Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site

September 17th, 2007 web

You probably knew this already, but here is a choice quote:

‘What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others,’ “

Content not container?

XRAY vision for web developers

August 8th, 2007 web

This is sweet.

One of my most used web development tools just got some serious competition. I have used MODi for a couple years now, and really haven’t dug into all the advanced usage of it, but XRAY looks pretty nice indeed.

I never jumped on the firebug train, mostly because Firefox on OSX is so dang SLOW. I much prefer Camino, thankyouverymuch.

What’s in your webdev toolbox these days?

Andy Warhol eats a Cheeseburger

August 4th, 2007 web

As advertised.

I-35 Collapse

August 3rd, 2007 web

UneasySilence pointed me to these pictures
of the I-35 bridge collapse this morning. I don’t have a TV, so I haven’t been saturated with cable news coverage. Very creepy pictures, but more importantly, it has me thinking about the growth of citizen-media and how (and where) I get my news and information.

I get my mainstream news via Yahoo News on the treo during the commute. I will pop into CNN once in a while (mostly for their funny headlines).

I’m also old-school in the AM : Coffee and the Chronicle.

playing in the sandbox

July 29th, 2007 web

I’ve been keeping my eye on the Sandbox Design Competition, looking forward to seeing what people come up with for the Sandbox Wordpress theme, and a few are starting to pop up. The results are supposed to be posted on Aug 2.

My favorite so far is Moo-Point by Will Wilkins. Will’s W2 is no slouch of a theme either, if you happen to be theme shopping.

I had been playing with the CSS on the site a bit but not nearly enough to bring it up to snuff. I’m sure there will be some more to sample, so don’t be surprised if you see the site changing in the evenings, or quite possibly horribly disfigured from time to time.

I love the idea of the thorough, logical, semantic markup of the theme, making it totally skinnable via CSS. Great stuff. Thanks Andy! Thanks Scott!

My Parents and the Internet

July 24th, 2007 web

Mom joined Facebook, and within a day she her third friend was a former Senator and one-time Presidential candidate.

She is on her way to becoming fully Web 2.0 compliant with flickr and del.icio.us (one bookmark so far, this blog, natch). Not sure if she’s a Metafilter user yet.

Dad isn’t bothering with the social web, but he did fessed up to getting a “D” in chemistry (but also slipped in the phrase “dual matriculated”) in this interview at Huskerpedia on his football playing days. Dad’s post-college career more than made up for that “D”, by the way.

Good stuff.

Tuning in to Facebook

July 15th, 2007 web

When I was a kid, my family would go to my Grandparents’ house every month or so. There wasn’t a lot to do there in Newcastle, Nebraska (pop. 312), but one of my favorite things to do was to dust off my Grandpa’s short-wave radio and tune in whatever happened to be broadcasting at the time. It was an amazing portal to far-away places, with professional, amateur, foreign and domestic broadcasts weaved through electronic blips and bleeps fading in and out of the static at each slight touch of the dial.

There were people out there who had something to say, not that I could understand half of it, - but it was fascinating.

In the same way, my initial introduction to the web way-back-when struck the same chord, and my first thought was, “How do I participate in this?” (The answer : Bum a “Teach yourself HTML” book from Sydney, and find a server. No free blogging platforms in 1995, unfortunately.)

I never gave much thought about Facebook. After playing around with Friendster and MySpace, I tuned out. There really wasn’t room in my life for another buddy-counting site. Beyond the benefit (?) of a public display of having twelve or fifteen friends, there wasn’t much networking in the ’social networking’ space for me. I knew how to get in touch with the people I needed to get in touch with, and they knew how to get in touch with me.

After reading Scoble’s recent enthusiasim for Facebook, not to mention some good coverage at Webware I decided to create my own account and start playing around, and I am impressed.

Beyond the buddy-building ego-stroaking basics, Facebook has unlimited groups and a growing number of applications which make it a much richer, and more customizable experience than the other sites.

So, I added the CNET Facebook app (natch), and LastFM, twitter, MyFlickr, and del.icio.us apps. I added myself to the Minutemen, and Our Band could be your Life groups, and added a slew of friends.

I’m now importing these blog posts as Facebook notes, and today I set up the Google reader shared items app. (thanks for the tip, Robert!).

So, now what?

Now I am relatively hooked-in to Facebook with the sites and applications I use daily, and hopefully, my broadcasting into Facebook-space will be transparent from my end. I’m less interested in putting energy into building up an address book full of high-school and college acquaintances, but much more interested to see how the integrations will work for me, while I do what I’d do normally.

We’ll see.

Am I the media? If you define that as broadcasting as efficiently as possible, then, yes.

I’m looking forward to see who might tune-in.

web 2.0 trifecta!

July 10th, 2007 web

Whew! I was sweating it a bit. With Pownce being in beta and private invite and all, I was starting to get worried that someone would scoop the username ‘bernie’. So concerned was I that I hit Technorati and Google Blog search looking for posts advertising “pownce invites” and left a few requests in comments. That’s all it took and one kind soul gave me the hook-up.

So, you might find me ‘lifestreaming’ away at:

http://pownce.com/bernie/
http://bernie.jaiku.com/
or (more likely) http://twitter.com/bernie

And, of course, link streaming at http://del.icio.us/bernie/

Interested in Pownce, leave a comment and I will return the invite karma.

CNET Blogs : We have lift-off

June 23rd, 2007 web

For anyone involved with making websites, whether it’s your new blog on a hosted service or a large project involving months and months of planning and development, it’s gratifying to see your work opened to the public. Last week we launched a new effort at CNET : CNET Blogs.

Blogging isn’t new to CNET, but we’re providing a new view into the latest and most popular blogs by aggregating all blog content at blogs.cnet.com. Also new is the CNET blog network which brings together a diverse group of bloggers, and they are generating some great posts!

Faves so far:

The Open Road, by Matt Asay
Matt is a prolific blogger, and anyone with interest in Open Source business and community will find this essential reading.

The Macalope: An Apple Blog, by the Macalope (who else?)
The worlds only part man, part computer, part Bovidae non-pundit blogger.

The Web Services Report, by Harrison Hoffman
An intelligent addition to the Web 2.0 discussion.

Plus lots more, with more to come, so stay tuned!

is microsoft using referer spam?

June 6th, 2007 web

Well, this is interesting.

Being the good web nerd, blog stats fanatic that I am, I check in a couple times a day to the different web analytics programs I have set up for the site. i’ve been toying with slimstat, google analytics, and the Wordpress.com stats plugin. Each has its own benefits, but that isn;t what this post is about.

I saw a curious referer from a search for “infiniti” from live.com

But i knew right away… I don’t write about cars on my blog.

Even more interesting is that the request came from an ip address @ Microsoft.

Now, it would really be silly if Microsoft thought it was a good idea to referer spam blogs like mine aspiring to make it to the c-list blogger tier in order to drive traffic to search.live.com, wouldn’t it? I wonder if text ads for “infiniti” cost much these days?

I can’t really explain how the referer happened, since the term “infiniti” hasn’t been on the site until now.

Here is a snip from the logfile:

131.107.0.96 - - [06/Jun/2007:21:07:12 -0700] “GET /wp-content/themes/sandbox/skins/bluno.css HTTP/1.1″ 200 2929 “http://www.bluno.org/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2; Win64; x64; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)”
131.107.0.96 - - [06/Jun/2007:21:07:12 -0700] “GET / HTTP/1.1″ 200 37905 “http://search.live.com/result.aspx?q=infiniti&mrt=en-us&FORM=LVSP” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2; Win64; x64; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)”
131.107.0.96 - - [06/Jun/2007:21:07:12 -0700] “GET /wp-content/plugins/audio-player/audio-player.js HTTP/1.1″ 200 791 “http://www.bluno.org/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2; Win64; x64; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)”
131.107.0.96 - - [06/Jun/2007:21:07:12 -0700] “GET /wp-content/themes/sandbox/stylebluno.css HTTP/1.1″ 200 5313 “http://www.bluno.org/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2; Win64; x64; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)”
131.107.0.96 - - [06/Jun/2007:21:07:13 -0700] “GET /wp-content/plugins/falbum/falbum.css.php HTTP/1.1″ 200 15426 “http://www.bluno.org/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2; Win64; x64; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)”
131.107.0.96 - - [06/Jun/2007:21:07:13 -0700] “GET /wp-content/plugins/google-analyticator/ga_external-links.js HTTP/1.1″ 200 2281 “http://www.bluno.org/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2; Win64; x64; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)”

I mean, that would be a really dumb move on Microsoft’s part, right?

Update: hmm… a few minutes more research turns up this at webmaster world:

What happens is:

- they build an index.
- it has errors in it.
- they run a util on high value kws that flags possible problems for a hand check.
- they do the hand check and delete obvious mistakes.

I guess I can buy that, but it would be sad that their search index could be so wildly error prone.. I sure hope word doesn’t leak out about it!