The app that changed my life is Simplenote, linked to Notational Velocity. I have Simplenote on my phone and Notational Velocity on my computer, and I’m obsessed with to-do lists and lists about my to-do lists. It allows me to have my lists on my phone and my lists on my computer, and they sync… if you are a list freak, with lists of lists, it will change your life.

— Lena Dunham

From a talk with Kara Swisher on Re/code. Listen to the whole podcast, Simplenote comes up at the 48-minute mark. Hat tip: Toni Schneider.

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.

Well Designed Weblogs?

Uncategorized

Or not.

Lars Holst, who has a beautiful WordPress-powered blog, has been doing a bit he calls Well-Designed Weblogs. I have been pretty disappointed with the second round (and to some extent the first round) of “Well-Designed Weblogs.” It is subjective, but quite frankly there are some sites I don’t see anything in. To me some look plain, unimaginative, squished — overall badly designed.

For the list to be a useful Lars should put a blurb about why a site was chosen so if there is some nugget of inspiration there that I’m missing, I can be enlightened. It would also shed some light on the subjective process he’s going through, which would be interesting. Round 2 has 37 entries — some great, some mediocre, some bad. If it could be distilled to the five or six very best, in Lars’ opinion, it would be a lot more meaningful than the catalog it is now.

But if it’s just a list with screenshots, there are better places to go.

Invalid Gnome

Uncategorized,

I get Chris Pirillo’s Windows newsletter (currently called “Windows Fanatics”) in my inbox this morning and was shocked that he seemed to assert that Lockergnome was going back to its old style, or lack thereof. Maybe it’s just Chris’ flourishes, but several things gave me cause for concern.

Remember what the Web was like when the BLINK tag roamed the earth?

Off to a bad start. We all know there’s only one good use for <blink>.

There were only a handful of browsers, and it didn’t take much to make a page “look good” on all platforms.

Maybe I missed these times. I remember pages “Made for Netscape” or that “Require Internet Explorer.” I remember having to essentially code two sites to work with two radically different browsers. I remember single-pixel GIFs and tables nested ten deep and bad typography. I try to forget, but I can’t.

It doesn’t take much to push the envelope, but sometimes (as we discovered) the envelope pushes back. You might recall the somewhat-simplistic design of our site before we dove head-first into Cascading Style Sheets. Despite its shortcomings and lack of finesse, the sucker worked – and we had few complaints.

I find that surprising. Here’s one: it was one of the ugliest sites I’d ever visited, and the bizarre look turned me off from subscribing to the newsletters even when I had heard several recommendations, because I assumed they must be unprofessional. I’m not trying to be mean, just honest.

Lockergnome.com is about to become less confusing as it goes back to more a basic code structure. We’re going to unbury the menus and options and chalk up the past few months to experience. I’m not saying that we won’t employ fancy scripts now and again, but we’re refocusing our new(er) layout on the thing that most likely brought you to us: the content. Right now, Jason’s putting the finishing touches on the overall structure and functionality…

The attraction of Lockergnome is the content, and the site could use better information architecture, but I hope this does not come at the expense of clean, fast-loading, semantic code and the distinctive aesthetic the site currently has. Though I’m not crazy about parts of it, their current design is pretty good in my opinion. It has some very nice elements that are impressive to me both as a web developer and a consumer. It’s not perfect, but a darn sight better than what was there before.

Is this going to be a step backward? In a way, yes. I’ll certainly miss certain aspects of our ultra-hip CSS implementation. However, until 99% of the installed browser / e-mail client base supports the same standards, we’re gonna leave the fancy-schmancy stuff to other online resources.

Mind pointing out these fancy-schmancy online resources so I can read them instead?

For what we do, and how we need to do it, advanced “hacks” just don’t work well.

What about web standards? Graceful degradation? From a purely business and marketing point of view, is the couple of percent of users on browsers so limited and hardware so old that they can’t appreciate modern web pages (and not just yours, also ESPN, Wired, PGA…) a demographic you want to cater to at the expense of the other 95%?

Furthermore, the old Lockergnome got eaten by spam filter several times because its markup was similar to the spam I got. Since the redesign, nada. Maybe it’s just my Bayes scores or installation of SpamAssassin, but I can’t imagine my setup being different from many others. If a newsletter falls in the spam box and no one sees its ads, does it make a penny?

I doubt it.

I could just be worried over nothing, their redesign could be impeccable markup combined with simpler CSS that works better than their current across browsers and platforms. The only reason I put my thoughts to words is that I’m on the cusp of several decisions. I’m examining my subscriptions; they recently cancelled the Linux channel (which was quite good) and the Web Developer channel is in a state of flux (it was pretty bad for a while). Also the affordable Gnomedex is coming, though my decision on that will probably be more influenced by its speakers. On one hand I have a lot of faith in the Lockergnome team to do the right thing, but the standards-lover in me is just terrified of the prospect of a site going backward. Not to mention the masses who subscribe to the newsletters that will draw the conclusion that “CSS isn’t ready for big sites yet,” in 2004. I can think of nothing further from the truth or more subversive.

For small business owners, WordPress is a well-trusted company, Yelp is a brand in trouble, and Facebook is on a downward path. Those are some of the findings out today from a survey of 6,000 small business owners from the second half of 2015 conducted by Alignable.

You can see the whole thing here. WordPress came in with a NPS of 73, Shopify at 29, Godaddy at 26, Squarespace at 11, Wix at -7, Weebly at -13, Web.com at -61, and Yelp at -66. Here’s how a Net Promoter Score works.

Notables

Uncategorized,

Some WordPress-powered blogs that have caught my eye recently:

Bill Day
“Bill Day is a Staff Engineer & Technology Evangelist at Sun Microsystems as well as Founder & Technical Guru of Day Web Development.
Bill’s J2ME Archive, writing, and speaking have helped drive J2ME adoption to hundreds of millions of devices and empowered tens of thousands to write applications for Java enabled handsets and PDAs.”
AxxLog
Joe Clark’s accessibility blog. Focusing lately on the (lack of) accesibility of a PVR.
Matthew Thomas
The same mpt, new domain. I don’t know if WordPress is the ultimate weblogging system yet, but it seems to work well for him. Matthew has given some brilliant input into the options interface which is going to be in WordPress 1.2.
Kimberly Blessing
Interesting gal I met at SxSW, Kimberly is a standards evangelist and developer at AOL.
Binary Bonsai
Great design and content. Most sites find a good design and stick with it. Micheal pulls out a brand new one just as good or better than the last every month or so. Michael is the guy who taught me how to make my XP desktop look decent.
Lars Holst
An very well-done WP site. Check out the style switcher.
Image Safari
Nicest WP photoblog I’ve seen yet. Reload for entertaining random header graphics.
Rebel Pixel
Excellent look and layout. Very interesting link styling. Nice linklog.
Debian WordPress package
Not a blog like the others, but an amazing development. Type apt-get install wordpress at your Debian command line and it’s there, automatically setting up MySQL, PHP, or Apache as needed. The packager says “I’m working on some scripts to make Debian automagically configure your blog on the next release of the package.” Awesome.

I hesitated to even start a list because this really is the very tip of the iceberg. I could write a post every day for the next 3 months highlighting someone doing something great with WordPress, and in July there would be hundreds more.

I know of a couple of projects in the oven and I can’t wait for them to (re)launch. If you’re doing something interesting or innovative with WP, let me know. Maybe I can even help out.

Tracking in Generated Images

Uncategorized

Generating images with PHP is one of my favorite tricks and the ease of doing this in PHP is really a testament the language getting something right. If you’re on the site and not in your RSS aggregator, then you enjoy a generated image on every page on PhotoMatt.net, the titles of each post and the post times graph at the bottom of the page. Combined with image replacement techniques, PHP-generated images can be very useful. This was one of the first blogs I know of to do it, but I’ve seen it on several sites since then and I’ve shared the code with anyone who asks.

However the function I’m using for all of this, imagettftext is rather crude, and doesn’t allow for much control in how the text is presented. After a bit of work I just created a function that simulates tracking in text images that are created by PHP. I’m happy with structure of the code, but the result is much uglier than if the text had been set by any decent program. Imagettftext is supposed to support unicode, so I’ll have to investigate using unicode semi-space characters or perhaps interfacing with Freetype more directly.

Anyway, now the image generator takes a background color (which may be transparent), a text color, and a rollover color. Then it generates a single image with the given text in it once with each color, for use with Pixy’s fast rollovers. This is all in the context of the Unamed CMS that is coming Real Soon(tm).

Gmail Invites

Asides

Gmail invites. The only thing I get on my Gmail account (mmmmmm@gmail.com) are people begging for invites, which has gotten very old very fast. It’s almost as bad as the people who stumble across my old Orkut entry and feel it’s my duty to invite them. I’ve given out one account so far, and it was to Simon.