June 18, 2008
A big step to Firefox 3.0
Along with a few zillion other people, I downloaded Firefox 3.0 last night, and installed it this morning. Much as I like Firefox, however, I have to admit a little bit of buyer’s remorse about the upgrade.
The primary driver of this, of course, has nothing to do with the Mozilla Foundation themselves, or at least, not directly. The problem is that I’ve become quite fond of a certain constellation of extensions (or “Add-ons” as the Firefox crew are now calling them), and the jump up to 3.0 has made some of them non-functional and others… wonky.
The “Wonky” includes ForecastFox, which is working fine but has odd white gaps between the icons with Firefox’s new shiny Mac chrome. (Oh, hey, the Mac-native Firefox now uses Mac-type buttons, after about three years of whining.) The outright non-functional include Dust-Me Selectors, a surprisingly useful tool which checks a site’s CSS and provides a list of style rules which are never actually used on the site, and Firebug.
It’s the busted Firebug which is really a deal-breaker for me. In the last year I’ve become so accustomed to figuring out and fixing layout and style issues on a page with Firebug that I’m actually a little disturbed to be going without it. Fortunately, I still have a 2.x Bon Echo build kicking around which I can run if a 3.x compatible Firebug isn’t released before I have need for it again. (They appear to be relatively close.)
Update: I’ve installed a beta of the next version of Firebug, which they had targeted for 3.x compatibility. Discussion on their end makes it sound like Firefox was a bit of a moving target for them.
Posted by pjm at 9:24 PM | Comments (1)
May 13, 2008
Test pattern
Apparently something in the “changing passwords” part of this mess has thrown ecto for a loop, because I haven’t been able to get anything posted from there yet (and haven’t really had time to fight with it.)
I do have a few short ideas brewing. And bits are marvelously malleable.
Posted by pjm at 7:26 PM | Comments (0)
May 5, 2008
It depends on your definition of "ethical"
Adam Gaffin at Universal Hub draws our attention to a new “service” in which you pay for “relevant” comments to be left on “high-page-rank blogs”, which helps your site “rank better in the SERPs.” (SERP = Search Engine Result Page.)
The part I find most amusing is their attempts at self-justification:
YES, Buying Blog Comments is 100% ethical and NOT spam!
…and yet they’re spending the rest of the page explaining how their technique leaves comments which won’t be deleted by the site moderator. Now why would a site moderator ever want to delete 100% ethical, not-spam comments?
(If there’s any confusion in your mind, buying blog comments is 100% unethical and is spam.)
No extra points for counting the spelling and grammatical errors. Note that I have used rel="nofollow" on the link to the sleazy ones.
Now Playing: Workin’ For A Livin’ from Picture This by Huey Lewis & The News
Posted by pjm at 1:28 PM | Comments (0)
May 3, 2008
General excellence
I’m two days late on this, but I’ve had limited time and inclination for being online for the last 36 hours or so. Not only did my old workplace (and I mean seven years ago), Runners World, win a National Magazine Award on Thursday night—a huge deal in the industry—but they won it for their website.
The site’s been down and up and down again and up again since my day, and the site in my time bears no comparison with the site now (this particular category didn’t even exist at the NMAs), but I still feel a little connection. I know a lot of the people working on the site. And I did write a weblog there last year.
I’ll be making things happen in their Olympic Track Trials coverage this summer, so we’ll see how much worse they do in 2008.
Posted by pjm at 12:42 PM | Comments (1)
April 10, 2008
Google has a hand over our eye
I was looking at site traffic statistics this morning and discovered that at least one site I have a hand in gets more search traffic from Yahoo! than Google.
How did that happen?
This particular company launched a website in the late ’90s on an ISP account without their own domain. The site was tricky to maintain, and for various reasons it stagnated. More recently, we set up another site, with the same design and largely the same content but easier for a non-technical person to update, and on its own domain. This site includes a lot of more search-friendly features, including an XML site map (seems silly when you only have five pages, but there it is.)
The ISP, however, won’t close or redirect the old site, even though it hasn’t been paid for it for years. We can’t redirect it, and it still comes up first in Google searches, and it’s not going anywhere. The new site has slowly battled its way up to eighth. (N.B. Because the company name uses a deliberately archaic spelling, there’s not a whole lot of competition for the significant keywords.) On Yahoo!, the old site is also first—but the new site is third. In other words, in my opinion, Yahoo! is returning better results. But Google’s stranglehold over English-speaking search results makes our job a lot harder. And search drives a tremendous amount of web traffic; more than half, for most sites.
After thinking about this for a minute, I went up to the search box on Firefox and switched the search engine to Yahoo!. I feel like this is important not just because of our site, but for perspective.
Search results are a view of the Internet. It’s easy to convince yourself they’re the only view, the same way you can convince yourself that the view from your back door is the only way to see your yard. But clearly they’re not. And if everyone sees the same search results, it’s the same as if everyone reads the same newspaper… or if you tried looking at everything from one eye. You still see stuff, but you don’t see depth, and you can’t judge distance. (Try driving with a hand over one eye. On second thought, don’t.)
Using one search engine is like looking at the world with one eye. (And using one meta-search engine isn’t much better.) We should be changing those search settings periodically, like farmers rotating crops. There’s nothing wrong with Google—but it’s not always right, either, and if we never look anywhere else, we might forget that.
Now Playing: Released from Winter Pays For Summer by Glen Phillips
Posted by pjm at 8:43 AM | Comments (0)
April 9, 2008
What I did with my day other than writing anything here
I merged a branch in and pushed a big revision to the La Cucina Italiana website. There are now recipes available—by which I mean, about 1% of all the recipes they have available, but that’s just the start, of course.
If you’re interested in reading me geek out for a few hundred words about asset hosts and revision control, that’s possible, too.
Now Playing: The Reasons from Reconstruction Site by The Weakerthans
Posted by pjm at 9:00 PM | Comments (0)
April 5, 2008
Pricing as incentive (or, why I still pay some bills by mail)
The online parking ticket payment I just mentioned is a great idea in concept: I sit down at my computer and pay my ticket, sparing me an envelope, a stamp, and whatever time it would take to write a check and mail the envelope.
In practice, it’s not so simple. For one thing, the system just throws errors; I gave up after two attempts to start the process were met by un-helpful error messages indicating some kind of software problem. (Probably it requires me to use IE on Windows, but (a) it doesn’t say so, and (b) even if it does, I won’t.) For another, they’re adding a $3.50 service charge to a $10 ticket.
Given a choice between paying a $10 ticket by mail and a $13.50 ticket online, I’m paying by mail. I’m guessing hundreds of others are making the same decision, and Northampton is probably not seeing mass adoption of their online ticket-paying system. This is disappointing to them, because if we pay the tickets online, they get $10, but if we pay by check, they get $10 minus the cost of opening all the envelopes and making the bank deposits.
But if they want tickets paid online, they should be reducing that service charge. 35% is too high; maybe they should try 10% and see how that does. (I’m betting a $3.50 surcharge doesn’t bother someone paying a $250 traffic fine, though.)
I ran in to the same thing with my taxes. Why should I cough up an extra $11.95 to e-file, when by doing so I’m going to be saving the government a chunk of money? If they want to encourage people to e-file, they need to provide a price incentive to move us that way. Imagine it costs the IRS $5 to handle every paper return, and $1 for every e-file. If they give a $2 discount for e-filers, they still save $2 per return e-filed, and they probably get hundreds more of them. Instead, they charge (or, they provide the service only through contractors who charge) and fewer people e-file.
(It does look like there are free services available, but only for people with adjusted gross income under $54,000. So I could’ve spared myself the agony.)
For an example of companies doing this the right way, see nearly any utility company. Every major electricity, gas, or telecommunications utility I’ve dealt with in the last few years has offered online bill payment for no extra charge. I’ve signed up, we’ve both enjoyed increased convenience, they’ve saved some money, and at least I haven’t paid extra.
If you want people to use the service which saves you money, price it so it saves them money, too.
Update: I sent email to the webmaster to point out that their site was broken. I just got a response: “The problem has been corrected. Please try again.” Um, no.
Now Playing: Попробуй спеть вместе со мной from Группа Крови by Кино
Posted by pjm at 10:08 AM | Comments (2)
March 28, 2008
I like good grades
After I spent a chunk of yesterday figuring out how to make some work sites load significantly faster (think “twice as fast”) without a few little configuration changes, I thought I should apply the same process here. I ran YSlow on this site, and started with a grade of 68, a D. Unacceptable.
Unfortunately, since I don’t own the server this site runs on (yet) I don’t have total control over its configuration. For example, I can’t figure out how to ensure that the site stylesheet (all 2KB of it) get compressed before it’s sent to your browser. (This would be worth doing because the time it takes to Gzip a CSS file is more than reclaimed in the time saved downloading a notably smaller file.) However, I was able to add these three lines to the configuration:
FileETag none
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 year"
This means that the two files you do download along with the front page (the stylesheet and the image) will stay in your browser cache as long as you let them, or one year, whichever is shorter, which means you won’t need to request them every time you visit this page. Not a big deal for one visit, but over time, it adds up. And you’re coming back, right?
What really got me was a number of little JavaScript inclusions I added years ago in the name of boosting traffic, such as a Technorati widget which, on closer examination, I discovered isn’t even current. Dropping those took a number of relatively slow-loading scripts off the download list for the front page.
The result of this is that, even though fewer people are coming here, the pages will load more quickly for those who still are. And, probably more important to me, my grade is now an A (94). Which we all know stands for Acceptable.
Now Playing: Merry-Go-Round from All Shook Down by The Replacements
Posted by pjm at 9:15 PM | Comments (0)
March 26, 2008
My life as a syndicated blogger
I think maybe I signed up with BlogBurst two years ago. Nothing came of it and the whole thing passed out of my mind. This is, after all, not exactly the sort of site that lends itself to easy syndication and republication; I’m far too erratic in my choice of topics.
This morning I saw an odd referral in my traffic stats from the Chicago Sun Times. Hmm. I pursued it and discovered that even as my search engine traffic has declined I’ve had a hundred or so post views from the Sun Times and Reuters. And, I might add, not exactly on the posts I would’ve expected to get picked up for republication.
Only the one click-through back to this site, though, and it’s pretty easy to see why when you look at how the pages show up; despite BlogBurst’s claim of helping new people discover your site, there aren’t many links back to the post source at all, and most of them are obfuscated by BlogBurst along the way.
I see that Rodale is on the list of BlogBurst publishers. It would be vastly amusing to me if one of my posts showed up there.
Now Playing: Daisy And Prudence from Distillation by Erin McKeown
Posted by pjm at 10:32 AM | Comments (0)
March 21, 2008
My algorithmic good name
A few weeks ago I noticed that traffic for this site has been plunging. I used to average just over a hundred visits a day; recently (i.e. the past week or so, though the trend started three or more weeks ago)it’s been less than half that. It’s easy to see where the change is: when traffic was higher, I was getting slightly more than half my traffic from search engines, mostly Google. Now, search engine traffic is somewhat less than a third of the much-diminished total; that translates to about a quarter of the traffic it used to be.
In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t a big deal; I like being read, but the search engine traffic is not regular readership. I don’t have advertising on the site, so the reduced traffic isn’t hitting any revenue source. However, eventually this site’s position on search engines affects other sites I link to in which I do have some financial interest, specifically the various CMI projects. So this morning I tried to track down what was going on.
Google’s Webmaster Tools tell me that I’m still listed. However, when I look at the “Top 20 queries in which my site appeared”, I find some odd stuff. In the top 10, I find terms like “free ringtones” (#2; I’m the 206th result) or “wallpaper” (#3; I’m 902nd) or “free ringtone” (#5; I’m 108th). I maintain an attitude of puzzled bemusement towards the ring-tone economy (why would I want my phone to sound like anything other than a phone?) and I’ve certainly never written about it. Why on earth would this site come up in searches for these terms?
The answer seems to come from Technorati. They find a slew of sites linking to me; some the expected other weblogs, but a few unexpected ones (hello, California Library Association?) which appear to be nests of comment spam. And that comment spam is… linking to this site. Using terms like “free go phone ringtone”.
Because, of course, you can find that stuff here, right?
My best guess is that this is meta-comment spam, that the spammed comments etc. were meant to link to similar comment spam on this site. But, of course, I filter that stuff. (At considerable cost to my blood pressure, I might add. Such is the cost of being a good internet citizen and taking responsibility where others won’t.)
My hypothesis is that since I appear to be the “beneficiary” of this (these) spam run(s), I’m getting penalized in the search results. One more reason to love spam. Don’t you?
Now Playing: Cowards from Abigail by The Nields
Posted by pjm at 10:09 AM | Comments (0)
February 19, 2008
Sometimes higher pay comes with higher pain
I don’t serve ads on this site, and every now and then something comes along that makes me positively happy about that. There are ads on eliterunning.com, a site I have no formal connection to other than sometimes writing articles or tweaking the templates when A doesn’t understand them, and I’m now on my second installment of “updating” the ad tags at the request of her ad network, which will remain nameless for now. (It pays better than Google for this site.)
The problem is that, for the second time, the tags they’ve sent are buggy. I’ve yet to install these tags and have them “just work” the way, for example, Google stuff (e.g. Analytics) does. Every time I make the template changes, save, load the page, and … blankness. This time I fired up Firebug and saw a slew of code in the head section of the page which simply does not belong in a page header. (Images? Hello?)
I don’t get paid enough to debug these folks’ code for them, so I reverted the pages to the “old” tags, and sent back a nice detailed email telling them which flavor of fail they had shipped and requesting troubleshooting. I wish I could’ve used the phrasing I had in mind, which was somewhat more terse and called their ability to write functioning code a bit more directly into question.
The other annoying part about this company is that when they get email from me, they tend to reply directly to me without copying A, even though I’ve copied her on every message I send, and her address is at this particular domain and mine is not. It’s as though they’ve decided that since I have a male name, obviously I must be the one who’s really in charge. Last time I specifically asked them to copy her on every message; let’s see if they are a snuggly enough bunch of pandas to remember.
Update, 20 Feb.: Cynicism wins again: they forgot.
Now Playing: Monster Ballads from The Animal Years by Josh Ritter
Posted by pjm at 9:14 PM | Comments (0)
February 14, 2008
More specifics about the good news
If you look at the domain at www.lacucinaitalianamagazine.com at the time I’m posting this, you’ll get redirected to a page on www.lacucinaitaliana.it, the pages of Italy’s oldest and most successful cooking magazine. If you look at them sometime in the afternoon of Friday, February 15th (“tomorrow” as I’m writing this) you should see the first stage of the site we’re building for their U.S. edition at work. (This is the “big, new job” I mentioned a few weeks ago.)
Monday we’ll start in on Phase Two. Phase One would’ve been much easier if we hadn’t spent quite so much time building foundation for Phase Two, but Phase Two is where we go from “just above the minimum you’d expect from a magazine’s website” to “hey, this is pretty cool,” so there’s plenty to do before our next big deadline.
Posted by pjm at 9:43 PM | Comments (1)
January 30, 2008
Nonspecific good news
We’ll make a more official (and specific) announcement in a few days on the company blog, but the victory of the day is that CMI has a big, new job. I’m once again working for someone I worked for (though not directly) in my first post-college job. And this job means paychecks will be reliable for a few months, maybe through the end of the year.
It’s a big job, and we’ll have to put in a lot of time and learn some new tricks. But oddly enough, I think we’re up to it. When people asked how I felt about starting the company, back in June, my stock answer was, “I’m excited and terrified.” It was almost my personal mantra. I’m a little less terrified, now, and a little more excited.
Now, about this job—that, I’m excited and terrified for.
Posted by pjm at 10:55 PM | Comments (1)
January 2, 2008
Self-promotion, redux
A few months ago I wrote about how I’d seen a dizzying rise in the Alexa ranking of this site (it’s now around 440,000th, putting me in the top half-million sites on the internet) simply by installing the Alexa plug-in for Firefox and thereby reporting my own daily web browsing for Alexa’s statistics.
In our various explorations of site promotion tools (have I mentioned that I work on this website?) we discovered another website ranking company, Compete, which uses both self-reported traffic from browser plug-ins (a la Alexa) along with ISP logs and other data closer to the backbone to arrive at another ranking number. Naturally, we want to be ranked there as well (many reports average the two rankings), so we want to report our daily traffic to them.
To do this, rather than install the Compete plug-in right next to the Alexa one, I replaced the Alexa plug-in with one from quirk.biz. This reports data to both Alexa and Compete, and also shows sites’ rankings on both services (plus their Google PageRank, an added extra.) Judging from what I read on Compete.com, it will take a while for them to accumulate enough data to rank some sites (this one, for example, is still unranked) but the more people who visit with this plug-in or Compete’s own, the sooner (and higher) it will be ranked.
Posted by pjm at 1:51 PM | Comments (0)
December 13, 2007
Unanswerable questions
I’d love to know why I’m getting (on average) two visits a day to this site, over the last week, referred by the search string site:flashesofpanic.com chain grease.
Sure, I’ve mentioned bike chain lubrication a few times (including alternate uses for the gunk, which seems to be when this all started) but why restrict the search to this site?
Now Playing: Saint Simon from Chutes Too Narrow by The Shins
Posted by pjm at 8:55 AM | Comments (0)
December 10, 2007
Tell us about your running shoes
At work, we’re getting close to a working state on our latest project. Simply put, we’re trying to recommend running shoes without having to ask a user a question they don’t know the answer to. Rather than asking things like “How much do you pronate?” or “How high or your arches?” the only thing we hope to ask is, “What shoes have you run in before? How did you like them?”
The hitch is that first, we need a bunch of people (I’m not sure how many, but probably a few hundred will make a good start) to tell us how they like their running shoes. If we can use that as “training data” for our system, we can start making some recommendations.
There’s a slightly more detailed explanation in my announcement and call for reviews on the company blog, if this piques your curiosity, but the short story is this: if you run, I’d love it if you’d drop by Common Running, sign up, and review your running shoes. You should be able to sign in and plug in a few reviews within five minutes. We may not have your shoes listed; I figure we probably have less than half the currently-available models in the system right now. In that case, we’d like to hear about that as well; it will help us find the models we’re missing.
If you have a running blog, I wouldn’t mind it if you asked your readers to drop by, either, of course!
Now Playing: Hotel Womb from Starfish by The Church
Posted by pjm at 3:35 PM | Comments (0)
November 22, 2007
No more "beta"
We took the “beta” off the Common Kitchen logo this week, which is good, because it was annoying me. (Gmail has been “beta” for over three years now, which tells me that the label means nothing anymore… and I don’t like using meaningless labels.)
What it does mean is that we’re pretty close to where we’re going with the site—I’d say over halfway, but the other half is really behind-the-scenes and interface pieces to make the site more useful and more powerful, not big shiny features from the user’s end. Just in time for a big feast day, right?
So we posted a press release and sent an email yesterday, and now we’re working out our next steps. We have a long list of tickets to attack for CK, and some other projects in the pipeline to pursue.
If you’d like to give Common Kitchen a look, though, come on by; we’re ready for you. (You can add the Facebook application, too, if you’re into that.)
While I’m talking about work, I’ll add that we recently did some blog organization at CMI (shorthand for Common Media, Inc, our company.) We pulled all the tech-geeky stuff about development, etc. out into the CMI blog, so the Common Kitchen blog could be more focused on the sort of thing you’d expect to read there, i.e. the site itself, and food in general.
Posted by pjm at 10:26 PM | Comments (0)
November 12, 2007
And another weblog
I have another blog now. We recently added tools to Common Kitchen to allow all our users to run blogs on the site, not unlike the journals of last.fm users. Because the site is set up to require sources for recipes, we needed a way for users to list recipes for which they didn’t know the source. The solution we settled on was to create weblogs which would, in essence, provide a source for every recipe posted in them.
I’m not a tenth the cook Audrey is, of course, but I had to post a few things—like the detailed pizza recipe from my pizza—just in the name of testing, of course. I’ll post more when it occurs to me. If you’re interested in sharing your kitchen experience, come on over. Trust me, I’ve set a pretty low bar.
Now Playing: Next to the Last Romantic from The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter by Josh Ritter
Posted by pjm at 9:20 PM | Comments (2)
October 31, 2007
Popularity is unpredictable
I spent a few minutes this morning trying to figure out why this site has seen a surge in traffic over the past few days. It’s not as though I’ve been posting anything particularly interesting (at least, aside from the generic World Series post, which may have set some kind of all-time record; there’s a nice spike in the traffic graph around that posting.)
It turns out that I’m the top three Google Image Search results for cat face jack o lantern thanks to my original version around the time of the Sox’ last World Series victory. (Since then, I’ve been posting my images on Flickr, so the subsequent versions don’t direct traffic here.) (Anyway, this one is better.)
All of which goes to show how pointless it would be to try writing a personal weblog with the intention of attracting traffic. All my pages which are most-found by searches are ones I never would have predicted as high-traffic pages; the frequently-linked ones puzzle me as well. (There was a big spike last month when this page got cited in a comment—a comment, for pity’s sake—on Metafilter.) What’s more, they’re almost inevitably the older pages on the site.
If I considered traffic a measure of success (I don’t), and this site a success (I do, but by different measures), I’d be writing a book about “how to succeed in weblogging” which recommends throwing a lot of random stuff up and then waiting three years.
Now Playing: The Precience Of Dawn from Reconstruction Site by The Weakerthans
Posted by pjm at 8:52 AM | Comments (2)
October 19, 2007
Unsolicited praise
While I am still at least a part-time resident of the Greater Boston Area, I need to say good things about Adam Gaffin and his site, Universal Hub. UH is a community blog which posts mostly brief summaries and links to news and blog stories from around the area; it doesn’t pretend to be an impersonal institution, but Adam also tries to keep it open for everyone’s contributions. He’s highlighted a few of my posts in the past, like my Olympic assignment last week, and I draw some traffic (and, in that case, nice comments) from that, which is cool. There’s often more discussion on the Hub as well, where the posts serve as the springboard for discussion; see this story from earlier this week, for example.
If you live near Boston—probably anything inside 495 counts, but inside 128/95 is definitely in range—it’s worth having Universal Hub in your feed reader. Adam does a great job highlighting what everyone else is doing, and it’s a good way to keep in touch with what everyone else is talking about, and get introduced to other reading outside your own list. (For example, UH led me to the motorized surfboard shot I linked earlier.)
Now Playing: Golden by Radio Nationals
Posted by pjm at 9:41 AM | Comments (1)
October 5, 2007
Pipes are cool
I’m late to the party on this one, I suppose, but I recently discovered the coolness which is Yahoo! Pipes, and I feel the deep, geeky need to share.
I’ve read about Pipes for months (I even hinted about building one here) but I really only came to find them—and see how easy they are to use—a week or so ago. I’d been putting together a bunch of feeds for Common Kitchen, and the nature of their creation meant I had a feed which had cookbook objects, a feed with recipe objects, etc., but it was very difficult to create a feed with different kinds of object. So, in order to put together a “unified feed” with everything that’s new on Common Kitchen—a concatenation of the existing feeds—I turned to Pipes.
Pipes let me take the five or six feeds of interest, slurp them all into one big blob, sort it by date, then truncate the result to a reasonable length. Presto: a unified feed.
Intrigued, I built a similar pipe which combines most of the feeds linked from this weblog: the main site feed, the comments feed, my Flickr photostream, and my del.icio.us bookmarks feed. One feed to rule them all, one feed to bind them…
But Pipes are good for more than just combining feeds. Say you’ve had enough of reading my ramblings on technology that’s so last month (or, what’s a feed, again?) or folk singers with horn sections, and you just want to read what I have to say about running. I wouldn’t endorse such monomania myself, but it would be pretty simple to create a pipe which filters out all but the “running” category.
Why “pipes”? Because in the Unix world, the “pipe” character—the vertical bar you get from shift-\ on your keyboard—tells the operating system to take the output of one command and “pipe” it into the input of the next. By chaining a series of simple commands with pipes, you can build complex and powerful operations. That’s what Pipes is doing: allowing several simple operations on data to be chained into a powerful system.
(Tell me again: what’s a feed and why should you care?)
Now Playing: Fighting In A Sack from Chutes Too Narrow by The Shins
Posted by pjm at 9:43 PM | Comments (0)
October 3, 2007
Literal self-promotion
When we were first writing the business plan, in January, I spent some time researching traffic numbers for various websites. These numbers generally aren’t widely available, so the next-best option is to work with Alexa, Amazon’s traffic-monitoring service.
In the course of this, I looked in to how Alexa measures traffic to various websites. The principal route seems to be by asking volunteers to install a browser toolbar or plug-in which then phones home to Alexa with your browsing data. Alexa then assumes that the users reporting their traffic are a representative sample of the whole population of internet users (which is, in the circumstances, one of the only reasonable approaches to take.)
This is effective enough when it comes to ranking the top 10,000 or so websites. However, once you get far enough down the scale, one user can have a disproportionately large effect on the overall ranking. This site, for example, was unranked for the first three years of its existence. Since I installed the Alexa plug-in, however, it has jumped to #547,291—an “improvement” of 750%.
Now Playing: From Time To Time from Live Light (France, 11/1994) by Ride
Posted by pjm at 9:03 AM | Comments (0)
July 11, 2007
Firebug and page layouts
Since the holiday weekend, the only thing that’s really going on around here is work. Common Kitchen is evolving like a weed in its Subversion repository, with 236 revisions as of right now and well over 200 tickets in Trac. We’ve become obsessive about closing tickets, and since we implemented Trac’s milestones feature, watching the roadmap.
Our decentralized working pattern means we don’t spend a whole lot of time looking at one screen and talking about how things look, and there are a lot of tickets saying things like, “That green went away? What happened?” Last night I spent 45 minutes tracking down a CSS bug, and part of that time was finding the right tools to diagnose the problem.
Let me save you some time. The tool is Firebug. Firebug is a plugin for Firefox which opens a bottom-of-the-browser window allowing you to browse page source (in the same sort of collapsible-tree format as Firefox’s DOM inspector), highlight portions of it, and see which CSS rules apply to that chunk of code, in order from strongest to most distant inheritance. In other words, it lets you back-track up the cascade. Rules which are overridden are shown, but struck out, so you can pick them out as well.
By showing me that some rules simply weren’t being applied, I was able to go back to the CSS validator to figure out what was buggy about my stylesheet, and solve the problem. And now that I know how to attack the problem, I find myself popping open Firebug all the time to check out why things are doing what they’re doing. It’s a neat idea, and a very helpful one.
Now Playing: Paralysed from Nowhere by Ride
Posted by pjm at 11:37 AM | Comments (0)
July 6, 2007
Help wanted
…but not (yet) at Common Media. One of my former colleagues pinged me with a job description for what my former job has now become. If you like running, grok the web to the point where you can “view source” on a web page and have a clue what you’re looking at, and believe that if something is worth doing it’s worth doing as well as possible, ping me and I’ll send along the link.
Now Playing: What Are You Waiting For? from Back to Me by Kathleen Edwards
Posted by pjm at 5:49 PM | Comments (0)
June 16, 2007
Unintended consequences
I started this page as a sort of destination for the stories nobody I knew was interested in. (Nobody wants to hear about troubleshooting, for example. Nobody wants to hear my swimming stories except my brother, and he’s usually there when they happen. And so on.)
Now, though, enough people who know me read this that I’ve had the experience, more than once, of starting in on a story and having someone say, “Yeah, I read that on your blog.”
Now Playing: Got A Message by The Latebirds
Posted by pjm at 9:08 AM | Comments (2)
June 7, 2007
Work blog
I should add that, pursuant to my threat a few weeks ago, there is now a company weblog. If you’re interested in our development and progress but not willing to commit to the user-survey mailing list, drop by there and subscribe to the feed.
I haven’t gotten around to applying anything other than the default Kubrick skin to the WordPress installation, but that will come when there’s less Actual Coding (tm) to be done.
Now Playing: Hiroshima Mon Amour from A Box Of Birds by The Church
Posted by pjm at 8:30 AM | Comments (0)
May 31, 2007
Food bloggers?
Despite my sparse posting, I have not disappeared. Right now I’m waiting on a long file download.
I don’t flatter myself that I know much about (m)any of you who read this, so I’ll just toss this out: if you keep a weblog and write on a fairly regular basis (i.e. once a month or more) about cooking, restaurants, etc., please visit Common Kitchen and drop Audrey a line. Spasebo.
I don’t have time to implement this trick right now, but it amuses me: replace the “Frequently Searched Posts” with a list, updated monthly, of the top five or ten search terms which found this site in the previous month, linked to the post(s) they presumably found. Could get recursive. (Pool Running is my current #1.)
Now Playing: Turn the Lights On from Into the West by Pilot Speed
Posted by pjm at 2:36 PM | Comments (1)
May 24, 2007
Milgram was right
On an online community centered around (but not limited to) alumni of my college, I ran across the author of an interface library I’m attempting to use for this project. Finding him out of context was a little disconcerting, but the more I think of it, not too surprising given the level of interconnectedness we reach now.
Now Playing: Dying For More from Be A Girl by The Wannadies
Posted by pjm at 9:51 PM | Comments (0)
May 16, 2007
New and improved
The City of Medford has dramatically improved their website since I last complained. It’s not perfect; I can find out how to recycle a television with only two clicks from the front page, but I need to make at least one good guess. First, I click “Recycling Information,” but then I need to try “Frequently Asked Questions” to find out that I need to buy a $20 recycling sticker and arrange pick-up of the stickered television. I discovered that only after trying “What can be recycled?”, “Ten Ways to be a ‘Trash Terminator’”, and “Household Hazardous Waste” unsuccessfully, plus a diversion into the Public Works Department’s “Trash Talk” page.
They’re definitely improving, and this new page is about fifty times more useful to me as a Medford resident than the old page. (I was able to print a schedule of recycling days, for example; I spent all of 2006 putting out the bins based on whether I’d done it last week and whether the neighbors did.) I’m still the number one search-engine hit for “medford parking sticker” and number two for “medford parking permit,” though, and that question still isn’t answered anywhere on the city site.
Now Playing: You’re Not Very Well from Some Friendly by The Charlatans
Posted by pjm at 11:06 AM | Comments (0)
May 14, 2007
You know you're a hopeless web geek when...
…you find one of those pages where an improperly-closed <strong> tag means two-thirds of the page is in boldface, and you can’t read it unless you download the source and fix the tag in your local copy.
Now Playing: Circus Envy from Monster by R.E.M.
Posted by pjm at 3:29 PM | Comments (0)
April 3, 2007
You can fix things by whining about them online, Part 3
Sunday evening I posted a cranky evaluation of tax software and my misadventures with it this season. This afternoon, I got a nicely-worded email from an H&R Block project manager thanking me for the detailed feedback, “because that’s the best way to improve the product year over year.”
I have to imagine, because taxes are inherently frustrating and any related hitch doubly so, that they get a lot of irate feedback. Even if this is a form letter—I say that because of its length, not its tone—responding politely like that is classy. It’s good to see a big company adapting to change rather than fighting it.
Now Playing: No Fear from Everything Changed by Abra Moore
Posted by pjm at 8:35 PM | Comments (0)
April 2, 2007
Lecture
Professor Σ is away until Wednesday. This has been fairly common this semester, due to his long list of non-class responsibilities. In the class I TA, we had a visit from Career Services once, and a midterm review (which I ran) last time.
Tomorrow, I’m lecturing. Fortunately, not on our recent class topics (lambda calculus and denotational semantics) but on something a bit more practical: programming for the web.
I wrote up a brief outline, and now I’m hacking together slides in Keynote. I have to say, I’m hugely impressed with people who can lecture with slides twice a week. This is an incredible amount of work! I can only hope someone learns something.
Now Playing: Red Army * Blues (Song Of The Steppes / Red Army Blues) from A Pagan Place by The Waterboys
Posted by pjm at 9:34 PM | Comments (1)
March 27, 2007
More on the sushi
A few weeks ago I mentioned the candy sushi. There’s a longer, more detailed post about them online now, for that fraction of you who read French. (OK, there are also photos for the rest of us.)
Posted by pjm at 9:03 PM | Comments (1)
February 25, 2007
Your own personal monster
I was getting tired of the blue Gravatar icon coming up for the many of my commenters who never signed up with them. So I installed MonsterID, and made a few little hacks to my local copy of the Gravatar plugin so that if you don’t have a Gravatar, you’ll be assigned a monster.
To expand a little bit, MonsterID randomly constructs a monster from a set of eyes, arms, legs, bodies, and colors. However, the “random” generation has a seed value, and if you give the same seed, you get the same monster. Just like Gravatar, I’m using a hash of the email address provided with the comment, but instead of using it as the database key, I use it as the seed for MonsterID. This means that if you provide the same email address, you get the same monster, and odds are microscopically small that anyone else will get an identical one. (If you don’t leave an email address, it will be truly random, possibly even across multiple views of the same comment.)
I’m still tinkering with the sizes a bit, but for now, enjoy the wonders of whimsical combinatorics.
Now Playing: So Much Water from End Of Amnesia by M. Ward
Posted by pjm at 9:54 PM | Comments (0)
February 7, 2007
Nobody's paying attention
After some minor wrangling, I managed to get my image-hotlinking prevention access rules (based on these instructions) working properly sometime last week.
I still see the dozens of requests referred from various myspace.com profiles in my logs, but the percentage of total traffic by byte is way down relative to the number of requests. It’s obvious that nobody is paying attention to what happens when they try to include the images. I’m seeing profile after profile with broken images in the comment boxes where they’d hoped my images would be.
Ha. I win.
Now Playing: Mesmerise from Mesmerise by Chapterhouse
Posted by pjm at 2:42 PM | Comments (1)
January 29, 2007
Another reason I wonder why eBay is still in business
It doesn’t take too much time spent on eBay to realize that the site is riddled with scams and fraudsters. Why else would they have so many links and “safeguards” in place to “protect” their users?
I’m not suggesting that eBay deliberately encourages scams, or that they don’t care about fraud. I am suggesting that eBay has accepted a certain degree of fraud as an unavoidable cost of doing business, and that they don’t really care about their users being defrauded.
For example:
Check out the feedback for the user whose account was supposedly “hijacked” to bid on our camera. Three positive feedback notes from small purchases, then a wave of negatives and neutrals for expensive electronics. I doubt, frankly, that the account was ever legit in the first place; I think someone started it, made some small purchases to establish a positive reputation, then launched a wave of attempted frauds before discarding the account. There has been no response from the “original” user.
We re-listed and sold the camera for some $50 less than the next-best legitimate bidder on the original auction bid. eBay refunded the “final value fee” for the fraudulent auction, but I had to pay for listing the camera twice. Total losses due to the scam, on the order of $60. eBay’s not coughing that up, I’m pretty sure.
eBay feedback to reports of incidents tends to be along the lines of this incident: send a form letter, make the defrauded party jump through hoops to get partial restitution, etc.
Here’s another story of a serial scammer who was still “in business” on eBay long after local law enforcement had started investigating him for numerous frauds. eBay makes it difficult to leave negative feedback, which keeps innocent users from being smeared, but also discourages victims from speaking up about being scammed, and its hands-off attitude tends to let the criminals off scot-free.
I increasingly think it’s a bad idea to do business with anyone who has less than 99.9% positive feedback, because if 1 in 1,000 users left negative feedback, there are probably ten to fifteen more who just ate their losses rather than jump eBay’s hoops.
I eBay 100% bad? No. Is it a scam magnet? Hell yes. Are most of their buyer protections security theater intended to provide the appearance of safety, rather than any actual protection against criminals? Undoubtedly. Will I avoid it for any transaction likely to go over $200? You bet.
Now Playing: Deacon Blues from A Decade of Steely Dan by Steely Dan
Posted by pjm at 10:24 AM | Comments (2)
January 19, 2007
Around again
I’ve been too busy to wrap up the story of the errant camera.
eBay spotted the fraud not long after I did, and cancelled the bids administratively. Apparently the account belongs to a perfectly legitimate user, but it was “hijacked” (read: legitimate user’s password was compromised, possibly through phishing) and the winning bid was placed by someone else controlling the account. I’m betting that the intent was not to defraud me, but rather to convert the contents of an illicitly-accessed PayPal account into less-traceable merchandise as quickly as possible.
With that bid cancelled, I looked back down the bidding list. I checked out the second-highest bidder and found, after a long string of positive reviews, two recent negative reviews along the lines of, “Never paid for items AVOID AVOID AVOID.” So I sent a “second chance offer” to the third-highest bidder, some forty dollars down the scale from the original “winning” price. That was active for a day and wasn’t taken, so I’ve re-listed the camera.
I’ve registered a dispute for the original “sale,” since supposedly that’s what I need to do in order to get eBay to refund their charge on my account for the fraction of the sale they take as their cut. That, and the resale is really just tedious. Get this thing out of here, huh?
Now Playing: Sooner Or Later from Bang! by World Party
Posted by pjm at 7:38 PM | Comments (0)
January 17, 2007
Export photography
I dusted off the eBay account last week to sell some accumulated stuff. The major item was A’s first professional digital camera, a Kodak DCS620 with no cards, no lenses, and just the one battery. The 620 was Kodak digital guts stuffed in the body of a Nikon F5, and therefore is a big, heavy monster of a camera, particularly next to the (relatively) sleek Nikon D series cameras A has been using since about 2003.
The price wasn’t bad, but things have started getting weird. The invoice address and the user’s shipping address don’t match, but they’re both relatively close to each other in the U.K. Then I got email from the email address listed with the buyer’s account, and it (a) uses a different name than the account does, and (b) asks me to ship to an address in Nigeria “for my son who is traveling in West Africa for a scholarship” and they’re in a hurry because they’re currently traveling in Portugal themselves.
By now the rat smells so bad you can probably smell it too. I’m now 95% certain this “buyer” is a scam, perhaps looting someone else’s PayPal account by converting it into expensive electronics. Here’s how I replied:
I can’t in good conscience send this camera for your son to travel with in West Africa. Did you read the listing carefully? This is one of the heaviest digital cameras ever made, and quite large even without the lens. There is no lens included in the sale, so I would have to assume you already own one. And West Africa, sadly, as you may know, has developed a reputation for fraudsters and scammers; a camera this large would be difficult for your son to protect. You should buy your son a smaller, less expensive camera where you are in Portugal, and send it to him yourself; as I’ve stated in my listing, I won’t be responsible for shipping overseas.
Let’s see how this plays out.
Now Playing: Departure from New Adventures In Hi-Fi by R.E.M.
Posted by pjm at 10:54 PM | Comments (1)
January 14, 2007
Hotlinking solved
I decided not to redirect hotlinks to my images to something obnoxious, though it would have been satisfying for a little while. (I was thinking of, “Image hotlinking suspended until News Corp. pays my bandwidth charges,” but I figure 90% of MySpace users wouldn’t get it anyway.)
Instead, I found this splendid technique which redirects outside requests for .*jpg|.*gif|.*png$ to a PHP script displaying the image with a text credit. Since this is served as text/html, it shows as a broken image if it’s embedded in another page; however, if you use a link to the image, you get the display page. This means you can link to the images, but not embed them in your pages.
Now Playing: Treatment Bound from Hootenanny by The Replacements
Posted by pjm at 1:38 PM | Comments (1)
January 12, 2007
The power of search
And, within two days, I am the #1 hit on Google for “medford parking sticker”. (“Medford parking permit” gets a lot of noise from the University, which provides information about permits for parking on its Medford campus.)
Thanks to Google’s cache, I did find a page on the police department site which provides this information, but (a) it provides inaccurate information, saying the fee is $5 when it’s actually $10, and (b) to find it, you need to pick “Administration” (not “Traffic/Parking”) and then “Central Records,” neither of which are intuitive choices. (I sent an email to the site’s contact address noting both of these things, hopefully with a constructive tone.)
It’s tricky, as a site builder, to know how to steer people around your site. In this case, it’s probably worthwhile for the webmaster to consider five or six simple, common questions that people come to the site trying to answer. “How to get a parking permit” is one. “How to pay a parking ticket” (or traffic ticket) is another one I can’t figure out right away, and probably should be able to. (It turns out this happens on the city’s website, which is significantly worse than MPD’s.) There’s no point in making a site like this “sticky,” nor in pushing a lot of information most people aren’t interested in to the front page. And making the whole site easily indexable is key; I shouldn’t be able to grab the top spot in a search that easily.
Posted by pjm at 9:15 AM | Comments (0)
January 10, 2007
Someone needs to eat eBay's lunch
Someone with a lot of web experience and good venture backing needs to go in and steal eBay’s business.
I suppose I shouldn’t be saying this, since eBay’s founder is an alumnus of the University and has donated a big chunk of change over the last few years. But I spent an hour last night trying to post a simple item listing—with 45 minutes of that spent in a chat window with a customer service rep who never asked what browser I was using and spent most of the time trying to solve a problem which was, to me, secondary (and unnecessary) to the issue I was really having, to wit, the form validation was broken.
Let’s leave aside, just for a moment, the issue of eBay’s own design and layout. Let’s just think about the usability of the forms. If Web 2.0 has taught us anything, it’s that it’s possible to write easy to use forms which require the user to jump through a minimum of hoops to get things done. Also, we’ve learned that not all the internet is using IE 6.0 on Windows. So why am I facing a pseudo-Ajax form which insists that I need to enable PayPal for this listing when (a) it looks to me like PayPal is already enabled, and (b) if I assume it isn’t, there’s no clear way to enable it. (There’s no unclear way, either.)
And why am I faced with customer service which asks me to flush my cache and delete all my cookies before they consider that I may be on a Mac, and may be using Firefox? (Once they learned I was on a Mac, they actually suggested I try Safari instead, which was both amusing and horrifying—is eBay so much of a nightmare for Firefox on Windows as well that Safari does a better job?) I flushed the cache (can’t hurt much) but only deleted eBay and Paypal cookies—I’m not sure they trusted me to do that properly, but I don’t want to lose logged-in sessions on a lot of other sites just because eBay is broken.
So why can’t someone do this better? Well, there are significant barriers to entry, and one of them is brand recognition. Another is the massive ecosystem of small businesses living like barnacles on the eBay ship; how do you recreate them and all the business they send through the parent?
But oh, there must be an easier way to do this. (The same goes for buying airline tickets, while I’m at it.)
Update, 1/11: While I’m at it, can’t I get a feed of items I’m watching? How about items I’m selling? Why should I be bound to the My eBay page? How about better permalinks for auction items? Friendlier URLs, perhaps ones which don’t expose the underlying technology (what if eBay switched to Rails from the DLLs they’re using now? How about if they switch from Rails to something else? Do they break all the URLs?)
Now Playing: She’s So High from Leisure by Blur
Posted by pjm at 10:18 PM | Comments (0)
January 5, 2007
Snappy comeback
I’m beginning to reach the point where I’m getting a little sick of seeing a quarter of my daily bandwidth go to images hotlinked from Myspace. It’s not like putting my URL on the images is drawing any new traffic, and Iz’s birthday-present photo is winding up on some pages which have to represent the bottom 10% of the non-pr0n web.
But more than anything else, I’m beginning to just resent Myspace. At the top level, the site is owned by News Corp. (i.e. a stinking rich media conglomerate) which sees it as a vehicle for aggregating and selling the attention of young people.
Which is fine by me; it’s certainly no worse than television in that regard. But when you put it that way, why am I being asked to contribute resources I pay for—even a small fraction of those resources—with no return? Let’s face it, Rupert Murdoch et al have a lot more spare change than I do. It’s high time I cut them off.
It’s pretty easy to redirect all image requests referred from myspace.com to another image, and the methods are well-documented. But which image? I’m not feeling quite as vindictive as the guy who goatse’d Myspace (although that may rank as one of the widest-scale practical jokes I’ve ever heard about.) A few choice lines expressing my point of view would be sufficient. But which ones?
- No taxation without representation?
- It’s your space, but it’s my bandwidth?
- TANSTAAFL?
- Something else? Suggestions welcome.
Now Playing: Somebody That I Used To Know from Figure 8 by Elliott Smith
Posted by pjm at 9:06 AM | Comments (1)
January 1, 2007
Looking back
I made very few tweaks to the wish list site this fall, but somewhere along the line my quick hack to add an affiliate code to any Amazon links actually started working. (I’m mystified as to how it works now but didn’t before, but I won’t question it.) Between mid-November and the end of December, affiliate fees from the Wish List rung up around $35, which is pretty close to paying my hosting fees for the past three Decembers. That’s pretty cool.
I’d particularly like to thank someone who put a massively expensive medical textbook on their Christmas list. (Unless there are other med students using this that I don’t know about…)
Now Playing: You Had Time from Out Of Range by Ani DiFranco
Posted by pjm at 10:30 AM | Comments (2)
Plans and decisions
I’ve been wishy-washy here for a year about what happens when I finish my MS at the end of the spring semester.
For the last month, it’s been increasingly clear that I’m not ready to move on to the Ph.D. For one thing, I haven’t lit on one area that sets me on fire, one thing I’m willing to devote three or four years of research to. Without that, I think going on is probably a bad idea for everyone. For another, the open doors have been closing; Professor β has decided I’m not such a great fit for her group (basically, my math skills are deficient, and I’d have to spend some time catching up,) and Professor Γ didn’t get the grant she wanted to fund me with. I could still try to work with Professor Σ, and I will be doing my MS work with him, but I’m starting way behind.
So it looks like I will take my paper in May and run. (Actually, I will be automatically rolled into the Ph.D. program, whereupon I will immediately go “on leave” for an indefinite period.) I’ve been talking with another student in the same situation, and he and I have been cooking ideas for a little website which we may try to turn into a going concern once we’re finished in May. I’ll post more as it becomes interesting. (Other than it being a website, it’s not an area I’ve worked in before, so let’s not get too excited yet. It’s the technology that interests me.) That will probably mean a lot of work, some of which is actually starting tomorrow.
But yes, of course this new project will have a weblog, too. Isn’t that the first thing after the business plan, nowadays?
Now Playing: Wings from Hello Starling by Josh Ritter
Posted by pjm at 10:19 AM | Comments (3)
December 30, 2006
75 days of Facebook
Back in October, I signed up for Facebook. This experiment has led to some interesting results, some of which I anticipated, and others which I didn’t.
I expected I would wind up networked largely to “my” students, the CS undergraduates either in my classes or in the research group I’m a mentor for. Two of them have “friended” me, but the vast majority of my “friends” here at the University are from… the women’s cross-country team, through A.
For someone who spends as much time as I do writing letters (e.g. weblog posts) to people I’ve never met, I shouldn’t be surprised that I have six “friends” I’ve never met in real life.
I expected to see other adults-working-with-younger-people on my friends list (there are two coaches and an “academic advisor” there) but the rabbi was a bit of a surprise.
This was the second of three “social networking” sites I’ve joined which are explicitly about the networking. (Some others, like Flickr or last.fm, aren’t centered around the network; I don’t really count them.) The first I joined at the explicit request of someone doing research, and essentially let it sit (I log in perhaps once a year.) I turn out to be a bad network node, because I hate sending friend requests. What if this other person has different standards for what counts as a friend? What if they haven’t used the service in months and hate the emails? What if we have a different concept of our relationship? So I wait for my friends to telepathically sense that I’m on the service, and send me a friend request. Because I tend to be friends with people like me, you can imagine that this doesn’t scale very well. (This whole paragraph is a passive-aggressive invitation.)
Related to another project, I also joined LinkedIn, which I like simply because the whole point of the service is “grow your network.” I’ve managed to ping a whole bunch of college connections, one of whom has provided some useful advice already.
Now Playing: Girl In The War from The Animal Years by Josh Ritter
Posted by pjm at 8:35 PM | Comments (1)
December 28, 2006
These aren't the pages you're looking for
In which I repeat a cheap and over-done joke because I still find it funny.
Search terms by which people have found this site (with answers):
how to get rid of saddlebags— Unclip them from your bike and put ‘em on Freecycle. Duh.i ran until my muscles burned and my veins pumped battery acid once a runner— Except that the quote is from Fight Club.pdr swimming pride movie stream— I’ve got nothing.panic icon— You’re looking for this.
Posted by pjm at 12:59 PM | Comments (0)
December 5, 2006
Stupid web tricks
Guess what? If you search either Google or Yahoo for “boloco medford hours”, this site is the top two links.
Obviously, the best place to find this information should be the actual Boloco site. Two big problems, though: one, it’s entirely in Flash, so Bog help any search engine trying to figure out what’s really on the site. The only plain text there is the title and the URL, which say nothing about hours.
And even if they did… the Medford location says only, “Opening in late November!”
Have I mentioned how much I love it when companies really get the web?!?
Update: They’re aware of the problem—see the comments.
Now Playing: The Whole of the Moon from This Is the Sea by The Waterboys
Posted by pjm at 8:53 AM | Comments (3)
November 28, 2006
Short strokes
A few weeks ago—I forget the context—I used the phrase “short strokes” and then had to explain what I meant. (It’s a golf metaphor, apparently, and not in wide use; now I can’t figure out where I picked it up.) But now that’s the best way to describe the semester. There are two weeks to go, we’ve drawn up our checklists of what needs to be taught/programmed/completed/graded in that time, and we’re just trying to get to the end of it.
When a former roommate and I were toying with learning to play golf, we used to go to a local driving range once or twice a week. We never, to my recollection, ever actually played golf; we just went to the driving range. I don’t think he even owned a full set of clubs, just three big drivers. Putting is what’s fundamentally frustrating about golf; everything else is whaling the skin off a little white ball, which is satisfying if you don’t slice like I do. So we’d get a medium bucket of balls (each) and try to smack them out of sight until our shoulders were sore.
The presentation went off today, I was barely prepared and took my lumps for it. (The draft I handed in a week before has not yet come back; I expect to take some lumps there, too, but I’m hoping to at least have a final paper that stands on its own.) I have a slew of coding and lab-sheet-writing and re-experiment-running to do over the next two weeks; I have my checklist written, the list of due dates lined up like wood that needs splitting, but no map of when to split it. There is no driving left; it is all putting.
I’m not the only grad student scratching at putting together my data and making it work. Scott is gathering data for his research, too, and while you can’t help me gather data (unless you ran Boston last spring, in which case you already have, thanks,) you can help him, particularly if you have a weblog. Read, understand, and give him a hand; we can’t push the ball into the hole, but at least we can give him a good lie.
Now Playing: Little Wing from Still in Hollywood by Concrete Blonde
Posted by pjm at 5:11 PM | Comments (0)
November 19, 2006
Bad user agent! No cookie!
Spotted this evening on weather.com:
Funny, I thought Firefox was a good user agent…
Posted by pjm at 7:01 PM | Comments (0)
October 29, 2006
Stellar
I’ve long been annoyed by websites which insist on opening links outside the site in new windows. If I want to keep your page up, I fume to myself, I’ll open the link in a new tab.
But in the new Firefox (or at least the build I have) if a site attempts to open a link in a new window using the “target=’new’” strategy, the browser automatically opens it in a new tab instead. (New windows opened with Javascript are unaffected.) How ever-so-useful.
Now Playing: Blood Roses from Boys For Pele by Tori Amos
Posted by pjm at 3:49 PM | Comments (0)
October 26, 2006
The new Mac Firefox builds
For those who still find me when looking for opinions about Firefox on Mac OS X, I finally got around to updating the processor-specific build I’ve been using to the new 2.0 release. It’s no longer called Deer Park; now it’s Bon Echo.
Now Playing: Wild Flower from Electric by The Cult
Posted by pjm at 8:20 PM | Comments (1)
October 15, 2006
Secret message to anyone tempted to include an automatically-playing audio clip in your web page
Don’t. Just don’t.
(In what contexts do you expect your audience to be viewing your page? In what contexts do you think your music, often blasting from their speakers at un-calibrated volume, will be appropriate? Odds are you’re going to tick them off more than entertain them.)
Posted by pjm at 8:00 PM | Comments (0)
August 26, 2006
Open training data formats
While I’m shooting my mouth off about how other people ought to be doing things (and I’m incubating some more detailed and technical thoughts on that particular topic, incidentally,) I’ve had some cause to think about training logs, particularly online ones, in recent days.
I’m skating on pretty thin ice when I talk about online training logs. For one thing, I keep my logs on paper—six or eight of the John Jerome né Jim Fixx logs from Random House, a few more random notebooks, etc. This year’s log is an IAAF pocket appointment calendar, and has the dates of all the major international races in it.
Also, I was partly responsible for one of the uglier and less-functional running logs on the web, back in the day; I’ve blocked most of that experience out of my memory, but in a quick 20/20 hindsight evaluation, we tried to do too much fancy stuff without getting the basics right.
On the other hand, through that experience, I have thought a lot about training logs, and I’ve actually been paid to write a quick review of some PalmOS-based logs. (Remember?)
Here’s one problem with every computer-based log I’ve ever seen: every athlete tracks different data. There is no simple way of describing RDBMS tables to allow for every idiosyncratic log habit. You need to accommodate both the old-school runner whose log is simply a wall calendar where they check off days they ran (or, at most, note the time) and the new-school data hound who is uploading HRM data, has a library of regular routes, and is tracking mileage on three rotating pairs of shoes. (This is a puzzle in itself; you need an entire table for shoes.) I used to track not only weekly mileage but my mileage over a trailing four-week window. Different data is generated by different kinds of runs, ranging from a normal training run to track work to racing. And, if you’re not convinced yet, consider triathlon training.
The other problem is linked to the first: lock-in. Spend a few months using any log, and you have a few months of valuable training data locked up in that software without an easy way of getting it back out, even if the log isn’t doing what you want from it. Most web log developers see this lock-in as a feature, keeping users coming back week after week, but I think it’s a roadblock; users like me are reluctant to try new logs because we’re afraid we’ll be putting our training data in jail, like dropping money into a piggy bank that can’t be reopened. I’ve seen some logs nod to the idea of data export by producing flat pages of data which may be printed out. Printed out! On paper! Talk about regression.
And yet logging is a critical tool for runners of all levels. A log lets you step back from your day-in-day-out training and see what you’ve actually done; it shows your strengths and weaknesses, and it can show you where you screwed up and incurred injury or fatigue. A computer-based log offers the (as yet unrealized, as far as I know) potential to perform more intricate analysis, visualize data in clear and illuminating ways, and share both raw and summarized data with coaches and other advisors. It’s too useful a tool to be discarded simply because it’s difficult, and that’s why people are still trying.
So what we need is a flexible data model which allows a wide variety of data but mandates little, and applications which provide for import and export.
The thing is, I think it’s possible to create that now. Specifically, I think it’s possible to describe such a data model in an XML Schema or DTD. Any application implementation which could read and write XML data conforming to that schema/DTD would then be free to store the data however it chose (potentially competing on performance,) or even to simply leave the data in XML and compete on ease of use. What’s more, by divorcing the data model from the application, it would be hypothetically possible for athletes to maintain their own data store, adding training sessions using whatever application they chose (on whatever platform was convenient!) and viewing and analyzing the data using potentially different applications.
Developers would be freed from creating end-to-end solutions; because they would be working with a standard data model, they could create data input managers customized to specific athletes or training programs, analysis engines, or even coaching bots. They could stop trying to lock in the few early adopters, and compete on features for a potentially much larger market. Also, it would open the doors to apples-to-apples comparison of aggregate training data, which might give a lift to the creative training commons we discussed a few months ago.
This might count as wishful thinking, but I think it stands up. Creating the schema would take a lot of work, and getting developers to buy in would take even more. I think the rewards would be significant, though, and worth the trouble.
Now Playing: It’s All Too Much from A Box Of Birds by The Chu