I’ve deleted the ‘Recently seen’ and ‘Recently read’ sections of my sidebar. Neither had been updated lately, so it may not be too big of a loss, but I’d still like to find a way to get them integrated back in later on if I can do so without impacting the server as much.
Geeky bits (and a question of written English usage) follow, if you’re interested.
I used to have the ‘Recent reads’ section (which listed books I was reading, along with reviews when I bothered) as a seperate blog, which I included in this page as an SSI.
(Quick unrelated question — when including acronyms in text, does one decide on using ‘a’ or ‘an’ before the acronym by the sound of the acronym, or by the sound of the meaning? Since ‘SSI’ is pronounced ‘ess ess aye’, that would call for using ‘an’, but when the meaning starts with the sibilant (Server), that would call for using ‘a’. Anyone know? I guessed and used ‘an’ on the assumption that most people would read the acronym rather than parsing the full meaning as they read, but I’m not sure if that’s correct or not. Anyway….)
The last time I redesigned The Long Letter, I incorporated the ‘Recently read’ blog into The Long Letter as a category, and added the ‘Recently seen’ category for my movie reviews. Then, in order to only display them in the sidebar and not in the main content area, I used a lot of ‘OR’ statements in my main content <MTEntries> tag, so it looked like <MTEntries category=“Books OR CSS OR DJing OR HTML OR Humor OR Internet OR Life OR Links OR Macintosh OR MovableType OR Movies OR Music OR PHP OR Politics OR Quotes OR Trek OR Website”>. The sidebar <MTEntries> tags were <MTEntries category=“BookReviews”> and <MTEntries category=“MovieReviews”>.
I’m thinking that this may have contributed to how long it took to rebuild when making changes, though. Anytime MT had to rebuild the front page — which it did both when adding new posts (obviously) and when a new comment was posted (in order to display the ‘Last 10 comments’ section of the sidebar) — it had to sort through and filter which posts were displayed according to what category they were assigned to.
So, for the moment, I’ve deleted the ‘Recently read’ and ‘Recently seen’ sidebar bits, and set the primary content area to a very simple <MTEntries>. Theoretically (in my brain, at least), this should speed things up.
As a last resort, I could take the ‘Last 10 comments’ section off, but I’d really hate to do that. It’s a really handy way for me to keep an eye on feedback on my posts, and a nice visual indicator that people are actually stopping by from time to time! So I’m hoping I don’t reach a point where I feel I have to lose that. Hopefully, simplifying the main content display will be enough to speed things up for now.
A ton of useful (and fun, in an extremely geeky sort of way) bookmarklets for digging into the code of a website to figure out just how it all works: Accessibility-checking favelets. I’ve snagged the first two listed already (‘Show and label divs with ids’ and ‘Show and label divs with classes’), and will be checking out more later on.
Geek toys!
(Via Zeldman)