Recently in WWW Category

So, Zeldman's missed three distinct warning that his Flickr Pro account was about to expire. He wrote about it. He got feedback. He wrote about it again. In-between I made snarky comments in my del.icio.us entries (it's just like leaving a comment, only different!). My basic point on the first was that just because he had a problem with Flick, it didn't automatically make it a usability problem. My second point was that his idea that there is such a thing as usable to "all users" is just insane. I'm not saying that you shouldn't strive for 100% coverage, because that will make your site better, but there is no perfect score in this game. Ever.

I understand that his blog is his soap box when he wants it to be, and that's dandy. Go shout from the mountain tops! Let it rip! Say what's on your mind. But if you're on a popular box and you start speaking crazy talk, you should expect a few people to point and whisper about the crazy guy talking to the rocks.

I'm just sayin'...but enough about Zeldman, I've been neglecting my rocks.

From The Cron

Take Brian Hall, a Berkeley man who recently quit his job making video games to work on other projects. His transition will be eased by the $450 a month his pirate-themed Web site (http://beej.us/pirates/)brings in through ad revenue. Number of hours Hall spends on his Web site per week: 0.

Go beej! Although, truth be told...I'll always think of him as a Pizza Man.

A long time ago, in the same city I'm living in now, I taught workshops at CSU, Chico for Student Computing. The topics were E-mail, Using the Internet, and Beginning HTML. During the one about the Internet (you see, back in those days there was only one Internet) I would give a super-brief history as well as a bit of my personal opinion on it's strengths and weaknesses.

The best thing about the Internet is that it allows anyone to publish what they want. The worst thing about the Internet is that it allows anyone to publish what they want.

Back in those days USENET was the worlds biggest water cooler. Today it's the plethora of weblogs and "community sites" (think Daily Kos or slashdot). With the increase of publishers the problem of finding "good" writing gets harder. Various "solutions" have popped up to try and deal with this issue. Weblogs have "The A-list" and community sites have karma, rankings, and all kinds of crazy bells and whistles to try and get the cream to rise to the top. Now, while these tactics help, they are not foolproof by any stretch of the imagination and they leave out some really great writing. Alas, no scheme that deals with subjective rankings can ever be "perfect."

My friend Greg and I often muse about what we read on the internets (kids today and all their internets, they don't know how good they have it). From time to time I will get notes from Greg that are so brilliantly succinct that I feel they must be shared.

For my money, there's only two tech pundits worth reading today. I hesitate to even use the word pundit in relationship to what these guys do because it diminishes their output. These guys are hardcore analysts baby!

Greg is referring to John Gruber and John Siracusa of Daring Fireball and Ars Technica, respectively.

Both have a Mac bent certainly, especially Gruber. However they branch out into non Mac topics. Regardless of the subject matter, just enjoying these guys really take apart a subject is educational.

Educational. To me, that is the whole point of the internets. That they do it in an entertaining way is icing on the cake. I would also add Whiskey Bar to this list. When I read a post there I learn about history, politics, and economics -- typically all at the same time.

All of them make me want to be a better writer. Of course I will not get better without practicing, no matter how much I read.

I couldn't resist...It's such a lame joke and hardly anybody "gets it" and yet I felt it had to be done.

Maybe "Oh, I'm also Spartacus" will go on the back.

Yesterday after reading a few rants about how nobody seems to want to make money off their work I remembered there was a site that really seemed to be the poster child for the profitless Web 2.0. But try as I might, I couldn't remember the damn URL. I tried Google. I tried my Google search history (No...you can't see it). I tried my del.icio.us bookmarks. I tried e-mailing Scott. Nothing. Nada. Bupkis.

"I guess it couldn't have been that great."

Then today at work I was going over it in my head...it had this stupid iTunes uploader thing which was horribly broken, as was their del.icio.us importer (turns out that you can totally XSS hack this place), and I read about it one one of the more popular design blogs. Well, that was the only hint that Scott needed. 15 seconds later he had it. Riffs. It's marked "Alpha" because "Beta" is so 2004.

So Bloglines had some scheduled downtime today to move data centers and their downtime plumber guy got all piratey!

It made it almost worth it.

There is no TLD for .ey, which really stinks. I was hoping to get do.nk.ey.