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.

It Feels So Good to be 3

Personal

A birthday present from Google: I have overtaken that other guy and I am now the #3 Matt in the world. Go look at it now, because Google can be a harsh mistress. If things continue to go well I might reach #1 and have to take down all my sites, like I promised.

For those of you commenting on the phantom ping from yesterday, I actually posted something and took it down. Don’t worry, a little editing and it’ll be back.

So I’m 20

Birthday

This is it. Last year my birthday was loud and surprising, this year it was chill. Both have their attraction.

WordPress Birthday logo

Awww thanks. 🙂 Mad props to Craig for the WordPress header (currently in rotation).

While I’m here I’d also like to wish a happy birthday to Dave, who had a birthday a few days ago and didn’t tell anyone. 😉

All birthday posts: 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42.

Assorted Links

Uncategorized, ,
  • 50 Miler Panorama is one of the coolest panoramas I’ve seen. Zach’s dad sent me an email detailing a little of the process:

    Dan Hale here – Zach’s dad, and the guy who created the panorama. I did this one entirely by hand in Photoshop. I made nine shots that day, placing the people in only the middle third of the frame of each. I shot with a super wide lens – a 17mm on a 35mm camera. The stitching was painstaking as I wanted to overlap the shots in such a way as to hide the transitions. This process was complicated by the fact that the cloud movement between shots varied the brightness, contrast and color of light. Evening that out took a lot of work. I did have the presence of mind when I did the shooting to use a constant shutter speed and aperture. I could go on and on about this labor of love. All in all it recon it took me 14-17 hours or so of work in PS to get to its current state.

    Wow. Hat tip: Zach.

  • Nightly builds of WordPress. Oh, and 1.0 is out. More on that later.
  • Adam Gessaman has the best response, Locke, Property, and Software, to the lame Aaron Swartz screed on Nick Bradbury’s On Piracy. One thing though, I’m tired of people making comments about Aaron’s ideas in relation to his age. Either talk about his age and be safely ignored, or treat his ideas independently.
  • How to fix <abbr in Internet Explorer. Nifty.
  • :hover anything in Internet Explorer. Awesome.
  • Simple Quiz from Dan Cedorholm has some of the most high-threshhold discussion of CSS and HTML semantics around.
  • Tantek is naked. Now what he really needs is to shed some of that extraneous list markup that really isn’t adding much to the semantic richness of his site. At least one level of that list could be eliminated. I’m not going to call Tantek’s markup bloated, but he could shave a few K off with that list markup. There are some novel ideas there though. I wonder what he could do with a good content management package. I’ve got a version of WordPress running with markup very similar to Tantek’s, but the blog isn’t public yet so I can’t link it.
  • Joi asks Are Blogs Just? I really like how he brings in things from all over the spectrum. Joi continues to pleasantly surprise me.
  • Apparently US money has a watermark of some sort so that if you open it up in Photoshop or try to print it the equipment has built-in guards. Pretty crazy.
  • WordPress nightly builds. Builds are released nightly, bugs are released hourly. Get 24 new bugs in every release.
  • Drawings from a guy on acid.
  • Cruft-free URIs in WordPress. 3 steps, one of which is clicking to the options screen and another which may be automated in a future version.