
View of Queenstown, New Zealand

View of Queenstown, New Zealand
Brent Simmons recently wrote about “Your name matters“:
Take a look at your weblog. How easy is it to find your name?
It’s hard in a surprising number of weblogs. But I’m not going to link to your weblog unless I can find your name.
I’m going to take his question one step further. How easy is it to find your name in your RSS (or Atom) feed? Most of the news I read comes from skimming posts in Google Reader’s ‘All Items’ view. That allows me to quickly go through new posts that I haven’t seen yet. When looking at a post my main hint for where it came from is the feed title, and to a lesser degree the post title.
I didn’t realize how important that was until I saw someone do a really bad job of it. Our local school district, www.canyonsdistrict.org, provides feeds for news items posted to their site. Which is great. But the title for the feed is useless: General News. Not ‘Canyon District General News’, just ‘General News’. When skimming through new items in Google Reader ‘General News’ provides me with zero details on what site the item is from.
Your name should be easy to find and obvious on your site and in your feed.
Ever wanted to get into the details of the GIF image format? What’s In A GIF – Bit by Byte covers it all.
Earlier this month everyone was talking about how Congress had declared pizza a vegetable. Not surprisingly there is more to the story. The Washington Post has an article that explains more of the details: No, Congress did not declare pizza a vegetable.
Turns out this wasn’t really so much about pizza as it was tomato paste. Which of course is used frequently on pizza. Currently “an eighth of a cup of tomato paste is credited with as much nutritional value as half a cup of vegetables”. I don’t know why it gets to count as extra exactly. Earlier this year the Obama administration put out guidelines that would change this to make an eighth of a cup and eighth of cup. Sounds like a reasonable change to me.
Congress choose to override that guideline, and that action is what passed recently and triggered the ‘pizza is a vegetable’ talk. I’d be curious to find out the trail of money and deals that led up to the passing of the revised agriculture appropriations bill.
Tired of hearing about how bad the federal debt is? Turns out you can donate money to the United States Treasury to help pay off the public debt:
Thank you for your contribution which will be deposited to the account “Gifts to Reduce the Public Debt.” Your contribution is accepted under the provisions of 31 U.S.C. 3113 which authorizes the Secretary of the Treasury to accept conditional gifts to the United States for the purpose of reducing the public debt. These donations are voluntary, and no goods, services, or other considerations are provided to the donors.
It sounds like these donations are specifically limited to only paying down the public debt.
As of 31 October 2011 the total public debt is $14,993,709,000,000. As of the 2010 Census there are 308,745,538 people in America, bringing the per person amount to roughly $48,563.33. Not exactly a trivial amount.
I’d be curious to know how many people donate to that account and approximately what those amounts look like.
I was surprised to see that Google’s plusone.js doesn’t support HTTP compression. Here is a quick test with
curl -v --compressed https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js > /dev/null
Request Headers:
> GET /js/plusone.js HTTP/1.1 > User-Agent: curl/7.19.7 (universal-apple-darwin10.0) libcurl/7.19.7 OpenSSL/0.9.8r zlib/1.2.3 > Host: apis.google.com > Accept: */* > Accept-Encoding: deflate, gzip
Response Headers:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK < Content-Type: text/javascript; charset=utf-8 < Expires: Fri, 18 Nov 2011 02:35:20 GMT < Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2011 02:35:20 GMT < Cache-Control: private, max-age=3600 < X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff < X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN < X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block < Server: GSE < Transfer-Encoding: chunked
You'll notice there is no Content-Encoding: gzip header in the response.
We'll have to get Steve Souders to pester them about that.
Having co-workers around the globe means that we often use GMT to refer to a date & time. I turned to the Word Clock widget (for Dashboard in Mac OS X) in hopes of showing GMT in an easy reference area. Unfortunately GMT is not one of the available timezones in the drop down list.
The easiest way to show the right time is to select a city in GMT that doesn’t change for summer time. Reykjavík, Iceland in the Atlantic region is the option I see most people recommend. But I wanted the the label on the clock to read GMT as well. This turned out to be really easy to do.
First step, open /Library/Widgets/World Clock.wdgt/WorldClock.js in your favorite editor (as root).
Near the top of the file you’ll see the region arrays defined. I added a new one:
var GMT = [
{ city: 'GMT', offset: 0, timezone: 'GMT' },
];
Next you need to add it to the list of regions (around line 238), which looks like:
var continents = [
{name:"GMT", array:GMT},
{name:"Africa", array:Africa},
{name:"Asia", array:Asia},
{name:"Atlantic", array:Atlantic},
{name:"Australia", array:Australia},
{name:"Europe", array:Europe},
{name:"North America", array:NorthAmerica},
{name:"Pacific", array:Pacific},
{name:"South America", array:SouthAmerica}
];
Save the file and exit the editor. As your regular user account run killall Dock, which will restart the process that manages the Dashboard.
Now go into the Dashboard and add a World Clock widget. You’ll see GMT as one of the region options:

In the new GMT region there is only one city:

Giving you a World Clock widget that shows GMT and is labeled as such:

This worked for me on Mac OS 10.6.8. I expect it to be the same for 10.7 but I haven’t tried it.
I was wondering about the stock price for Google today and out of habit went to finance.yahoo.com to see a chart. Specifically I wanted to see the 1 year chart. I don’t have Flash installed on my primary browser, which triggered Yahoo Finance to redirect me away from the 1 year chart page to http://finance.yahoo.com/chart/flash#symbol=GOOG;range=1y instead. Which looks like this:

Yahoo Finance Chart Without Flash
Seriously, that is what the page looks in my Chrome 16 beta browser without Flash installed.
If you are going to continue using Flash for these charts, why on earth would you redirect people without it to such a useless page?
Update : @azitzer (product manager for Yahoo Finance) noticed this and to their credit fixed it. Still requires Flash to get the regular graph, but at least now the redirect doesn’t send you to a mostly empty page.
Videos of WordCamp SLC 2011 Presentations are being published at WordPress.tv. Included in the first batch was my Site Performance, From Pinto to Ferrari session.
Last night I headed over to Twitter.com to check on the recent updates to my timeline. Near the top I noticed something a little different:

Subtle isn’t it? Just in case you missed it, here is the same screenshot with a highlight of the difference:

Twitter allowed Linode to inject an ad (effectively) into my timeline. In Twitterspeak this ad is called a ‘promotion’.
This isn’t new of course, Twitter has been talking about ads promoted tweets for months. This the first time I’ve ever seen it show up in my timeline though.
Twitter says these can show up in official apps as well, but when I looked my at timeline with the official Twitter iOS app I didn’t see the ad promoted tweet:

I have mixed feelings about Twitter injecting ads ‘promotions’ into my timeline. The promoted trends in the sidebar on Twitter.com weren’t a problem. They are clearly labeled as an ad promotion, making it easy to tell the difference between real trends and ads promotions. Most of the time I only scan my timeline, skipping the trending items entirely.
Timeline ads promotions are a different beast though. The visual difference is relatively small, making it easy to miss when scanning through tweets. If it had a clear visual difference (different background color?) I think it would be less annoying to me since I’d know what to avoid when scanning recent tweets in my timeline.
Despite having taken over $1.1 billion in funding there is little doubt that they’ll have to do something to increase real revenue. I can’t help but feel that my timeline is expected to be pure though, having ads promoted tweets inline with little visual distinction is a disappointment.