ecto 2

by

So ecto 2 is updated, and one of the nifty new features is Amazon integration. It’s pretty slick, with a handy little search window within ecto to find items, one-button posting once you’ve chosen what you want, and a few options for how you want the finished link to appear.

I do have one concern about the link format, though.

I’ve been very careful to make sure that all my Amazon URLs are formatted a specific way, after reading this from kottke early last year:

I’ve noticed lately that when I browse items at Amazon, the URLs now take one of two forms:

http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684868768/ http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0684868768/

The former URL style has been around for some time, but the latter is relatively new. If you’re an Amazon Associate, the proper way of linking to an individual item (per their linking guide) is to append your Associate code (mine is “0sil8”) to the first URL style, like so:

http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684868768/0sil8

But if you run across an item at Amazon with the second type of URL, this won’t work:

http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0684868768/0sil8

If you’ve linked to items using that style of URL (something I’ve seen on several sites), check your reports at Amazon…you’ll find that you’re not getting any Associates clickthroughs or credit for those purchases.

Obviously, since I would like to get credit for any clickthroughs I might receive (rare though they may be), I’ve been very careful to make sure to use the ‘ASIN’ format of link, and not the ‘tg/detail/-‘ format.

While experimenting with ecto’s new Amazon integration, I put together a quick link to Neal Stephenson’s ‘Quicksilver’, and checked the URL — and, unfortunately, it came up with the ‘tg/detail/-‘ format (though I’ve fixed it in that link). After poking around in ecto’s settings for the Amazon integration, it doesn’t appear that there is any end-user control over the links (that is, the URL format, not the format of the link itself) other than manually fixing them after they’re inserted. While this really isn’t a major dealbreaker — it’s essentially what I’ve been doing for a while anyway, and the ecto integration does make it much easier to find items — it does leave me with a few questions…

  1. Most importantly, does this still matter? Or does Amazon now give credit correctly for both styles of links? On the assumption that it does still matter…
  2. When constructing the link, does ecto receive the entire URL string from Amazon, or just the ASIN?
  3. If ecto only receives (or needs) the ASIN, can the URL string be changed to the ‘ASIN’ style of link in the next update to ecto?
  4. If ecto receives the entire string…
    1. …is the returned string always ‘tg/details/-‘ format, or does it switch between that and ‘ASIN’ format?
    2. If it’s always ‘tg/details/-‘ format, can that be automatically adjusted within ecto to ‘ASIN’ format?
    3. If it switches, can ecto watch for that string and adjust it when necessary?
  5. And lastly, according to the tail end of Jason’s post, adding ‘ref=nosim/’ before the Associate ID forces Amazon to skip the “You may also be interested in…” page and send you straight to the actual product page. Can an option be added to ecto to add the ‘ref=nosim/’ string in the right place for people who might worry/care about such a thing?

If not…well, I’ll live. I can hope, though! :)

iTunes “Leæther Strip Part II” by Leæther Strip from the album Penetrate the Satanic Citizen (1992, 6:00).

Raise the roof!

by

Random silliness over IM tonight…

walkingoctopus: Shit, I’m such a technowhore.

Me: it’s a good thing in my world

walkingoctopus: Cam, digicam, mic, five consoles and a handheld…

Me: yikes
Me: hmm

walkingoctopus: And none of my consoles are online.
walkingoctopus: Haha.

Me: 3 ‘puters, webcam, digital camera, scanner, iPod

walkingoctopus: Hmm.
walkingoctopus: One computer.
walkingoctopus: /me looks around her room.
walkingoctopus: i’ll HAVE a sewing machine, that’s sort of electroncsy.

Me: “old skool” electronic…sorta

walkingoctopus: o/
walkingoctopus: I’m so Amish.

Me: ain’t no party like an Amish party ’cause an Amish party don’t stop
Me: and when they raise the roof, they really raise the roof
Me: barn roof, even

iTunes “All the Way Down” by Voltaire from the album Devil’s Bris, The (1998, 3:45).

E=1/2CV^2 (Hanscom’s Law)

by

While wandering through /., I stumbled upon this comment, which contained the equation E=1/2CV\^2.

Not having a background in electrical components (the context of this equation), my brain immediately translated ‘CV’ as ‘Curriculum Vitae’.

Logically, it followed that ‘E’ was something related to employment…’Employability’ works.

The end result was that I ended up reading the equation as “Employability = 1/2(Curriculum Vitae)\^2” — or, in layman’s terms, any given job will only require half of what you know, but will require proportionately more experience than you have.

Sounds about right to me. I’ll call it “Hanscom’s Law”. ;)

100 percent

by

Abstinence is the only 100% sure method of avoiding STDs and unwanted pregnancy.

Not eating is the only 100% sure method of avoiding food poisoning.

Never leaving a windowless room is the only 100% sure method of avoiding sunburn.

Not walking is the only 100% sure method of avoiding stubbed toes.

Not driving, riding in cars, or coming too close to any public or private roadway is the only 100% sure method of not being injured or killed in an auto accident.

Never crossing over or under a bridge is the only 100% sure method of avoiding dying in a sudden freak bridge collapse.

Never picking up a fork is the only 100% sure method of not accidentally stabbing yourself with the tines.

Never coming into contact with anything wooden is the only 100% sure method of not getting a splinter.

Never handling anything paper is the only 100% sure way of preventing paper cuts.

Never using plastic bags is the only 100% sure way of avoiding wrapping the plastic bag around your head and suffocating.

Abstinence courses wildly off base

by

Our tax dollars at work: the abstinence programs that Bush is so heavily in favor of (as opposed to real sex education) are distributing wildly inaccurate information to teens:

Many American youngsters participating in federally funded abstinence-only programs have been taught over the past three years that abortion can lead to sterility and suicide, that half the gay male teenagers in the United States have tested positive for the AIDS virus, and that touching a person’s genitals “can result in pregnancy,” a congressional staff analysis has found.

Those and other assertions are examples of the “false, misleading, or distorted information” in the programs’ teaching materials, said the analysis, released yesterday, which reviewed the curricula of more than a dozen projects aimed at preventing teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease.

In providing nearly $170 million next year to fund groups that teach abstinence only, the Bush administration, with backing from the Republican Congress, is investing heavily in a just-say-no strategy for teenagers and sex. But youngsters taking the courses frequently receive medically inaccurate or misleading information, often in direct contradiction to the findings of government scientists, said the report, by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), a critic of the administration who has long argued for comprehensive sex education.

Several million children ages 9 to 18 have participated in the more than 100 federal abstinence programs since the efforts began in 1999. Waxman’s staff reviewed the 13 most commonly used curricula — those used by at least five programs apiece.

The report concluded that two of the curricula were accurate but the 11 others, used by 69 organizations in 25 states, contain unproved claims, subjective conclusions or outright falsehoods regarding reproductive health, gender traits and when life begins. In some cases, Waxman said in an interview, the factual issues were limited to occasional misinterpretations of publicly available data; in others, the materials pervasively presented subjective opinions as scientific fact.

Among the misconceptions cited by Waxman’s investigators:

  • A 43-day-old fetus is a “thinking person.”
  • HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, can be spread via sweat and tears.
  • Condoms fail to prevent HIV transmission as often as 31 percent of the time in heterosexual intercourse.

One curriculum, called “Me, My World, My Future,” teaches that women who have an abortion “are more prone to suicide” and that as many as 10 percent of them become sterile. This contradicts the 2001 edition of a standard obstetrics textbook that says fertility is not affected by elective abortion, the Waxman report said.

“I have no objection talking about abstinence as a surefire way to prevent unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases,” Waxman said. “I don’t think we ought to lie to our children about science. Something is seriously wrong when federal tax dollars are being used to mislead kids about basic health facts.”

Bad enough that Bush is pushing teaching abstinence instead of safe sex, rather than teaching both concurrently (doubly stupid considering “Nonpartisan researchers have been unable to document measurable benefits of the abstinence-only model.”), but when the information in the abstinence courses is this ridiculous — really, it borders on nothing more than right-wing propaganda — there is no way that the government should be funding these programs!

Inaccurate information like this helps nobody, least of all the kids in the classes.

Ugh. Makes me see red.

(via William Gibson)

MSN Spaces reactions

by

Robert Scoble is collecting reactions to MSN Spaces, including mine:

Michael Hanscom: “Power users and web standards geeks (who are probably not the target market anyway) will definitely want to look somewhere else.” (Scoble’s note to Michael: hey, did you see the Macintosh in the video?)

I actually haven’t taken the time yet to watch either of the two introductory videos that Scoble posted, so no, I hadn’t seen that yet. :) I’ll try to get a look at them later today, maybe this evening.

iTunes “Get to Know Ya” by Johnson, Jesse from the album Pretty In Pink (1986, 3:35).

Balloon Feather Boat Tomato

by

Jason Webley has updated his site with information about his most recent show. He has links up to the photo galleries that Josh and I have posted (nifty!), plus a few other goodies.

The “Life of Webley” animation that opened the show can be downloaded as a 4.8Mb .wmv file, and he’s posted the text of the four stories from the evening:

The Story of Balloon:

What is it about holding a balloon that is so magical and familiar? A hand that is holding a balloon is a content, happy hand. Why exactly is that? I’m sure the scientists and philosophers and marketing people have written dozens of millions of pages about this subject, but I have my own theory.

The Story of Feather:

Feather was a girl who trusted her feet. She ran so light, so fast and so reckless that she never had time to fall and skin her knees. She had big bright eyes filled with bees a-buzzing and long yellow hair that trailed behind her when she ran through the garden. There was always dirt under her fingernails and snot on her chin. But never a scrape on her knees. Because she trusted her feet.

The Story of Boat:

Isn’t it interesting how differently people move through the world? One person walks down the street and everyone he passes immediately likes him and thinks to themselves, ‘what a nice pleasant fellow! I should invite him over for dinner!’ But when another person walks down the same street in much the same way, people lock their doors and grumble to themselves, dogs bark, he is met with suspicious glances until eventually someone throws a shoe at him.

The Story of Tomato:

Tomato was the most beautiful woman in the world. She never knew her mother, but she never gave that much thought. She was the most beautiful woman in the world and there were always plenty of people around to shower her with attentions and affections.

iTunes “Music That Tears Itself Apart” by Webley, Jason from the album Viaje (1998, 3:22).

MSN Spaces launches

by

Microsoft finally makes their long-rumored debut into the weblogging service arena with MSN Spaces. I got curious, and it’s free, so I went ahead and signed up for a Space of my own to try it out. I have no intentions of moving over…I just wanted to kick the tires a bit, so to speak.

My MSN Spaces site

Signup is pretty easy, as long as you have a MS Passport (I didn’t…but now I do). So far, it seems to be a fairly decent option for beginning bloggers — it’s free, there are a decent number of design templates (though there’s only so much customization you can do, much like the entry-level TypePad system), you can choose whether or not to syndicate your blog (with RSS 2.0 only), comments and Trackback are both supported (interestingly, Trackback has three options: disable, accept from everywhere, and accept only from other MSN Space weblogs, with the last option being the default [and I don’t seem to be able to switch it off of the default so that I can allow Trackback pings from everyone]), there are a few default categories and custom categories can be added…all the basics, and some frills.

MSN Spaces apparently ties in tightly with both MSN Messenger and MS Outlook (though I can’t play with that, being a Mac user), and as such, adds a special privacy option that can restrict visibility of your weblog to only people on your MSN Messenger Allow list, along with an option to only allow selected contacts in your MSN Address Book to see your blog.

secure.spaces.msn.com

There are settings for moblogging (blogging via cell phone) — amusingly, though, when I first clicked on the “Mobile” settings tab, I got an “unknown authority” error dialog. Not having a cell phone, there’s not much here I can play with.

You get 10 MB of storage, with no indication if there’s a way to increase this (or if there will be a way in the future). That should be fine for a good amount of text, but enough photos will eventually eat into that, so there’s a simple file manager to allow you to delete any photos you’ve uploaded.

Finally, there are some simple statistics available, showing total page views, views this week, today, and in the last hour, along with a referrer list (no idea how extensive the referrer list is, as I’ve got all of three hits so far while poking around with things).

So far, so good — it looks like a decent entry-level weblogging service.

One thing did catch my eye, though, and it could be a big one: apparently, posts have to be written with paragraph tags (\<p> and \</p>) or linebreak tags (\
), otherwise your text gets all smooshed together into a single paragraph. I was surprised enough that this would be the default behavior after I posted my first test post, but looking through the interface, I can’t see an option to turn on any sort of automatic linebreak conversion that would allow someone to type normally and actually get paragraphs. I can see this causing some serious headaches from HTML-ignorant newcomers who expect to see paragraphs and instead get huge blocks of unseparated text!

(Caveat: I am looking at this via Safari on my Mac, so it’s entirely possible that this actually works correctly with IE/Win — though if that’s the case, that’s another strike against the system, in my view.)

There is a note on the bottom of the posting screen that “Some HTML tags may be removed from your entry for security and formatting reasons” — unfortunately, they don’t list which tags may be removed. And what’s this “may” bit? Are they or aren’t they? Will the list of which tags get removed change from time to time, and if so, why? Odd.

Clicking the “Trackback” link takes you to the comment entry form, and I can’t find a Trackback link to send a ping to. I can’t find a Trackback address in the source code, either, and auto-discovery from the MT QuickPost interface isn’t coming up with anything either. Perhaps that’s due to not being able to set the global Trackback acceptance flag?

Permalinks are ugly — for instance, the permalink for my first test post is http://spaces.msn.com/members/michaelhanscom/Blog/cns!1plKnLKPq0gBtnAfWaupqTNA!106.entry. Ouch.

Source code is also ugly (though honestly, that’s exactly what I expected). Heavily table-based, lots of crud and cruft. Running it through the W3C validator returns 193 errors, and that’s after the validator displays a big warning that no Doctype was found so it’s guessing 4.01 Transitional.

End result: it’ll keep newbies and MS fans happy (assuming that that bit with requiring paragraph or linebreak tags is fixed), but power users and web standards geeks (who are probably not the target market anyway) will definitely want to look somewhere else.

(via Scoble)

iTunes “Making Plans for Nigel” by XTC from the album Rock and Wave Vol. 1 (1979, 4:10).

Switch to VoIP?

by

On the off chance anyone noticed, my site (along with all other sites I host) had about two hours of downtime earlier today. Sorry about that — as it turns out, the DSL modem had frozen up, probably from overheating thanks to the poor ventilation in my apartment. Once it was reset it was fine. Sorry ’bout that.

While I was bouncing around Speakeasy‘s site during the initial round of “what’s going on?” troubleshooting, I ran into some interesting information that may lead to me ditching my current phone service with Qwest.

Item One: Speakeasy OneLink — DSL service that doesn’t require a phone line.

Item Two: Speakeasy Voice — VoIP service.

Item Three: Nice savings when you order both packages.

I already use Speakeasy as my broadband provider, and I’ve been very happy with the service I get from them. I have a good package for a reasonable price, and the few times I’ve had to call tech support, they’ve been quick, friendly, and very friendly (and occasionally just a little bit silly).

I currently use Qwest for my phone service, and have very intentionally been getting the bare minimum necessary package. For me, that means about \$30/month for basic phone service plus voice mail, and nothing else. No caller ID, no call waiting, no other fancy features — and no long distance.

According to Speakeasy’s site, if I were to switch over to their VoIP service, I’d get unlimited long distance in the US and Canada, voice mail, caller ID, call waiting, three-way calling, last call return, do not disturb, and I’d even get to keep the same phone number I’d have now — all for the same price as my current basic service from Qwest.

If I switched over to both OneLink and VoIP, my final cost would be about \$6/month more than what I’m paying now, but the first three months would be cheaper, as you get a “free three months” for signing up (some of which are offset by the setup costs, but that’s expected). All in all, this sounds like a pretty damn good deal to me.

Giving this one some serious thought.

iTunes “Predator (Final)” by Collide from the album Vortex (2004, 6:32).