April 2005 Archives
How to destroy the earth gave me a good laugh. Especially seeing, after an impressive list of very serious theories, that "gay marriage" is indeed isn't a means of geocide (much to the content dismay of the new pope, I guess).
The feed URL dialog that tells you 10.4 must be installed to view RSS feeds is simply a bug and not part of a master plan for global domination.
From Dave Hyatt in Response to Some Safari 1.3 Comments.
Too bad for conspiracy theorists.
MT 3.16 has been released. Too late to test, but this installation will be upgraded asap. [Update: MT upgraded to 3.16, please let me know if anything breaks.]
Adobe buys Macromedia, so much for competition, at least in the webmaster/web designer toolbox market. Let's hope they're not just buying out competition and that it does not sign the return of the "Web As PDF And Flash". I'm looking forward to see how GoLive and Dreamweaver will evolve, as I've always be very found of GoLive but had to live with Dreamweaver because of its quasi corporate monopoly (it's more difficult than being a Mac user actually).
Update: Mike Chambers from Macromedia developers relations has published some initial thoughts on Macromedia + Adobe.
For some time I've been thinking of hacking a Movable Type blog to drive an online contact form for our upcoming new corporate site. As a first stage, and proof of concept, I've built an MT-powered feedback form for gathering comments during the internal test launch that begins today. I'll try to document the full thing after we launch, but here is a preview on how it works and the benefits I expect from it. Meanwhile, for the technically inclined, I've followed the recipe of XML-RPC & Forms on Movalog.
The idea is to have a link on every page of the new site asking the internal testers for feedback through a form that is generated by a MT template:
As you can see, the feedback is organized by categories:
Those categories are actually the categories (and sub-cats) defined in the blog, modifying those in MT automatically regenerates the feedback form:
Once the feedback has been submitted, a confirmation page comes up, giving the user the direct URL to their feedback on the internal blog:
And here we are, the feedback as posted on the blog with additional captured metadata (referrer page, user agent and the identity of the poster):
The idea behind this (apart from satisfying my need to prove that MT can do much more than mere blogging) is to gather, store and share our testers' feedback easily with the web team. This is a collaborative process that needs to remain easy, fast and flexible. The ability for anyone internally to see and comment on all the received feedback will (I hope) help us work faster to fine tune things before the big launch. And now I can track feedback via RSS on my aggregator :-).
The next step for me will be to drive our external contact form with a blog through a similar idea, again making use of categories. Those responsible for processing contact leads would track new contacts via RSS and/or email. Answers would be given simply by commenting on the post (the visitor being notified by email). The blog would give us a very simple way to track and archive all the requests and their given answers. A small CRM solution with a simple blog, easy and cheap but efficient, a good hack I think.
You know one of the funny things of shared hosting? It's that you can feel exactly as if you've been slashdotted when one of your neighbors have. Thanks to the good folks at TextDrive, the geeks drove has been contained and a full frontal slashdot lighttpdly exposed.
I can't wait for that (European) lighttpd cluster guys ;-).
I read a while ago someone wondering if the Google Bar is spying on URLs visited by its users, now it's the turn of Tim Bray who's confident that the Google AdSense ads are calling the bots army in the Googleplex [Tim has updated his post: If you look real closely at that robot (for geeks, at the "User-Agent" field), it’s not quite the same as the normal googlebot; apparently this beast is just reading the text of the page to figure out what contextually appropriate ads to display.]. On a related note, Google has acquired Urchin, so they're one step away from providing nicely looking stats to all those happy AdSense customers.
I know that Big Brother said "do no evil", but for some reason I find Paul Ford's Robot Exclusion Protocol deliciously K. Dickesque:
I took off my clothes and stepped into the shower to find another one sitting near the drain. It was about 2 feet tall and made of metal, with bright camera-lens eyes and a few dozen gripping arms. Worse than the Jehovah's Witnesses."Hi! I'm from Google. I'm a Googlebot! I will not kill you."
