New Yahoo Search

Meta,

Yahoo has flipped the switch and is no longer using Google for their search. (Some technical details.) The question on everybody’s mind: Is Yahoo’s search better than Google’s? Yes. Why do I think so?

  1. Results are given as an ordered list, or <ol>, which is a good thing.
  2. It shows 20 results instead of just 10.
  3. You have an option by each result to open it in a new window.
  4. They are somehow detecting RSS feeds for sites that have them, and linking to them directly and also allowing you to add them to My Yahoo. They seem to have gotten my RDF file instead of my RSS 2.0 file, which is prefered, but no worries. I’ve been meaning to replace that with a 301 redirect lately anway.
  5. It is much better designed.
  6. But the best reason to use Yahoo? I’m the #2 hit for “Matt”. Yes, even ahead of that Drudge clown.

What? Were you expecting me to check for any other search terms?

A quick trip to MyCroft and you can make Yahoo your default search engine for Firefox. Easy as pie.

Highly Confidential

Uncategorized

I love it when I get forwards that, several people back in the forward chain, have something like the following:

This communication, including any attachments, is intended solely for the confidential use of the person(s) named above and is the property of [name removed]. If you have received this communication in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete/destroy the original. Any reader other than the intended recipient is hereby notified that any review, dessemination, distribution or copying of this message is strictly prohibited.

CSS Style Competition

Uncategorized

There is still time to get your entries in for the WordPress CSS style competition, with the top prize currently at $70. Not bad for making a single CSS file. What’s great is no matter who gets the prize, the community wins as each entry is licensed under the GPL.

Update: It finished up with 38 entries, many of them quite good. Yes that’s 38 different designs you can use on your new WordPress blog after just updating one line. We might even automate that step too. 🙂

Best Postcard Ever

Personal, Photolog

My friend Becca just returned from the Dominican Republic where she taught English at several local schools and an orphanage for a couple of weeks. I’ve read over her notes from the trip and they sound really interesting, I hope she publishes them somewhere. When she came back she brought a “postcard” that was actually a picture she had taken on this gorgeous beach, “behind El Morro en Monti Cristi.”

1/30/04, Hi Matt! - Rebecca

It says:

1/30/04
Hi Matt!
– Rebecca

What I would give to be on that beach right now!

Orkut Cracking?

Uncategorized

I have been surprised that so far Orkut has remained amazingly responsive even under the incredible traffic I’m sure they’ve been getting. I still stand by my opinion that Orkut will be a success, however when trying to log in just now I was greeted with not one, but four distinct error messages each time I reloaded. This outage has been the exception rather than the rule, so I’m not particularly worried. (I still remember the day Google returned an error when I did a search.) For entertainment more than anything the screenshots of the errors are below. The first one is very verbose, more than what you usually see on production websites.

First Orkut Error Second Orkut Error Third Orkut Error Final Orkut Error

Link Archiver

Ideas,

(Pardon my verbification.)

Here’s an idea for any website, though it could be particularly applicable to weblogs. I’m a reading junkie, I can’t get enough. When I come across a blog I like I often go back in its archives, which is a great way to get a feel for a site. It’s fascinating to see how some blogs have evolved over the years, how posting styles evolve, and to see what people were thinking around the time of important events.

There is one common thread in every archive I browse, I constantly run across dead links. Long-dead links. Dead permalinks even. I have read that the average life-span of a web page is 100 days—I think that may be generous. What good is the wonderful archiving of modern weblog software if those archives become irrelevant less than a year after they’re written?

I think the answer lies in some kind of automatic archiving of all linked content. When you publish a new post an intelligent spider tied to your blog engine could go and grab the content of the page you link to and store it locally. Once a week the spider checks all links on your weblog and if the resource no longer exists it updates the link in the entry to point to the locally archived version. The local archive would have a disclaimer and a link to the original location of the resource, much like Google’s cache. The link in the entry could also be modified in some way, perhaps with a different CSS class or rel value than normal links. The engine could also alert you so you could be sure to be wary of that website or publisher in the future.

How hard would this be? I know there are copyright issues that I’m ignoring, but I don’t forsee that being something that would hold this back. I doubt copyright holders who can’t keep their URIs cool are going to devote many resources to tracking down blogs violating their missing content. Besides, this could be covered.

I could see this done as a centralized service, something like Technorati meets Furl, but that would really defeat the purpose. Decentralization is the path of the future.

On Orkut

Asides, , ,

What can I say, I like it. Orkut is a new social networking site funded by Google that takes the best of all the other sites out there and rolls it into one fast system. Let me emphasize fast. I gave up on Friendster because I’m not patient enough to wait minutes for every screen to load. I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this, but every site I’ve tried so far (with the exception of LinkedIn) feels like it’s held together by spit and duck tape and run on a 486. Not to mention the atrocious markup.

A neat thing about Orkut is that it’s invitation-only, so everyone there is connected to the original seed guy and programmer (whose name is Orkut, incidentally) which I think is an interesting idea. Scott Allen (who has a great new WordPress-powered blog) says that’s the most innovative thing about Orkut.

Scott remarked to me that he didn’t see Orkut flourishing the same way Ryze or Linkedin have because it mixes the personal and business aspect of things, while those two are mainly for business networking and only flirt with personal aspects. It’s too soon to tell, but I think Orkut is going to be a big success. It does a lot of things right.

So go check it out, and if you’re having trouble getting in let me know and I’ll send you an invite. If you’re already on, introduce yourself.

Only In Texas

Humor

Just in time for the Superbowl, Homer Simpson let loose on US nuclear weapons facility.

In the first incident, highly-skilled operatives inadvertently drilled into the warhead’s core, provoking a full-scale evacuation of Pantex. They later made a second Chernobylesque blunder by bodging a highly-explosive warhead part back together with tape.

Had they subsequently dropped the component, the likely outcome would have been a “violent reaction”, with “potentially unacceptable consequences”, as safety board chairman John T. Conway rather conservatively put it.

Hat tip: evilbunny on #hwug.

Back In Town

Personal

The ride back from Austin earlier tonight was a delight. The stars were gorgeous, I felt like the only person on the road, and the music was excellent. The trip was enjoyable and a much-needed break. On Saturday I also had the pleasure of having lunch with Jacques Distler. His links may be terribly crufty but his markup is impeccable and most importantly he’s a swell guy. Before I knew what happened we had already talked almost two hours, and the conversation could have continued for many more. If two bloggers meet and no one takes a picture it didn’t happen, so I took the oppurtunity to try out the new phone camera and snapped this:

Jacques Distler

Enjoy it, I paid 25 cents to send that to myself. I need a bluetooth dongle.

We discussed, amoung many things, comment spam and crap-flooding. The conversation foreshadowed the next morning when I was drizzled (“flooded” doesn’t seem appropriate) by a few hundred trackbacks. More on that later though. For now I have decided trackback is a security vulnerability disguised as a poorly-implemented cross-blog communication tool perpetuated only by a MT software monoculture. Trackback is dead, long live pingback.