http://maisonbisson.com A bunch of stuff I would have emailed you about. Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:53:17 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Backblaze is a cloud backup service that needs cheap storage. Lots of it. They say a petabyte worth of raw drives runs under $100,000, but buying that much storage in products from major vendors easily costs over $1,000,000. So they built their own. The result is a 4U rack-mounted Linux-based server ... http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/14160/backblaze-storage-pod/ I've been a fan of Drobo since I got mine over a year ago. The little(-ish, and sweet looking, for stack of disks) device packs as many as four drives and automatically manages them to ensure the reliability of your data and easy expandability of the storage. However, Thomas Tomchak ... http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/11773/drobo-sweet-storage-one-big-flaw/ A few years ago I found an article pointing out how spammers had figured out how to abuse some code I wrote back in 2001 or so. I'd put it on the list to fix and even started a blog post so that I could take my lumps publicly. Now I've ... http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/11313/bugs-and-hacks/ Most of my work is available publicly, but some development is hosted on a private SVN that's hidden behind a firewall. Unfortunately, my primary development server is on the wrong side of that particular firewall, so I use the following command to bridge the gap: ssh -R 1980:svn_host:80 username@dev_server.com That creates a ... http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/14142/ssh-tunneling-example/ Search Engine Land.com: Yelp...is...essentially a poster-child for semantic markup. This spring, Google’s introduction of rich snippets has allowed Yelp’s listings in the SERPs to stand out more, attracting consumers to click more due to the “bling” decorating the listings in the form of the star ratings. There are now some very good ... http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/14078/yelp-a-poster-child-for-semantic-markup/ In March of this year Apple applied for a patent on technology that enables or disables features of a phone via a config file. The tech is already in use: it's the carrier profiles we've been downloading recently. On the one hand this is just an extension of the parental controls ... http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/11772/iphones-anti-customer-config-file/ A quick Google search of klaomta.com reveals more than a few people wondering why it's iframed on their websites. The answer is that the site has been compromised. Unfortunately for the fellow who asked me the question at WordCamp, solving the problem can be a bit of a chore. Keeping your ... http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/13979/evil-evil-klaomta-com/ Plugin Development Will Norris' talk at WordCamp PDX introduces WordPress coding standards, common functions, and constants to would be plugin developers (and smacks those who've already done it wrong). Also notable: functions, classes, variables, and constants in the WordPress trunk. Custom Installations Just as WordPress has a number of hooks and filters that ... http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/14138/the-wordpress-way/ ContentsPlatform ChoicesOur Needs vs. WordPressWhat We DidWhat It Looks LikeAny university worth the title is likely to have a very mixed identity environment. At Plymouth State University we've been pursuing a strategy of unifying identity and offering single sign-on to web services, but an inventory last year still revealed a ... http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/14110/wordpress-user-authentication-hacks/ Moving data by homing pigeon requires some planning, and pigeons It was a tech story so apparently humorous that the popular media felt compelled to cover it: carrier pigeons delivered 4GBs of data faster than an ADSL line. The BBC story's subtitle read “broadband promised to unite the world with super-fast ... http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/14087/avian-transfers-show-slow-networks-or-growing-storage-capacity/ Ben Fisherman's JSNES runs entirely in the browser using nothing more intrusive than JavaScript. It apparently manages real-time performance within Chrome, but it works (if not playably) on an iPhone. I wish the screen was resizable and that it supported iPhone compatible controls, but both of those assume that browser performance ... http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/14085/jsnes-javascript-nintendo-emulator/ Will Norris has discovered that iTunes 9's interactions with the Store are more web-happy. I've been asking where the iTunes Store API was for some time, now I think I've got what I need to build one. http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/14080/itunes-9-closer-to-an-api/ ContentsHack The Path MappingOptimization noteSetting Up New BlogsHack The .htaccessSituation: you've got WordPress Multi-User setup to host one or more domains in sub-directory mode (as in site.org/blogname), but you want a deeper directory structure than WPMU allows...something like the following examples, perhaps: site.org/blogname1 site.org/departments/blogname2 site.org/departments/blogname3 site.org/services/blogname3 The association between blog IDs and sub-directory paths is ... http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/14052/wordpress-hacks-nested-paths-for-wpmu-blogs/ Click here to view the embedded video. With AT&T facing lawsuits for not delivering MMS features at the iPhone 3GS launch, they kind of had to do something. I'm not sure if I'd be satisfied by this video if I were among the plaintiffs, but I think it does a good ... http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/14049/am-i-supposed-to-feel-bad-for-att-now/ Click here to view the embedded video. Okay, I don't want to watch all the movies depicted in this 100 year overview of film special effects, but I did just add a few to my Netflix queue. The full list, according to the description in YouTube: 1900 - The Enchanted Drawing 1903 - The ... http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/14047/now-i-want-to-watch-or-re-watch-all-these/ ContentsChallenge: setting up service on multiple (sub-) domainsSet up your web serverSet up your DNSCreate a new blog in WPMUReconfigure wp-config.phpSet up your new SiteSet up the admins of the new siteSub-domains or just different domains?Challenge: unified log in cookiesSet your cookie pathAvoid conflicts with other WordPress installations at your ... http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/14028/wordpress-hacks-managing-multiple-sub-domains/ I don't know if it's just the Mother's day effect, but the top 10 online retailers for May 2009 were dominated by flower shops. The top shop is converting almost 40% of their visitors to buyers, though the average is just over 5%. Tim, meanwhile, claims he's lowered his bounce ... http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/14026/online-advertising-metrics/ Click here to view the embedded video. Liam Lynch explains the origin of the video, but what was Dan Deacon thinking as he recorded the audio? Of all the free MP3 downloads he offers, Two Friends from the Acorn Master album may be the most, um, listenable. Thanks to daily songsmith Corey B (Corey ... http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/14018/not-my-chair-not-my-problem/ The following was my email response to a thread on the web4lib mail list: Okay, it must be said: you're all wrong[1]. I can understand that news of a librarian being fired/furloughed will raise our defenses, but that's no excuse for giving up the considered and critical thinking that this occasion demands. Consider ... http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/14014/who-gets-to-control-the-future-of-libraries/ An amusing hacks-conference lightning talk-turned-blog post on web development: "Graceful Hacks" - UX, IA and interaction design tips for hack days. Martin Belam's talk at The Guardian's July 2009 Hack Day must have been both funny and useful: Funny: "However, I am given to understand that this is now deprecated and has gone out ... http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/14011/martin-belams-advice-to-hackers-at-the-guardians-july-2009-hack-day/ The AP's diagram of their Protect, Point, Pay “news DRM” scheme looked like a joke, then I saw the parody. Despite all the smoke and hype, Ed Felton explains that it's underwhelming, at most. Still, hNews might be an interesting format for some blogs to adopt. Most of what the AP ... http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/14008/hnews-might-not-be-so-bad/ Click here to view the embedded video. http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/14003/get-your-beer-pong-skills-on/ All Facebook is happy to share the ten laws of Facebook advertising, but will those rules lead to better results than the .02% CTR Bob Gilbreath got a year ago? http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/13996/do-facebook-ads-work/ Howard Weaver wants newspapers to play offense against Google and others, but Chris Tolles, CEO of news aggregator Topix.com says he's been trying Weaver's plan for a while, and there's no bucket of gold to be found in it. The problem, it would appear, is that newspapers don't sell news. They ... http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/13995/newspaper-business-news-was-a-loss-leader/ Google's own webmasters help site recommends microformats and RDFa structured data to improve indexing and usefulness of the data. Review metadata appears to have full support, while people, product, and business data are in beta. http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/13988/google-recommends-microformats-and-rdfa/