I’d long been a user of BareBones’ BBEdit, a product that’s served me well for a number of years. But upgrading from version 8.5 to 9 is a paid deal, and after spending 15 days with the demo of BBEdit 9, I decided I wanted to look around a little bit. My friend Matt switched […] » about 600 words
I spied the Wintec FileMate 48GB Ultra ExpressCard and began to wonder how it works as a boot drive for Mac OS X in a late 2008 MacBook Pro (the model just before Apple replaced the ExpressCard slot with an SD slot). But I didn’t have to wonder too much, as a post to this […] » about 300 words
David Weinberger kicked off the latest installment in the ongoing debate about the future of electronic books versus paper books in his Will books survive? A scorecard… post. He’s got some good points, but like many of the smart folks I admire, he approaches this question assuming that books, in any form, are important. Ursula […] » about 300 words
Ethan Zuckerman’s recent post, What if they stop clicking? points out the difficulty of building a business on ad revenue. He points to statistics that show fewer readers are clicking banner and arguments from the web advertising industry about how un-clicked ads still build brand awareness. It’s not really central to Zuckerman’s point, but I […] » about 300 words
Authentication Hacks My first talk was on User Authentication with MU in Existing Ecosystems, all about integrating WP with LDAP/AD/CAS and other directory authentication schemes, as well as the hacks I did to make that integration bi-directional and deliver new user features. My slides are online (.MOV / .PDF), and you can read earlier blog […] » about 200 words
Matt demanded accent-aware spell checking for the WordPress spell checking plugin his company acquired earlier this year. And just a little more than a month later, After the Deadline delivered. Now Beyoncé, café, coöperate, and even my resumé look prettier.
Separately, Wordnik offers a new take on online dictionaries, and they just launched an API.
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 that contains 67 terabytes […] » about 100 words
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 just pointed out one major […] » about 300 words
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 rediscovered that draft post…and that I never fixed the bad code it had fingered. Worse, I’m no longer in a position to change the code.
Along similar lines, I’ve been told that a database driven DHCP config file generator that I wrote back in the late 1990s is still in use, and still suffers bugs due to my failure to sanitize MAC addresses that, being entered by humans, sometimes have errors.
I’ve written bad code since then and will write more bad code still, but as my participation in open source projects has increased, I’ve enjoyed the benefit of community examples and criticism. My work now is better for it.
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 reverse tunnel through […] » about 200 words
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 reasons why sites with ratings and reviews should be adopting microformats, and it’s not that hard to do! For a more detailed explanation, read my recap on the subject, Why Use Microformats?
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 that Apple has included […] » about 300 words
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 WordPress installation up to date is important, as there are some known security flaws in older versions, but most of the attacks that crackers use are targeted elsewhere. Your passwords, all your server apps, the PHP config, your hosting control panel, and other users all must go under the microscope when trying to find security holes.
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.
Just as WordPress has a number of hooks and filters that plugins can use to modify and extend behavior, it also has a cool way to customize the installation process.
TinyMCE, the WYSIWYG editor in WordPress has a rich API to allow adding buttons and stuff, but the docs are hard to get into. We can get a jump on that by looking at how it’s implemented in other WP plugins. This code creates the buttons, while the function that responds to the button click and does the work is defined within the plugin. The TinyMCE plugins in core are also informative.
Any 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 great number of systems not integrated with either our single sign-on (AuthN) or authorization […] » about 1700 words
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 data delivery – but in South Africa it seems the web is still no […] » about 1000 words
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 will improve enough to […] » about 100 words
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.
Situation: 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 determined in wpmu-settings.php, but the code there knows nothing […] » about 900 words
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 enough job. The stat about 300% annual increases in mobile data […] » about 300 words
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. » about 200 words
Situation: using WordPress MU (possibly including BuddyPress) on multiple domains or sub-domains of a large organization with lots of users. WordPress MU is a solid CMS to support a large organization. Each individual blog has its own place in the organization’s URL scheme (www.site.org/blogname), and each blog can have its own administrators and other users. […] » about 1400 words
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 rate to just 10%.
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 Blanchette) for the tip. » about 100 words
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 this: the […] » about 400 words