Mozilla Labs’ Ubiquity has a lot of promise:

Ubiquity is an experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily. It’s a Firefox extension, so it works on Macs, Windows, and Linux.

With only a couple keystrokes, it lets you use language to instruct your browser. You can translate to and from most languages, add maps to your email, edit any page, twitter, check your calendar, search, email your friends, and much more. All without leaving the page you’re on.

The first live example I saw reminded me of how a person could add an appointment in Newton (the web is strangely empty of examples, but you would write out “lunch with Dave next Tuesday” or something like that). The second example reminded me of Mac OS X’s Spotlight. The third example finally showed me something useful, and the video above is along those lines.

I’m wondering, however, how long until Apple adds those features to Spotlight.

I’m simply in love with this video. Watch through the credits to see a bit of how it’s made.

Philip Greenspun suggests small organizations use a blog for their website (ironically, not blogged):

The Small Business Web circa 1994

In 1994, a small organization that wanted a Web site would hire a “Web designer” skilled in the exotic art of “HTML programming” to produce a static Web site, i.e., a cluster of linked pages with a distinctive design and color scheme, giving information about the company or non-profit org. None of the pages would have a date on them because, by definition, nothing on the Web could be more than four years old.

The Small Business Web circa 2009

Managers of new small enterprises or established non-profit organizations sometimes ask me “Whom should I hire to build my Web site?”

I ask them what they want the site to do. The answer is to promote their business and distribute some basic information to customers. What they want is a static 1994-style graphic designer-produced Web site.

I explain that publishing on the Web is like producing a word processor document or writing an email. Would they hire a designer to write their documents and emails? No? Then why would they hire a designer to build their Web site?

he goes on…

It can be difficult to get the Zimbra iSync connector, as the company doesn’t offer a simple download from their site. Fortunately, the license allows us to freely redistribute their software.

Download the Zimbra iSync Connector here.

The description to David McNicol’s URL Cache Plugin raises more questions than it answers:

Given a URL, the url_cache() function will attempt to download the file it represents and return a URL pointing to this locally cached version.

Where did he plan to use it? Does he envision the cache as an archive, or for performance? Why hasn’t it been updated since 2005?

It caught my interest because I’ve long been interested in a solution to link rot in my blog. A real “perma-permalink” would be very useful.

Bret Victor offers the above design suggestions (from 2006) to Amazon in the book search results display (he’s comparing to this). I didn’t discover them at the time, but many of them are still relevant now. Bret notes that Amazon’s display doesn’t do a good job of answering the questions a person has when searching for books: “What is the book about?” and “is it any good?”

Unfortunately, these questions are completely unaddressed by the information provided. To see relevant information, the user must click on each listing individually. That is, she must navigate by hand instead of by eye, and must use her memory to compare information across time instead of space.

The problem is that this graphic was designed as an index into a set of webpages, but is used as a catalog for comparing a set of books. The purpose of this graphic should not be to return a list of query matches, but to help the user learn about books related to her topic of interest.

The Hanzo Archives Wordpress plugin is something I’d be very excited to use. Ironically, it’s disappeared from the web (though the blog post hasn’t):

We’ve released a Wordpress Plugin which automatically archives anything you link to in your blog posts; it also adds a ‘perma-permalink’ for the archived version adjacent to each original link.

An Amazon Web Services case study put me on to Hanzo a while ago, and in May 2008 I actually spoke with Mark Middleton (the markm who posted the entry above). Mark revealed that community take-up on the plugin and other general purpose web archiving services was below expectations. The company has since refocused on legal matters (even their blog tag-line has changed to “web archiving for compliance and e-discovery”).

I wonder if, now that the number of people and companies that have been blogging for years has grown, there might be more of a market for such a service.

Lorelle is a big fan of Scott Reilly’s Customizable Post Listings:

Display Recent Posts, Recently Commented Posts, Recently Modified Posts, Random Posts, and other post, page, or draft listings using the post information of your choosing in an easily customizable manner. You can narrow post searches by specifying categories and/or authors, among other things.

[I]n theory, I should be able to issue one command to VLC and have it receive the MPEG4-ES stream from the camera, transcode it to h.264, and stream it to the Wowza, which would handle the rest.

via John Beales.

Well, not ‘leaked,’ but just in time for the new Transformers movie, Patrick Boivin has posted this video of Bumblebee breakdancing.

Also in line with movies, here’s Bruce Lee p0wning Iron Man:

Click here to view the embedded video.

In line with yesterday’s discovery of the Viddler WP plugin, Riffly Webcam Video Comments also supports video or audio comments within WordPress:

Riffly is a free service that easily plugs into your site allowing visitors to create video and audio comments.

The service is advertising supported. We cover all the costs for bandwidth, servers, and maintenance. Optionally, we also offer Premium Riffly accounts that provide you with additional benefits, such as advertising removal, control panel access, analytics, and much more.

The Viddler Wordpress plugin promises to “Enrich your site’s commenting experience by enabling video comments….” Users can record direcly from a web cam or choose a video they’ve previously uploaded to Viddler.com.

Viddler evangelist Colin Devroe has it on his site, where I can see it requires would-be commenters have a Viddler account. That last bit is too bad. I like Viddler, but I can’t force my readers to like it and get accounts as a prerequisite to commenting.

What is the current status of web servers…Is Apache 2.x “fast enough?”
Automattic uses Lightspeed (for PHP), nginx (for static content), and Apache (for media uploads). For WordPress-generated content, all server options are approximately the same speed.

What about APC?
Automattic uses beta versions of APC, and provides a 3-5x performance increase. It’s tied closely to the PHP version, so Automattic recently switched from PHP 4 to PHP 5.

Databases?
MySQL scales well and is easy enough to use that there’s little reason to consider other DBs for WordPress content. Other applications may have different needs. Note: FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data. Single-table key lookups in MySQL are faster than getting the data from Memcached.

Caching?
Automattic uses Batcache for full-page caching (.002 to .003 second), Memcached persistent object cache, very limited MySQL query cache (never larger than 256MB), sufficiently large key buffer.

HyperDB?
HyperDB solves DB scaling problems.

Backups
User-data backed up every hour, if something changed. Every blog backed up every 12 hours. Dedicated MySQL slaves do LVM snapshots for backups.

Why BuddyPress? “Build passionate users around a specific niche.”

Do you have to become a social network? “No, look at GigaOM Pro,” a recently launched subscription research site based on BuddyPress.

But, yo do get “BYOTOS: bring your own terms of service.” That is, you get to control content and interactions. And your service won’t be subject to the whims of a larger network like FaceBook (or vagaries of their service — think Ma.gnolia)

It’s pretty easy, Andy says, to create a custom BuddyPress component, and there are already a number at the BuddyPressDEV Community.

jQuery 1.3.2 is in WordPress 2.8, but the most exciting changes are in the automatic concatenation and compression of scripts via the script loader.

Andrew Ozz says “This feature can easily be extended to include scripts added by plugins and to use server side caching, however that would require some changes to the server settings (.htaccess on Apache).”

I have yet to figure out how to extend that feature to scripts in my plugins, but I’m working on it.

90% of WordPress blogs he sees are spam. But for those who aren’t spammers and want to do better in Google….

“WordPress automatically solves a ton of SEO issues…WordPress takes care of 80-90% of SEO.”

Still, he recommends a few extra plugins:

• Akismet — reduce spam comments
• Cookies for Comments — reduce spam comments
• FeedBurner FeedSmith
• WP Super Cache — improve performance

“We crawl roughly in order of PageRank…higher ranked sites get crawled faster and deeper.”

“What is PageRank? The number and importance of links pointing to you.” But “avoid BO (backlink obsession). You want to be relevant and reputable.”

Relevant is what you say on your page/site.

Reputable is what others say (link) about you.

Be relevant: Blog about what you love. Blog about what you’re really good at doing (or, I suppose, what you want to be really good at). Blog in your own voice. Write often, write every day.

Think about the keywords that users will type. Include them naturally in your posts

Avoid jargon mismatch. Be sure to include language that non-expert users may use to find information. Include relevant information for beginners on the front page. Try Google Keyword Tool to understand what people are searching for.

Recommends /%postname%/ permalinks. And use slightly different terms in the permalink and title. Other URL tips:

• Use categories that are also good keywords
• keywords in URL paths
  • dashes best
  • next best is underscores
  • no spaces is worst
• Should I change old URLs? No.

Ferris’s law: don’t do it if it’s not fun.

Gaining Reputation?

• Be interesting
• Update often
• Apply Katamari Philosophy — start small, build up, don’t over reach. Start in a niche, then “ambigining” that niche.

Build an audience:

• Provide a useful service
• Do original research or reporting
• Give great information
• Creative niche
• Write some code
• Live blogging
• Make lists
• Create controversy
• Meet folks on Twitter, Facebook, etc
• Make a video

Consider using:

• Google website optimizer (a/b testing)
• <!– google_ad_section_start –> and <!– google_ad_section_end –>

In your content:

• Identify and leverage “evergreen” content
• Show related content
• Avoid shortcuts and scams
• Avoid paid posts

Keep your WordPress updated! Don’t let spammers hack your site.

LifeHacker: productivity porn, read about it more than you do it

Above is Peter Linsley speaking about Google Image Search at SMX West in February, 2009.

Meanwhile, Stefan Juhl suggests some JavaScript to break your site out of the image search result pages:

Many Google image search users are quickly clicking on to the direct image URL and thereby not seeing the page with the image. Also, it seems that many of the users don’t hesitate to click back to the image SERPs when they don’t see the image “above the fold” - probably because of Google image search framing the page with the picture and thus making it almost too easy to do so.

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
if (top.location != self.location) top.location.replace(self.location);
</script>

After adding this to the one of my websites I saw a quite big increase in pageviews. It turned out that the visitors happily continued to browse around the website.

The homeland security press is just getting wind of Joe Weston-Webb’s attempts to deter vandals with nonlethal weapons, but the story became all the rage in Britain when it broke last year.

The stories hit all the timely bits: Joe got burgled, so he announced plans to install a catapult. A what? A catapult. Why? To launch chicken droppings at miscreants. Unfortunately, the local constabulary warned him off, and the catapult wasn’t ready when burglars returned. Or, it could have been that the catapult didn’t work. But, aside from the fact that Joe does floors for Strictly Come Dancing, the real story is that Joe previously used to put the dung tossing, home defense catapult in question to launching his wife, Mary, across the River Avon in 1976. Joe’s bio tells more.

Joe’s years spent building catapults and other contraptions (and a cannon not yet converted for his home defense), hasn’t worn him out on experiments, or from re-using those circus acts to protect his property. But what of his wife? “She’s 54 now and far too big to fit into the cannon in any case,” Joe is reported to have said.

Mrs Weston-Webb was one of Mr Weston-Webb’s squad of “Moto-Birds”, travelling the world driving motorcycles and cars over ramps and water features. While injured with a broken arm, she climbed into the catapult her husband is now employing to defend his warehouses, before an expectant crowd of 30,000. “I flew across 160ft of the Avon,” she said. “Unfortunately the net was set at an angle and I bounced into the river.”

Mrs Weston-Webb stood by her husband as he attempted to build a car with wings that would fly from the edge of a quarry (it didn’t) and a ramp that would take a double-decker bus across the Avon.

And she stands by his decision to lay booby-traps. “We just feel so helpless,” she said.

Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance at Amazon, a used book store, or your parent’s book shelf. Still, it’s available on the web as PDF, at least two text files — one, two — And even as a podcast (subscribe via iTunes).

Lots of people have re-traced the journey described in the book, at least one person has posted a travelogue about it to the web. Henry Gurr has posted Pirsig’s own photos, and Christoph Bartneck pointed out many locations in Google Maps:

• Minnesota > Minneapolis > Breckenridge
• North Dakota > Ellendale > Hague
• South Dakota > Herreid > Mobridge > Lemmon > Bowman
• Montana > Baker > Miles City > Laurel > Red Lodge > Cooke City > Yellowstone National Park > Gardiner > Bozeman > English Department at the Montana State University > Missoula > Three Forks > Butte > Anaconda > Philipsburg > Hall > Lolo Pass > Billings
• Idaho > White Bird > Riggins > New Meadows > Cambridge > Brownlee Dam
• Oregon > Richland > Baker > Unity > Dixie Pass > Prairie City > Dayville > Mitchell > Prineville > Bend > La Pine > Crater Lake > Klamath Lake > Medford > Grants Pass
• California > Crescent City > Arcata > Leggett > Mendocino > Caspar, CA, Point Cabrillo Road - The Climax of the book. > San Francisco, CA, Haight / Divisadero - The corner on which Chris died.

NPR interviewed the author at the book’s release in 1974, when he was living in Minnesota.

Those unwilling to open of their iPhone to adjust the camera focus might take a look at Griffin’s Clarifi, a case with a built-in close-up lens that can slide in our out of place as needed.

Flickr user Meine Ideenecke, meanwhile, has figured out the iPhone camera specifications. He says it’s about 37MM (35MM equivalent), though this source says it’s 27MM.

Now that I’ve discovered it, I’m tempted to try TuneUp on my collection of MP3s downloaded as podcasts (and without good ID3 tags) from places like the KCRW’s Today’s Top Tune. The story is that the iTunes plugin automatically identifies your tracks, can fix the tags, and add album art.

What happens when one of Google’s street view camera vehicles encounters a low bridge or a muddy Australian road?

The above are the result of PanoLab, Hugin, Calico, and a single shot with a very wide angle lens (Canon’s 10-22mm, effectively 16mm on my Rebel XTi). The first three originated on my iPhone and the PanoLab shot was stitched and originally uploaded to Flickr on my iPhone (though I have since done some color enhancement and reuploaded the photo from my MacBook Pro). Hugin is GPL, the other solutions are less free (in both senses).

MySQL answer: utf8_unicode_ci vs. utf8_general_ci.

Collation controls sorting behavior. Unicode rationalizes the character set, but doesn’t, on it’s own, rationalize sorting behavior for all the various languages it supports. utf8_general_ci (ci = case insensitive) is apparently a bit faster, but sloppier, and only appropriate for English language data sets.