My father IM’d me this afternoon because he wanted to comment on my article about Digg vs Mixx. Apparently no one could register and no one could comment on my blog as a result. I had initially turned it all off so that I didn’t have to deal with spammers and the like but I had forgotten to turn it all back on once I had some countermeasures in place. Oops.
I spend a pretty equal amount of time on both sites. On Digg I mostly go to read whereas on Mixx I go to participate in a community. Both get me my news and both deliver different content, but it got me to thinking… what makes these two sites so different?
If you Digg this then you Dugg this.
The typical workflow at Digg is that you go, submit an article, people digg or bury it and if it’s popular and makes it through their algorithm it makes it to the front page. If you aren’t up for submitting something you can just read the articles, make comments, and digg or bury them. The comment stream at Digg is really great. Sure there is a lot of stupid stuff, but the user participation is fantastic. It’s not uncommon to see a few hundred comments on an article. Furthermore - you can actually digg or bury the comments. If people are saying stupid stuff then they can be burried so no one has to look at them. If you leave a good comment then it can be dugg up so you and everyone else can see what the community is thinking about things today.
More after the jump…
The fine folks at Twitter have been talking about a search feature for quite some time now. They never actually pulled it off since they were busy focusing on stabilizing the platform and restoring functionality to the service. Off in the distance, a website called Summize rose up and filled that void. The nice thing about Summize is that it was able to provide a realtime query into what’s going on in Twitter without having to visit the actual Twitter website. It also proved to be a solid failover for developers for when Twitter had gone down or was busy firing off whales like a mad man. Aside from that, there was no real cap on the number of API requests one could make in a given time frame. It just worked. Period.
Well I had a smooth upgrade to Wordpress 2.6. No problems. I also changed themes at the same time. Not entirely sure if I like this or not. The Hemmingway stuff from the previous one was pretty awesome. Maybe I’ll try to combine to two into a super theme of sorts. For now this one will stay though because it feels more readable and comfortable.
Like it? Loathe it? Tell me.
Update 7/15/2008:
I was informed today by James Januszka (http://twitter.com/jamesjanuszka) that if you were not logged into the site and you tried to view a full article that it would not work properly. I apologize for that and spent some quality time with the theme working out what was going on. Apparently there was a missing close div tag. The author of the theme still denies that there was a bug and insists it is a conflict with plugins in Wordpress. If anyone is looking to use “Hello :D” and needs the fix, let me know.
I decided to start writing a little series of articles based on the lessons I’ve learned in writing code the uses twitter, using twitter itself, and just generally getting the most out of it. This is the first one, and maybe there will be more depending on how I like it.
The Problem - Why You Should Care
Other sites that you pull content from are not always going to be reliable. They could be down, running slow, or some other possible problem. If you are using something like twitter to display your status on your site but you have a lot of other content you want people to see then it would be wise to use client-side scripting to get the content. You might be saying in your head “Oh but I have this sweet PHP script that does that for me.” but you should tell that voice in your head to shut up and just listen.
Welcome back to the saga of Patrick’s battle with the Chinese. When we left our hero, he thought he had battled off the Chinese internet registrar and the government in a few short emails. Alas, he was wrong. Carol had one more thing to attempt to sell to him. Sensing that this was a scam of some sort, and not really caring about who looks at his lowly blog in China, he decided it would be fun to start messing with them.
If you haven’t read the previous posting about this nonsense then you should probably do so. Basically a Chinese company contacted me with some nonsense about someone wanting to buy my name in China and wanted to know if I would allow this. I said no, and they started trying to convince me to register the names with them… and then this happened…
UPDATE: I had taken this down since I didn’t want to blow my cover but it looks like they realized I was onto their game. I believe this company that has contacted me is actually just trying to screw people in other countries out of money by threatening them with fake companies. If that’s not the case and they are reading this then I’d like to see some proof otherwise. The rest of the emails will come shortly when I have time.
I know. I know. There are plenty of questions going through your head right now upon reading the title of this… How could this possibly happen? Why do they want some Irish/Polish mixed name? Don’t they have enough to do with the Olympics this year? How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie pop?
Well, I’m as bewildered as you are. Let me start at the beginning since it was only this morning and I am pretty sure I can re-count it.
I woke up to my blackberry going off next to me for an emergency email. No one sends me emergency emails, with the exception of the Chinese government, so naturally I had a look see. I skimmed it quickly and determined it could wait until morning because they did not say anything about me needing to wake up immediately and get dressed.
I won’t sit here and proclaim myself to be some god of Grease Monkey but I do know a thing or two about Java Script. Basically, for those of you who are clueless as to what Grease Monkey is, it’s a plugin for Firefox that allows you to manipulate certain pages you visit using Java Script. Now that we know what it is and have tons of ideas flowing through our heads, let’s just do something kinda cool.
Today we’re going to beat up on certain gallery pages that use images of the format “imageName.sized.jpg”. What I mean by this is - we’re going to take the page (which is usually filled with junk) and replace everything with just the full size image and the caption.
Let’s get some assumptions out of the way:
You know SOME Java Script, the site you’re visiting also has the non-sized images in the same directory as the sized images, and you don’t care what else is on the web page. We’re also assuming there is only one caption with no “id” and we only have a style class to work with.
Ok? Ok. Let’s go.
Dawned on me the other day that this blog was kind of a pain in the eyes to read. That’s what I get for not taking the time to make my own theme for Wordpress.
What I did was I made most of the fonts on the page black, but this had some negative affects in terms of not being able to read the text on some of the black spots on the page. I’m working on it, I know. Just want to let everyone know I’m aware.
One of the other things that was pretty annoying was the slow page load time when my twitter status is loading. I handled that with some PHP to verify the URL of the page you’re looking at and I also moved the javascript to the very bottom of the site before the end of the body tag. This makes sure that only pages where the twitter status is shown will actually load the javascript AND it also makes sure that the rest of the page loads in a timely manner so you don’t need to wait around for my status if you want to read something else.
Just some usability metrics that I had to handle and I thought I’d mention them. I’ll be doing another article on the PHP used to handle the twitter status probably later on this week.
A screen name is something you use to communicate with friends and the internet at large. It is who you are when you sit down at the keys and get to spreading your word. Some people are more than comfortable to step away from this screen name and get out there into the real world. Afterall, that screen name has done nothing but chat on AIM, Yahoo Messenger, or something else along those lines. Sure it might have a few frags in Counter Strike, but unless you are playing competitively, no one really calls you by THAT name.
There are the other people that dwell on the internet and use it for socializing or a means of communication with people in the outside world. Social networking and building communities and websites with a “screen name” can draw away from what you have actually accomplished and steal away some of the recognition you deserve.
