Technology

Things that catch my geeky interests that don’t fall into a more specific tag.

Safari bug: Amazon Associates Build-A-Link

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Safari/Amazon bug screenshot

I’ve been noticing a bug in Safari over the past few days, and finally figured it was worth writing up and seeing if this is a “just me” thing or not.

I just recently started using the Amazon Associates Build-A-Link tool to create the product boxes for certain items that I talk about (like the one for Season 7 of Deep Space Nine in this morning’s post). Unfortunately, once I find the item I want to create the product box for, when Amazon sends me the page that is supposed to give me the appropriate HTML code to copy and paste into my entry, the textarea field is blank. In order to get the code, I’ve either been using Internet Explorer (shudder) or just viewing the source code for the Amazon page and digging through until I find the code snippet in question.

The code in question is found about 80% of the way down the source code. Here’s the relevant section of what Amazon sends, with what I should be seeing in that blank box on line six:

<tr>
  <td>
    <form name="snippet_form">
      <center>
        <textarea name="snippet" rows="7" cols="35">
          <iframe marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" width="120" height="240" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?o=1&l=as1&f=ifr&t=djwudicom-20&p=8&asins=B00008KA57&IS2=1&lt1=_blank"><MAP NAME="boxmap-p8"><AREA SHAPE="RECT" COORDS="14, 200, 103, 207" HREF="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm/privacy-policy.html?o=1" ><AREA COORDS="0,0,10000,10000" HREF="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect-home/djwudicom-20" ></MAP><img src="http://rcm-images.amazon.com/images/G/01/rcm/120x240.gif" width="120" height="240" border="0" usemap="#boxmap-p8" alt="Shop at Amazon.com"></iframe>
       </textarea>
        <br />
        <input type="image" style="margin: 3px;" src=http://g-images.amazon.com/images/G/01/associates/build-links/highlight_html.gif name="highlight" onClick="javascript:this.form.snippet.focus();this.form.snippet.select(); return false;"/>
        <p style="margin: 5px;"><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="-2">Paste all the HTML into your Web site's HTML.<br /> Note: your tracking ID, <strong>djwudicom-20</strong>, is already embedded in the HTML.</font></p>
      </center>
    </form>
  </td>
</tr>

My immediate guess is that because the code ends up looking as if it’s requesting an iframe inside a textarea, Safari is just discarding what it sees as “bad code”. Unfortunately, as placing code inside a textarea is a fairly common way to avoid issues with long text strings that muck up a page’s layout (such as, well, this very post), that behavior effectively breaks the Amazon tool.

I’ve submitted a bug through Safari’s bug reporting feature, but I figured sending a TrackBack ping to Dave of Surfin’ Safari couldn’t hurt, either. ;)

My G5 is an insomniac

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I’m having some odd issues with my G5 that I’m having trouble pinning down. I’ve just tossed a plea for help out in an Apple Discussions thread, but I wanted to put it up here also in case anyone else out there has seen similar behavior.

I’ve been having an odd issue (actually, two, but they may be related) with my G5 (Dual 2.0Ghz) that I haven’t seen anyone else mention, so I thought I’d toss it out here. Unfortunately, I’m having trouble narrowing down exactly what’s going on, so this may be a tad vague.

Issue 1: My G5 appears to be an insomniac. If I leave the computer alone, it never seems to go to sleep. The screensaver will kick in, but after a while at some (apparently) random time, the screensaver kicks off as if I’d just bumped the mouse. Because of this, the machine will only go into Sleep mode if I tell it to via the Apple menu.

Issue 2 (this is the one I’m having more problems diagnosing): At some point, I lose the ability to choose some of the commands in the Apple menu: ‘About This Mac’, ‘Force Quit…’, ‘Restart…’, ‘Shut Down…’, and ‘Log Out [username]…’ are all non-responsive. All other commands in the Apple Menu work fine. Most of the time this isn’t a major issue, but when a time comes when I do need to restart the computer (for instance, after installing a Software Update), the only way I can do it is to execute a ‘sudo shutdown -r now’ through the Terminal.

I’ve tried choosing ‘Log Out…’ occasionally after a restart to pin down when the menu commands stop responding, but am having difficulties determining just what the cause is. So far, it hasn’t seemed to be related to any particular application or sequence of events.

I have noticed that it appears to happen sometime after letting the computer go through its bout of insomnia for a while. In other words, if after restarting the machine I manually tell it to Sleep, then when I wake the computer up again, I can still access all Apple Menu commands without a problem. However, if I leave the computer alone and it fails to sleep automatically as it should, at some point after that I lose the Apple Menu functionality.

Unfortunately, at this point, I can’t get any more specific than that.

Has anyone else out there seen behavior like this, or am I alone with this particular glitch?

Getting in Google's good graces

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One of the constant topics that many webmasters and webloggers are concerned with these days is Google, how to increase your site’s standing in Google’s eyes, and therefore drive more traffic to your site. I use a number of techniques on my weblog, both in the code and how I create entries, that help Google get the most useful information out of my pages.

While I’ve mentioned some in the past, the subject recently came up in a thread on the TypePad User Group, and I shared some of my methods in that thread. At the request of both Liza and Richard, who have also been posting about this topic, I’m re-posting my post (post-haste, though not post-mortem, and definitely not postpartum) here…

Still, I’m amazed to read that you had 1,000 per day BEFORE MS made you a web celeb (boo! to them). Do you think those hits came from your blogging subject or from special tactics you engaged in to increase your site traffic.

A little bit of both, probably.

First off, it’s not so much my subject, as my lack of subject. ;) Because I’ve never really focused on any specific topic for my blog, and just randomly babble about whatever crosses my mind, that gives Google a lot of potential keywords to pick up on.

Also, I’ve been at this for about three years now, so I’ve got a fairly large archive section, which also increases the probability of any given keyword turning up in a search.

As far as special tactics, there’s a few techniques I’ve picked up on over the years that seem to help (some of which you covered in your post).

  1. Descriptive headlines as a page title. The title of a webpage scores very highly in Google’s ranking scheme, so I generally try to make sure that my post titles are descriptive of what I’m posting about (“Lord of the Rings Trailer” rather than “This is cool!”), and I make sure that the post title is included in the page title.

    I believe that TypePad is set to include post titles in page titles for individual archives by default, but some weblog tools (including MovableType in its early stages, I believe, though I could be wrong) only include the site name for every page title, so instead of a site containing 1000+ differently named pages, you’d end up with a site containing 1000+ pages all named “My Weblog”, which doesn’t give Google nearly as much to work with.

  2. Setting a consistent structure for the code on each page. As HTML was designed to emulate (though not visually replicate) the structure of a printed document, it includes various structural elements such as various levels of heading. As Google pays attention to these when it scans a document, it often helps to use them correctly.

    In the past, rather than using the <h1>, <h2>, etc. elements for headlines, division markers, and so on, many sites would use <font> tags to give their subdivision headings the look they wanted. Now that the <font> tag has been deprecated and we can use CSS to style every element on a page the way we want, it’s good to return to using structurally correct markup. In addition to making a site much easier to code, it also assists Google in determining the structure, topic, and relevance of any given page.

    For each individual archive page on my site, I’ve structured it as follows:

    1. <title>: website name > post title

    2. <h1>: website name

    3. <h2>: website ‘tagline’

    4. <h3>: post title

    5. <p>: post body

    6. <h3>: trackback

    7. <h4>: trackback source

    8. <p>: trackback body

    9. <h3>: comments

    10. <h4>: comment author

    11. <p&>: comment body

    12. <h3>: comment posting form

    This gives each page a clearly delineated, easy to read structure that tells both the reader and Google which parts of the page are the most important and the most relevant to the topic of the page.

  3. Link descriptively. Simply, this involves using natural language for your links so that the link is descriptive to what it points to. For instance, saying “The new Lord of the Rings trailer is out!” instead of “You’ve gotta see this!” gives Google more information about what you’re linking to.

    This carries a double benefit, in that not only does it give Google better information about what you’re referencing, it also lets Google know more about what you’re linking to, which helps out whoever is on the target end of your link.

  4. Alt text on all images. This is important for a few reasons. First off, it lets Google know what each image is so that Google can include it more reliably in their image search feature. Secondly, though, and more importantly, it greatly improves the readability of your site for people with disabilities using specialized browsers to read the web.

    Blind users can use a “screen reader” to read websites — this is a specialized browser which translates the text to audio, and reads the page to them. Without alt text, all that screen reader can do is give them the name of the graphic, and might end up telling them something like “Image named funnypicture.jpg”. With alt text, they’ll instead hear something like “Image named Gimli falls off his horse”.

  5. Use the excerpt field to create useable descriptions. While keywords are no longer recognized by Google, another <meta> tag in the <head> section of your document still is (I think), which helps Google determine the topic of the page, and that’s the ‘description’ tag. What I’ve done is put this code into the <head> of each individual archive:

    <meta title="description" content="<$MTEntryExcerpt>" />

    I then make sure to take a moment to create an excerpt for each entry as I’m making it that relates to the topic of the post, rather than just relying on TypePad’s auto-generated excerpt (which generally just grabs the first n words of each post).

Anyway, there’s a few of the things I do which seem to help my site visibility. Mostly, though, I think a lot of it just boils down to the fact that after three years of babbling, I give Google a lot to work with. ;)

Bombardier Embrio

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Bombardier Embrio

Too cool — another ultra-nifty vehicle to go on my “lust list”, along with the Vandenbrink Carver: the Bombardier Embrio.

The Embrio is a single-wheeled vehicle, balanced using internal gyroscopes and powered with a hydrogen fuel cell, emitting only water as its exhaust.

Unfortunately, it’s also only a prototype, and it may not ever become a reality. Still, it’s definitely fun to drool over!

(via Mike and /.)

Stuff I've Seen

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Finally — I can talk about this!

Every so often during my time working on the Microsoft campus, I’d see something that really caught my interest. However, I couldn’t ever talk about it — NDAs and the like — so I’ve never mentioned any of them. However, the one that was always at the top of the “I really wish I had this” list was just announced at Comdex (and was apparently briefly mentioned back in April, too).

A prototype application called “Stuff I’ve Seen,” for instance, will store every screen that has popped up on a given computer monitor for a year. (from the April article)

The chairman also showed off a research project known as “Stuff I’ve Seen,” which catalogs any place a computer user has gone. As previously reported, Stuff I’ve Seen is designed to make it easier to find a previously visited Web site or an old e-mail, as well as other files that have become increasingly hard to find among the myriad folders on a typical PC’s hard drive. (from yesterday’s article)

Right now, it’s not uncommon for me to remember (or half-remember) reading something, somewhere, that I’d like to reference back to later on. Unfortunately, it can be a royal pain in the butt to track that down. Where did I see it? Was it in an e-mail someone sent me? An IM session? Something I stumbled across on the web? If it was on the web, how easy will it be for me to find it? As wonderful as Google is, when you’re a little iffy on the details of what you’re looking for, it can be almost impossible to find a specific reference or citation without being buried in false hits because your search terms are too vague.

SIS attempts to solve that problem by creating a database that stores the text of virtually any information displayed on your screen in the past year (I’d assume the default time period could be adjusted), along with references to the source of that information (URLs, files, etc.). Then, when searching for a phrase or subject, rather than limiting your search to whatever is stored on your drive, or expanding your search to everything on the Internet, you can confine the scope of your search to items that you have looked at, and likely increase the chances of finding the correct result by leaps and bounds.

I want this. And I want it on my Mac. ;)

Apple? Mac shareware programmers? You listening?

For more information on SIS, this Google search is turning up a lot of hits, including research papers and PowerPoint presentations directly from Microsoft Research (in fact, this Google search is the only reason I continued this post beyond the pull quotes — if I hadn’t turned up this amount of already freely-available information, I’d have stopped with what C|Net reported just to be on the safe side).

(via Scoble)

iPod Rocks!

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I promise not to pierce myself.

Looks like Apple’s gearing up for the holiday season with a new teen-focused website at ipodrocks.

It’s rather cleverly done, if a little uneven. Lots of short little flash-style animations (apparently it’s Flash wrapped inside Quicktime — odd), some short demos of the iPod and how it works, and various “hints and tips” on how to convince your parents to get you an iPod. Some of the iCards that can be sent through the site gave me a laugh — the one I’ve got pictured here was my favorite of the bunch. There are also “help around the home” coupons, a points-for-grades suggestion, and even a small screensaver featuring the dancing silhouettes from the recent iPod ads listed as “subliminal advertising”.

I’ve already noticed iPod ads on quite a few of the buses around the Seattle area. Looks like we’re going to be seeing a lot of those bright iPod ads over the coming months.

(via MacRumors)

It'll never happen, but…

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Well, word just broke on the ‘net this past week that Microsoft is moving to the IBM PowerPC processor (the same family of processors used in Apple‘s Power Mac G5) for their next generation of XBox game systems.

Interesting.

So. Randomly putting things together in my head.

First thought: if the XBox is moving to an IBM PowerPC processor — assumedly at least similar to the G5, if not the same processor — wouldn’t they need development/testing machines? Could it be that I’ve finally figured out whose toes I stepped on? I doubt I’ll ever know…but it’s worth thinking about.

Second thought: Not terribly long ago, Microsoft acquired Connectix. This was most notable at the time because Connectix’ flagship product was Virtual PC, which allows Macs to run Windows software through emulation of a x86-compatible PC. Less noted, though, was another older Connectix product that has been discontinued, the Virtual Game Station, which used similar emulation technology to allow the Mac to play original Sony PlayStation games.

Wouldn’t it be cool if Microsoft retooled the VGS codebase to produce a “Virtual XBox” for G5 Power Macs? It’ll never happen, if for no other reason than pure marketing dollars (I’m sure they’d rather have people buy a \$200 Xbox than a \$50 piece of software — playing Devil’s Advocate, though, there might be more profit margin on that \$50 piece of software, plus it would drive game sales…). In any case, it’s also fun to think about.

(via codepoetry)