Ultranormal

Category: development

  • Yellow Pages on the Go

    How cool is this? I found out this morning that AOL has an IM bot for Yellow Pages. So, next time I’m out of town and need to find a movie theater or restaurant, I can just send an IM from my Sidekick to AOLYellowPages and get what I need.\
    I love IM bots for mobile stuff. Short messages, text interface, no waiting for images and pages to download that may or may not render on the Sidekick’s craptacular browser. I use ZolaOnAOL to get headlines, and play games while waiting in lines. I hear there’s a mythical bot for MapQuest too, but I haven’t found that one yet.\
    AOLJournals will let you post to an AOL blog, but yeah… I know most people who read this don’t have one of those.\
    Any other IM bots I should know about?

  • Interesting Developments

    Big changes at work coming next week. I’ll be doing something different, playing a different role, and it will hopefully be big. Big is good.\
    In other news, I got new pants. Not just any pants, smaller pants. I’ve dropped two pants sizes in the past year. My only new year’s resolution this year is to continue. My goal is to lose fifty pounds this year. That would bring my weight loss to a grand total of one hundred pounds. It won’t be easy, but I’ll get it done. It’s only a pound a week… small steps, small changes, gradual improvements.\
    And it’s only January, and I already can’t wait for SXSW.

  • Klanko

    My pal Jon is a genius (he says he’s retarded, so I guess that makes him a savant). His latest Klanko is amazing. It’s my favorite piece of his yet (and I loved the Klanko Discovers His Middle Finger so much, I bought the original artwork). Read it now, before Open Book makes you pay for it.

  • I Feel Professional

    Wow, Anil went and mentioned my class on the Six Apart Professional Network. That’s like getting your cat on the cover of Cat Fancy or something.\
    If you’re coming here from there, the class is for beginners, and covers basics like installation, editing and customizing templates, provides annotated copies of the default templates and goes over some useful/fun plugins. If you’re comfortable doing those things, then the class probably isn’t for you.

  • A Stunning Realization

    So, I’m cleaning out my old e-mail, deleting everything older than a year, and I just realized that in 2004, I received and stored (which means it’s not counting spam) over 24,000 pieces of e-mail to my work address, and over 1,400 (not counting things that get moved to other folders like listservs, comments on my site, breaking news, etc) to my personal e-mail addresses.\
    I have no way of knowing how much spam I got, but since my real-to-spam ratio on my personal address is about 1:4 (I have one address that just gets slammed) and on my AOL account, it’s probably 10:1, that’s almost 10,000 pieces of spam last year.\
    So, more than 25,400 pieces of e-mail passed through my inbox. That’s about 70 a day. I’m sure there are people who get more e-mail than I do, but wow. That’s just crazy. I can guarantee that I read all of them, and more than half required me to either send a response or do something. I’m surprised I do anything else.\
    If only I could figure out how many IM’s I got last year…

  • Bloggie Nominations

    I figured that since I spent so much time on this list, I should share it. If you have your own list o’ faves, go nominate them.\
    Here are my nominations. If I left out a category, it’s because I didn’t nominate anyone for that category. Reviewing the list, it looks like Dooce and Photodude are my favorite blogs, and that’s pretty much true. Here’s the rest of the list:

  • Best Search Term Ever

    Guess who’s number one for best poop ever. Yup, it’s me. Check out The Best Poop Story Ever\
    Man, I love search engines. They provide never ending entertainment.

  • Blogging With Movable Type

    You know, if you know someone who wants to learn about blogging, get one set up and learn how to customize it , my class at Eclectic Academy on Movable Type would be a swell Christmas present. Only \$20 for six weeks of online classes, and lots of hands on helps from me? I mean, come on… that’s a deal.\
    Or, not. You know, it’s up to you.

  • Comment Spam-o-rama

    This will probably get me spammed, but I’ve been reading a lot the past few days (here, here and here, and the MT Pro list) about the horrors of comment spam, and how evil comment spam spiders are crawling sites for the path to mt-comments.cgi and then spamming the crap out of it. Me? I don’t really have a problem with comment spam. How I’ve been able to avoid it up to this point, I’m not really sure. I have several blogs, and none of them have been hit by more than one or two comment spams in their long lives (three years now for Ultranormal, two for Geekout and almost two for the photo gallery).\
    But, I’m getting serious with the preventative medicine. I haven’t implemented all of these things, but I have done some of them:

    • Don’t install Movable Type in the cgi-bin if your host allows it.
    • Rename mt-comments.cgi (and update the CommentScript line in mt.cfg, removing the # in front of it).
    • Use javascript to write out the form action on your comments form. That way, they can’t spider for the location of your comments script (well, make sure the function to do this is in a linked javascript). All of these javascript options screw people who have javascript turned off, but there are sacrifices we have to make.
    • Use javascript to write out your comments. This way, they won’t be indexed by search engines, and you’re removing the benefit of spamming you.
    • Use javascript to open your comment popup window. The one I use uses the entry id, and has the comment script in the linked script – so, again, it’s not easily spiderable.
    • Use the Moderate plugin to close comments on old entries. This gives the spammers fewer available targets.\
      I wrote a tutorial for doing a few of those. I’ll update it to add the form action bit and probably post it to Geekout in the near future.\
      To me, the real problem here is that Movable Type’s default templates are vulnerable out of the box. Maybe if the default template set was a little more protected, comment spam wouldn’t be such a problem. I know the train has kind of left the station on this, since there’s already a huge installed base of people probably using slightly modified versions of the default templates. But, for future versions, a lot of these changes could be included in the default, protecting the vulnerable “newbie” from themselves.

  • Different Data

    Ambient Dashboard is weird. It’s weird in a way that makes me tilt my head to the side. But, somehow, it feels right. People are good at reading dials. We do it every time we drive, look at our thermostats or check a thermometer. They’re just translating what we normally think of as digital data to an analog interface. What’s interesting is that they’re using analog paradigms to do so. They’re not trying to create pie charts or graphs, powerpoint slides or anything else that might feel digital. It’s strictly analog, which is the way to go. Use the tools of the medium to display the data.\
    I’ve been talking at work about design and usability (on top of standards and accessibility). This is a perfect example of using the chosen medium to display information. Too many designers try to translate the medium instead of use the medium’s particular advantages to display their content. For example, if it’s a designer used to working in the publishing world, their web designs are going to use magazine conventions and not web conventions. Their web sites will look stale, out of place, and be neither compelling or usable. I see it all the time, all over the place. Instead of doing things the web does well (expandable, flexible display of content, interactivity, portability), they hamstring their products by ignoring those things and making everything look like a magazine page.\
    I’ve been trying to come up with a better way to argue this point to designers, and I think I’ve hit a wall. The best I can do is point to products that feel “right” and say, “See?!” Yeah, that’s probably not productive either.