Hashplus and Hashminus
Twitter's a pretty handy way to vent about something good or bad that's happening.
Here's a really simple way to flag that:
- #+
- #-
They're just hashtags. They're as short as can be, but I think their meaning is pretty clear.
16 posts tagged with:
Democratic Telly
As a part-time political nerd, I'm keen to keep informed about British politics, particularly in the run-up to a general election. I do a lot of reading, but I also watch programmes like the leaders' debates.
I'm a registered voter, but I happen to live overseas. Given the sorry state of global television distribution by television channels, that causes some hiccups.
I'm not concerned that I can't get access to these videos; with a fair dose of technical knowledge it's pretty simple. I am concerned that it is wrong to make it harder than it need be for any potential voter to get informed.
I hope that for the upcoming debates, the television channels will make them available to all, as easily as possible. If you agree, please let them know (see the links at the foot of this post).
Update at 07:39 EDT, 23rd April 2010 – Some success
Tagged: Media, Rants, Distribution, Web, Technology, Politics
Posted at 09:09 EDT, 18th April 2010.
No comments.
First Two Ws
The Web is becoming more fragmented, and not quite so World-Wide. More and more often, I get to sites that can't show me what I'm there for because of where I seem to be coming from.
I know there's nothing in the internet's protocols that reliably dobs in where you are coming from, so it never really gets in the way.
Having recently moved from the UK to Canada, I naturally want to keep in touch with the old country. Moreover, I watch a number of things from our southern neighbours. As a geek I have no trouble routing my traffic so that I can see the end result. It's always a little clumsy but works in the end. If the BBC let me pay for an overseas TV licence, I'd likely jump at the chance.
I've been misidentified as German, Swedish and, very occasionally, Polish. If it's just Google taking a best-guess as to which site you'd likely prefer with a clear link back to what you actually asked for, that's fairly harmless.
[Image from the NASA Earth Observatory, by Reto Stöckli, based on data from NASA and NOAA. Thank you.]
Tagged: Distribution, Web, Technology, Media, Rants
Posted at 10:42 EST, 19th November 2009.
No comments.
Cascading Test Sheets
Testing Web pages is a pretty complex task. Very often we settle for too little, checking little more than:
- that our markup validates against the spec
- that a simple link-checker doesn't find dead links
- & that some monkey-testing doesn't turn up any glaring errors
Those are good checks to make, but we need to do a lot better.
I want to make some declarative statements about what is expected of different pages, and have them run routinely. For complicated pages, that depend on user-supplied, database-held or offsite data, I'd like to run the tests on any pages I might ever ship, and give the administrators a decent stab at recreating the error and damn-well fixing it.
Thankfully, the CSS people have done a fine job of allowing you to pick out parts of an HTML document and then apply styles to them. Better yet, we've just about reached the point where smart designers can express what they want in CSS, without needing to write anything terribly complicated.
This is a little idea for how to do that. There's no implementation yet, but I'm looking for feedback on doing it this way. The basic idea is to express some useful, human-level tests in a CSS-like language that make sense to more than code-nerds, and use them to test individual Web pages, or entire sites, and be more confident that they do all that you expect, and nothing that you don't.
Update at 11:03 EDT, 8th April 2009 – Minor tweak to the examples.
Using secure Web sites more frequently
I've got a little more diligent recently about using encryption where I can. In particular, several sites allow you to use an encrypted connection, but don't force it:
- Google Reader
- Twitter – including for their fine API, so I no longer send my credentials in plain text every few minutes
- Newzleech – a handy index of downloadable content on Usenet
- The Pirate Bay – although these days I go there more often for the amusing legal threats than for anything else
Harvard Business Review Fuckwittage
It's a little thing, but if we are to have a hope of educating users to protect themselves online that reputable sites don't behave just like the fraudsters.
Here's a quick spot of fuckwittery from Harvard Business Review.
Tagged: Fuckwittage, Rants, Web, Technology, Security
Posted at 05:29 EST, 21st February 2008.
No comments.
Halifax Stupidity
Argh.
The front page of Halifax's online banking has an extravagantly stupid 'feature'.
Somehow, they have managed to publish their warnings about phishing attacks so that they look like, well, a bit of a phishing attack!
Tagged: Technology, Security, Fuckwittage, Rants, Web
Posted at 14:23 EST, 5th February 2008.
No comments.
SemanticCamp London
The sign-up for SemanticCamp London is open.
If you are near London and interested in using the Web with meaning, then grab a spot before they are all gone. It'll be on the 16th and 17th of February, at the Department of Computing at Imperial College (or 'work' from my point of view).
We also have some good pubs nearby, for refreshments afterwards.
Trying to use the BBC's new iPlayer
I'm very pleased that the BBC have made a version of their catch-up service, iPlayer, that isn't tied to Windows and Internet Explorer.
There are a few good things, programmes are addressable at the episode/programme level, not just the series. That's a great thing, and as I've said before, the BBC's new Programme Support is a fantastic step forward for Tv metadata.
The quality is fairly good, but variable. It's obviously worse than television, and quite a bit worse than recordings people distribute amongst themselves using BitTorrent or Usenet. HIGNFY S34E09 was pretty watchable, full-screen on a 21 inch monitor, from across the room. Last week's Film 2007 was unwatchably blocky, for me. The BBC (and their Trust, and the rightsholders) should recognise that that is what they are competing with, and if the normal distribution mechanisms are worse, we'll get good, shiny, socially acceptable alternatives built by the crazy people.
Amazon patent decent URLs for search
A long time ago, I wrote gallery.future-i.com, and I was particularly exercised about using clean URLs (and still am).
One place I feel I did a really nice job was in making the search URLs pretty nice, e.g. a search for 'mary' lives at:
I did that in the middle of 2001, and I expect plenty of others did similar things by then, too. For me, the tricky bit is all done by Apache's mod_rewrite, which takes incoming requests to your web site, and let's you rejig it to pass parameters to scripts without exposing all that grunge to the outside world. It isn't the only way to do it, but it is powerful and effective.
My annoyance now is that Amazon have a patent on a very similar technique, covering URLs for search results of the form http://somedomain/flibble, filed in 2004.
I was impressed by Amazon's A9 when it launched, principally for the clean URLs for search.
That doesn't mean they own the idea, which is plainly in play before that. And don't get me started on parallel invention, making it all the sillier.
I hope the patent boils away in a sea of prior art.
[Via Buzz Out Loud #589, Slashdot coverage]
Tagged: Rants, Web, Technology, Social, Politics, Fuckwittage
Posted at 09:54 EDT, 25th October 2007.
No comments.
BBC Programme Support
The BBC have a great new Web site – BBC Programme Support (more info from Tom Scott of the BBC). This is especially good for Web nerds like me, but it will help make link-centric television work for Real Human Beings, too.
There are a few quirks in how things are listed right now but I'm sure they'll shake out in due course. What's great about this service is that the Beeb is committing to long-term, stable URIs for their programmes, with a single, clear link for each show, irrespective of how and when it is shown or repeated.
Phoney privacy
I'm unsurprised at recent developments at Oxford as over-zealous proctors fine students for misbehaviour using evidence from Facebook.
I think there's some real trouble with people understanding quite what they're publishing, and to whom.
Worse than that, I think people have a false sense of security when they tag their updates as 'friends only' on sites like Twitter, Facebook and so forth.
Twitter awareness
Wired has an article on Twitter by Clive Thompson which is spot on:
Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.
I've several friends using Twitter who I'd love to see more often. I'm not going to manage that, but at least when I do see them now the conversation starts in a much more interesting place. We both have a sense of whether things have been fun or crap lately. Since the Twitter messages are so short, they sometimes only just make sense after chatting about it.
Twitter's great, and I expect we'll see more of this ambient presence in other spheres before long.
Better than 'Search Engine Optimisation'
It's a depressing thought. There's a site you love, you have poured heart and soul and energy into it.
More and more frequently, I find myself fighting the corner of not doing "search engine optimisation".
'Verified' by Visa
While using my Halifax Visa card online recently, I bumped into the Verified by Visa programme.
It's a nice idea, in theory, but the implementation I saw was woeful. It was depressingly similar to a phishing attack, warmly assuring me about security by chatting about it in the Web page, while hiding the parts of my browser that can tell me that more sensibly.
Like most geeks, I try and educate my less geeky family and friends about how to behave safely with technology. Things like this make that job harder.
Update at 17:51 EDT, 21st April 2007 – Follow-up: Guardian coverage
Tagged: Business, Web, Technology, Security, Fuckwittage, Rants
Posted at 11:22 EDT, 31st March 2007.
Noddy rules for accessibility
I've been stuck in a few conversations recently about Web accessibility, which has led me to think a little more about what the proper balance is between shinyness and usefulness.
In short, I don't want to poke people in the eye – they usually don't deserve it.