People commonly use the word “procrastination” to describe what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe what’s happening as merely not-doing-work. We don’t call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working.
Paul Graham’s The Acceleration of Addictiveness.
A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection. I’ve been considering a new laptop once Microsoft finally ships Vista and Sony et al start bundling it, but reading things like this seriously makes me reconsider. (I’m a big fan of the TX series.) I’d love to read a differing viewpoint. Hat tip: Simon.
Just a warning for entrepreneurs out there, if you ever announce funding you will be contacted by people offering the following services: banking; debt financing; PR services; other VCs; fancy SoMA offices; telephone services; India outsourcing; Kansas IT outsourcing; recruiting (x10); equipment leasing; renting/leasing/buying real estate; stories about Audrey Hepburn; web analytics; bandwidth; data communications (?); Java programming. Expect 50+ emails in the first 12 hours, and a steady trickle after that. They will also send emails to firstname @ your domain for every name they can find on the website. It gives you a newfound appreciation for those nice Nigerian banking folks, who gave you attention before you were “big.”
One day I’m going to do a presentation on Scaling Large Scale Web Services with one slide: Use PHP. š
Just downloaded TortoiseSVN, which I hope is as good as its CVS cousin.
Official prototype of kilogram mysteriously losing weight. If I was kept at a chateau in a triple-locked safe I would too.
Eric has a new book you should buy, despite the fact he’s all wrong about weblogs. His thesis is that it’s easy to read chronological items that relate to each other from top to bottom on a page. It’s not that Eric has his facts wrong, he’s just looking at the wrong facts.
Weblogs are not 20 chapter books. Eric’s entries refer and develop more than the average weblog’s, he is no exception to the rule that most weblogs would be just as intelligble if they randomly ordered the entries you haven’t read yet than if they presented the newest ones at the top. For some reason Eric insists on using monthly archives for his permalinks, which isn’t helping his visitors or Google (or the bandwidth he’s concerned about). Anchored monthly archives should never be used for permalinks. The only people who still use these are those who are technically hindered from or too lazy to implement post-level permalinks.
On monthly, weekly, or daily archives it makes perfect sense for the entries to be ordered chronologically, because the defining characteristic of the posts is their chronological relation to that date range. On a search result page, I want to see the results ordered either in reverse chronological order or by some search relevance. Both Technorati and Feedster get this, and both default to reverse chronological order of their results. On the front page, which is where Eric has his main beef, the most relevant thing to at least 95% of visitors is going to be the latest items. Anything else is going to be making the site less useful to the majority of users for the benefit of a few. There is a much larger precedent for putting the most recent items at top than just weblogs: most email and webmail software I’ve used, every press release page, news sites like CNN, Zeldman, the Board of Governors, the White House. Breaking the convention of thousands of familar sites for the benefit of the occasional reader who checks back every week or so but is really annoyed at having to scroll funny to what they’ve missed breaks the Hippocratic Oath of design. Weblogs aren’t ordered the way they are because of some freak historical accident, they’re ordered this way because it works.
(A sidenote about the bandwidth issue: it’s dead. Of course pages should be made as small as possible using standards and efficient markup to help them load quickly. No one is going to argue that. However an optimized 10K page loaded thousands of times a day is still a healthy chunk of bandwidth. If you are adjusting your content or paying more for the popularity of your website, find a better provider. The server that this site (and others) is on is allocated 1.2 terabytes of bandwidth transfer per month. At worst it uses a third of that. Server bandwidth should not be an issue anymore these days.)
I mostly disagree with his post, however I feel Eric’s pain. I’ve had to do the scroll-catchup thing before, and it was annoying. Without breaking the website for the vast majority of my users, I can offer some relief:
?order=asc to any WordPress URI and it will order the dates ascending instead of descending. Example: my March archives, my March archives descending. It would also be pretty trivial to set a cookie to allow people to see things ordered different ways, and I imagine within a few hours of writing this there will be a new hack or plugin on the forums. If only everyone used WordPress.First day of WordCamp Indonesia in Jakarta.
Weird problem: my iPod shows that it’s charging and it shows up as connected (with full info) in the System Profiler but it doesn’t mount, it doesn’t show up on the desktop or in iTunes. I’ve tried two Firewire cables and a USB cable, so I’m sure it’s not that. If I had to guess I’d say it started after the 10.3.5 update, but I’m not really sure.
Yesterday in front of my building in Montreal I ran into (almost quite literally) Mena Suvari. There’s been a large filming crew hanging out the past few days and they relabeled the building from 400 Sherbrooke to Nottingham Hotel. None of the movies under production on her IMDB page seemed likely candidates and in the news she’s mentioned arriving in Montreal but for unknown reasons. I finally talked to a member of the crew and it turns out they’re filming a made-for-TV movie called No Surrender, but I was unable to confirm this or find any more info online. I’d like to see it when it comes out since I might be in one of the shots. š
LIFE magazine has relaunched, powered by WordPress.com VIP. I’m a huge fan of the magazine’s history and the work of photographers like John Dominis.
StayPress is a collection of plugins that will turn a standard vanilla installation of WordPress or WordPress MU into a property management and bookings system.
From when you leave the gate to takeoff, your phones (and iPads and Kindles) must be off, but when you land you can use your phone before you get to the gate.
Geez, I should have stayed in Paris! When I arrived at my hotel in SoHo London last night around midnight I found out they had no record of my reservation from Orbitz and no rooms available. What makes this worse is my reservation for 4 nights had already been charged. Every hotel in town was booked solid for the night. Several hours later I found myself in a hotel waaaay out by Heathrow and now instead of exploring London I’m trying to clear things up, find a place to stay in town tonight, and catch up with work I was planning to do last night.
John Hawkins is now the second person with a real-life WordPress tattoo. You can see it finished here, and two in-progress shots. John used the variation of the logo they did for WordCamp Las Vegas which he also organizes. Perhaps we should create a new category on Code Poet for 9seeds. š
We’ve been driving all around the Dublin area, through Slane, Dunleek, Dowth, New Grange, and finally Drogheda and becoming accustomed to driving on the left has been an interesting experience. First in the rental car there are no fewer than 4 stickers throughout the driver area reminding you to be on the left, and there also seem to be signs to remind you about it around all the tourist areas. What I found difficult wasn’t driving on the left side, which was fairly easy to remember, but rather I found myself aligning myself as the driver with the part of the lane I would be in if I was driving on the right side. Needless to say, this can put you dangerously close to anything to the left of you. So my new mantra (oft-repeated by my sister) has become “Guide to the left.” Thank goodness for collapsible mirrors. On the bright side, left turns are easy.
Alexa appears to be blocking any image loads from the Statsaholic domain, which was recently renamed from Alexaholic. If you change or block your referrers, the images load just fine. Bad form on Alexa’s part, especially since Alexaholic put an infinitely more usable UI on Alexa’s data, which Alexa later updated their own chart widgets to copy.
You’ll either find this incredibly funny or find it incredible that anyone could find this funny. From the HTMLDog Dogblog:
Q: Why did the XHTML actress turn down an Oscar?
A: Because she refused to be involved in the presentation.Q: Why was the font tag an orphan?
A: Because it didn’t have a font-family.Q: Why do CSS designers have too many children?
A: Because they employ lots of child selectors.Q: Why was IE5’s 3-metre wide cell in the insane asylum smaller than IE6’s 3-metre wide cell?
A: Because the width of the cell included the padding…Q: Why was the XHTML bird an invalid?
A: Because it wasn’t nested properly.
There are a few more in the comments over there. This made my day.
I was at Yahoo with Raanan a few weeks ago and Jeremy Zawodny grabbed me and we did an interview for Yahoo Developer Network. We talk about WP 2.5, scaling, bbPress, PHP vs the world, and more.
Some sites, like WordPress, where Iām typing this right now, pushed out retina upgrades right away. The result is amazing. Iām typing this, and it looks like Iām typing out printed words. Text is so crisp.
From MG’s review of the new Retina Macbook Pro. There is more news on the retina-WP front coming soon. My review of the Macbook Pro Retina: best computer I’ve ever used. Amazing screen, great speakers, I’m willing to put up with the extra size and weight after being on 13″ or smaller laptops for… 8 years I think.