MovableBlog: Asides: July 2004

July 30, 2004

How to remove Internet Explorer from your system [#]

Dell sucks Dave's case seems to be an extreme one: my two experiences with Dell's tech support have been pleasant, once when my HD crashed (they replaced it with a bigger one) and another when I lost the registration code for Windows (which came with the machine). [#]

How Drupal serves a page Following the graphic is a detailed writeup. [#]

Technorati sucks Since they removed "Beta" from their logo, it's okay to complain about outages and long waits (it's by far the slowest web service I use), although I'm surprised Adam didn't visit a hanout of one of the Technorati developers *ahem*#joiito*ahem*. [#]

July 28, 2004

Anil Dash reflects on the Nigritude Ultramarine contest I entered a much smaller, geographically-concentrated (if one can call Canada that) contest earlier this month, and I will write my reflections on it when the time comes. [#]

Global Worming Written by an actual person (or at least directly attributed to one), attempts to correct a misinterpretation, has a clever title, has a sense of humour, and also a sense of humility (it acknowledges an error message was less than helpful). This is corporate blogging done right. [#]

July 27, 2004

6A announces 3.1 feature set The PHP dynamic interface is neat, and the adding default plugins (the winners of the contest) exposes the developers further, and rightly so. I'm not exactly pro-comments, but MT-Blacklist is cool tech and was useful on a now-defunct multi-user site with comments enabled. [#]

July 26, 2004

PHP's handling of arrays in HTML forms Google Groups is the second-place I turn to after the web for already-existing tech-support. [#]

July 24, 2004

How Gmail changes the way you look at your existing email habits I haven't used my Gmail account a lot since I got it. [#]

Cookies are no longer delicious delicacies :( [#]

Six Apart announces features for MT 3.1 Official weblog posting forthcoming, says Mena in a comment. [#]

U-Blog, Six Apart and their angry bloggers Stephanie says there's a firestorm about the company in the French-language weblog community, but you wouldn't know it by reading English-language weblogs. See also the discussion in French. [#]

Standards are part of the real world The dichotomy is a false one. A standard is a practical solution to a technical problem arrived at through a consensus. [#]

July 23, 2004

DOAP Description of a Project, an XML vocabulary for describing open source projects. [#]

Photomatt's experiment I've done it a few times, but then again, I don't have a laptop. [#]

Sticky hack for Wordpress Add to that an aggregator and faking a CMS, and WP development infinitely approaches that of Drupal. [#]

July 22, 2004

Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist for MT3 wins the Movable Type Developers Contest grand prize He appears to be the first to blog about it no less. [#]

Screenshot of what looks like a Yahoo! redesign I don't see that version of the site from home, but I do see it from work. [#]

Plugin to remove links from comments if number of links exceeds 5 [#]

Your desktop is a two-dimensional representation of your life [#]

If your tech support sucks, users like Darren will complain [#]

Suw Charman writes that file sharing has little impact on album sales [#]

July 21, 2004

Mark proposes a moratorium on the MT vs. WP smackdown So much for my plans to write why I think Wordpress is better than Movable Type. (Seriously.) [#]

July 20, 2004

The programmer who outsourced his own job Karl has a summary in French. [#]

"Powered by Wordpress" vs. "Powered by Movable Type" Good luck coming up with accurate measurements of what tool most bloggers use (although I know, or knew, of a recent effort), and no, just because there's "powered by [x]" on a website, it doesn't mean it's actually powered by [x]. [#]

Darren Barefoot interviews the mayor of Visitor Ville Web stats done differently. [#]

Urban Vancouver designed by Bright Creative's Dave Shea I'm one of the editors of the site, and I couldn't be more pleased to write for a site with a layout done by a web design hero. [#]

Backup, restore and migrate your Movable Type weblog [#]

July 19, 2004

Yahoo! redesigns with inline CSS and JS, mostly divs and unordered lists and some tables Looks pretty. I look forward to the critiques from standards nerds and actual designers. (Update: or not? Select IPs only?) [#]

July 18, 2004

Wordpress as CMS [#]

July 17, 2004

R is an XML serialization for RDF Not an RDF serialization in XML. [#]

July 16, 2004

Windows XP is quite insecure [#]

Photos of the Vancouver blogger meetup last night I'm in one of them (though barely visible in the background), and I took the second one from the top. [#]

A picture is worth 1,000 emails Roland says the article itself is behind a subscriber wall. New rule: Any article that uses the word "sharing" (or any variation thereof) in the headline or sub-headline must be freely available on the web. [#]

Feed splicing begins to deliver on the promise of syndication I use Magpie to aggregate all of my weblogs, and sort the entries chronologically in an HTML page and then create an RSS feed (<vapor>I've been meaning to write up a how-to on that</vapor>). [#]

Bloggers seem more attractive than IRCers Uh oh, I'm both. [#]

Easy textures in Photoshop Earlier, Dave says Web Standards Solutions is an absolute must-buy for web designers. [#]

Inside Telus, "a cancer of callous disregard and ignorance continues to run unchecked" He's upset the Telus tech people weren't informed of a change to their mail server, and then when they found out, didn't inform their customers. [#]

Search engine ranking means higher traffic You're paying too much for SEO if you were recommended against starting a weblog. [#]

Derrick refused to buy CDs of artists he liked because of copy-protection DRM destroys value. [#]

July 15, 2004

Feedster 2.0 I'm with Matt: taking off "beta" from the logo is a step in the right direction. [#]

July 10, 2004

A good example of a bad website critique It leaves us guessing (as people are in the comments) as to what's wrong. [#]

July 9, 2004

MT 3.01D released Bug fix releases, plus TypeKey security enhancements. [#]

Backing up your Movable Type weblog Helps if you use the the MySQL database, although Elise also has instructions for the Berkeley DB option. [#]

Blogging evolving from publishing to communicating Roland Tanglao has notes and a photo of the speech Mena and Ben gave at BlogTalk 2.0. [#]

Adam Kalsey redesigns I subscribe to his RSS summaries, so I care about how his site looks. [#]

July 8, 2004

Remove the update indicator in Firefox 0.9.1 when there are no updates [#]

July 7, 2004

Xoduszero My entry for the Canadian SEO Championship. [#]

July 6, 2004

What does "beta" mean? To me it means "don't complain and be lucky you're working with a live version". [#]

Race conditions in security UI "Ironically, advanced users are the most susceptible to these attacks". [#]

July 3, 2004

Karl says that Friendster's switch to PHP broke links [#]

Homeland Security warns against using IE Never thought I'd agree with Homeland Security on something, but here we are. [#]

July 2, 2004

Google removes dictionary feature, brings it back I used (and now use, I guess) it every day. [#]