Technology

It turns out the Internet Explorer doesn’t properly support CSS’s position: fixed. Google led me to the following:

• How To Create – Making Internet Explorer use position: fixed;
• doxdesk.com: software: fixed.js
• Fixed Positioning for Windows Internet Explorer

The DoxDesk solution looks promising and simple, but I think bugs elsewhere in my layout are preventing it from working. It’s time to start again from scratch.

Just when I was beginning to feel a little on my own with my talk about the Google Economy here, I see two related new books are coming out. The first is Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability. The second is John Battelle’s The Search.

Findability appears to ask the big question that I’ve been pushing toward. From the description at Amazon:

Are we truly at a critical point in our evolution where the quality of our digital networks will dictate how we behave as a species? Is findability indeed the primary key to a successful global marketplace in the 21st century and beyond?

Here, as always when thinking about information, think about “marketplace” in broader terms than pure commercial, pure profit. This is the Google Economy.

Matt started talking up the weird issues developing around multiplayer online games a few weeks ago. Then soon after he blogged it, a story appeared in On the Media (listen, transcript)

Short story: online gaming is huge — one developer claims four million paying customers. More significantly, the interplay between real and virtual worlds might create new challenges for this real world legal system. “Theft” of in-game money and equipment among players in the online world is possible, but it’s lead to the real-world arrest of at least one person and the murder of another when authorities refused to act.

One argument is that these games occupy players time and cost money, so in-game theft results in real-life loss. Baloney. Chess and Monopoly occupy great deals of time, but try telling the cops I rooked your knight. Money? A huge number of Americans invest time and money on building and racing cars on the approximately 1800 racetracks around the country. Real time and and hard-earned money are lost when cars crash, but the track has its own rules “rubin’s racin, Cole” — and none of us would excuse a driver for off-track violence against a competitor.

I don’t want to admit to being interested in marketing, but I am. Here’s a few links…

Blogs:

• Church of the Customer
   
• Seth Godin
   
• Aaron Wall’s SEO Book.com
   
• Threadwatch.org
   

Randomness:

• Writing, Briefly
   
• Google’s search result quality evaluation guidelines
   
• definition of the Google Economy at Wikipedia
   
• The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR
   

Bookmarklets are interesting little bits of JavaScript stored as bookmarks. They’ve been around since about 1998 (earlier?), but I’ve never bothered to write one.

Here are a few examples:

• This sort of creates a bookmark
• Alexa Snapshot
• Wayback

I’m going out on a limb to say MySQL’s full-text indexing and searching features are underused. They appeared in MySQL 3.23.23 (most people are using 4.x, and 5 is in development), but it’s been news to most of the people I know.

Here’s the deal, the MATCH() function can search a full-text index for a string of text (one or more words) and return relevance-ranked results. It’s at the core of the list of related links at the bottom of every post here.

For that query, I put all the tag names into a single variable that might look like this:

$keywords = “mysql database php select full-text search full-text searching docs documentation”

Then I do a select that looks something like this:

SELECT * FROM wp_posts WHERE MATCH(post_title,post_content) AGAINST(‘$keywords’);

The docs give a lot more detail, including how to do boolean searches.

37signals takes on Google and suggests some improvements.

coconutBattery:

coconutBattery is a tool that reads out the data of your notebook-battery (iBook/Powerbook). It shows the current charge of your battery as well as the current maximum capacity related to its original.

Via O’Grady’s PowerPage{#14850}

bstat has become bsuite. The name change reflects the fact that I want the plugin to do a lot more than track usage stats. One of the first features to enter testing here is the “related” section below. I’m calling it “bsuggestive,” but that may turn out to be too cute a name to tolerate for long. The results are based on the tags for the post, so it doesn’t work with old posts that haven’t been tagged, and it sometimes returns some weird matches, but it’s still alpha, so what can we ask for. Though, if you arrive at MaisonBisson via a search on one of the recognized search engines, the related posts will actually be based on the search terms used. The results in those cases seem to work better, which probably says a lot about the quality of my tagging efforts.

I hope to release a public beta of bsuite in the next couple weeks, but expect to see continued development of the bsuite features here.

I stumbled across the sometimes funny How To Live Your Life and got curious about the theme. Turns out it’s by Sebastian Schmieg, who keeps things real at kingcosmonaut. The theme is Blix, but the kingcosmonaut site is much cooler.

The developers describe Flock as

[T]he world’s most innovative social browsing experience. We call it the two-way web.

Which is a good enough sales pitch to make me try the free demo, but it’s all still a private beta. Perhaps they’re trying to prove the point that nothing builds buzz better than unavailability. Osakasteve gushes:

A browser that is designed around social software like blogs and flickr

And Roland Tanglao overflowed:

I was blown away! Drag and drop blogging – drag text from a blog post and it automatically creates a cite tag with a link to the original post and the quoted text is indented using a blockquote tag. Drag and drop Flickr photos. And Chris teased me with some more future features like having del.icio.us as your bookmarks (goodbye to useless local bookmarks).

Extra: it’s based on Firefox and will fully love Mac, Win, and Linux. Interesting ideas…where’s my beta invite?