We're all just linking to each other around here.
Moo
29 November 2006 — danReplacement of hotlinked images is... whimsical today.
(He used to have this, from my subwoofer review. Now he has this.)
(On trolling further down in my referring-URL list for today, I am pleased to note that the priapic rabbit with which I graced this page remains there, pink and proud. He's Not Safe For Work, by the way, in case you don't know what "priapic" means.)
I'm such a bitch
28 November 2006 — danMy very good friend Peter at BlueTomorrow has, in our little tiff, adopted the any-publicity-is-good-publicity, bring-it-on-you-little-wusses attitude.
UPDATE: And now he's un-adopted it again. A cynic might suggest that this is because it really, really didn't work. A starry-eyed believer in the fundamental goodness of the human nature, like me, would take him at his word when he says that he was only asking, not demanding, when he talked about lawyers and Ceasing and Desisting.
Anyhoo, on with the post as it was a few hours ago. Don't feel obliged to actually do any Googlebombing now.
It strikes me that this is not entirely wise, when your online identity is tenuous enough that the first Google hit for your name is a link farm and the fourth hit for your site name is a PageRank 0 site.
(And yes, that's a wiki, but don't be lame and vandalise it.)
When you're in this situation, you're a large and soft target for Google bombing. That snarky letters page of mine is going to bubble up the search rankings well enough all by itself, but it won't take many other people putting the strings "BlueTomorrow" and "Peter Manzella" on their sites for those sites, and the other sites they link to, to swamp the feebly ranked current results.
With any luck Sad to say, but people searching for Peter's name will, quite soon, have a hard time finding any information about him except the fact that he once alleged a chunk of rampant suckery to be fine journalism, and pissed off some guy in Australia.
[As I write this, a few days after this post first went up, my letters column is Google's #2 hit in a search for "bluetomorrow", and I am now officially the Internet's number one authority on Peter Manzella!]
I've never done this kind of Google experiment before. It's nice to have a deserving target.
(Well, it is until they sue you, anyway. Peter made a vague legal threat, then very rapidly changed his mind, apologised nicely, and now we're all friendly-like again. It was by far the fastest such cycle I've ever encountered, and I've done this sort of thing a few times now.)
One annoyance down...
23 November 2006 — danI was pleased to hear from Avery Morrow, the author of the ClumsyFingers extension that turns off the questionably helpful auto-address-completion feature in Firefox without making you fiddle with the browser's guts.
Yea, that extension doth now work with Firefox 2, and verily, it saveth me from attempting to visit such popular URLs as http://www.ebay my search string goes here.net/.
Three cheers for Avery!
E-I-E-I-O
13 November 2006 — danToday, I received in quick succession three boilerplate letters from one "Tim Kelly", who's proud to be in charge of the various link farms at you-name-it.clickdirectory.info.
He thought, all three times, that one or another page of dansdata.com was "fantastic", and would perfectly suit the content of three of his subdomains, and he'd already linked to me, and I could add my site to his invaluable directories at this page here, blah blah.
Even the more focussed sub-pages of clickdirectory.info contain, of course, a spray of links which struggle to even be relevant to each other. They are, as is normal for link farms, never even a tenth as useful to anybody as would be the first page of results of a Google search for the term in question.
Link farms are not just useless Web pages and sources of spam. If you actually fall for one of these e-mails and swap links with a farm, Google is quite likely to reduce your site's PageRank. Yes, link farms often manage to scrap together a bit of PageRank - but Google hate them.
It's perfectly safe to be linked to by a link farm, but if you link back to them you're declaring yourself to be part of the scam.
Firefox's Least Useful Feature
10 November 2006 — danIf you type "foo" in Firefox's address bar and press Ctrl-Enter, you get http://www.foo.com/. Shift-Enter gives you http://www.foo.net/, and Ctrl-Shift-Enter gives you http://www.foo.org/.
I'm sure there's someone in the world who wants those shortcuts.
But I have never needed them. I have, instead, about a zillion times been peacefully typing a Quick Search and pressed Shift-Enter by mistake, usually because my search string ends with a quoted string and I'm still holding Shift down.
Like all normal humans, I use "g" as my Google Quick Search. So I might, for instance, type
g autoerotic "hydraulic shovels"
...then press Shift-Enter by mistake, and thereby try to go to http://www.g autoerotic "hydraulic shovels".net/.
Is there something in about:config to disable these shortcuts? I can't find it.
UPDATE: As per Avery Morrow's comment below, this problem is indeed now fixable, with the updated version of his extension. Yippee!
Firefox fiddling
5 November 2006 — danHerewith, the few (Windows) Firefox tricks that I find particularly handy, and a small rant.
You know how IE could be set to make each new window load whatever you'd been looking at in the last one? To make Firefox do the same thing with a new tab, make your new blank tab with ctrl-T, then press ctrl-Z to paste the contents of the last tab's address bar into the new tab's.
Troubled by drop-down autocompletion menus (for login names, for instance) that contain useless relics of past mis-typing...
...or evidence that you've been doing lots of searches for things that would make the rest of the National Association of Evangelicals very angry with you?
Cursor-down to any entries you don't want, and press shift-Delete. Bing, gone.
Also, you can cycle through tabs with ctrl-Tab and ctrl-shift-Tab, and close tabs without bothering to select them first by middle-clicking them on the tab bar (and, of course, ctrl-W closes the current tab).
That last trick isn't actually especially tricky, but it lets you do everything that the new Firefox 2 tab close boxes do, while leaving the close boxes turned off so you've got more room for actual tab text. You can also make the tabs work pretty much exactly as they did in Firefox 1.5, if you don't like the new horizontal scrolling and List All Tabs button - that's mentioned near the top of this Lifehacker piece.
The comments on that piece point out that the new "prefetch" feature is (a) not actually new, and (b) not as brillant as you might at first think. No, Firefox 2 (or various versions of 1, or Google Web Accelerator...) does not dumbly preload whatever the first link on the current page points to, or some such goofy thing.
Right now, I bet prefetch actually still doesn't do much at all. I suppose some sites must use the <link rel="prefetch"... syntax needed to make it happen, but it's not exactly rife. If prefetch ever does become really popular, though, it could indeed be a definite pain for dial-up users. Just because the browser's idle doesn't mean nothing else needs bandwidth, after all.
Oh, and people in offices with strict browsing policies could be in for all kinds of fun if some random page decides to invisibly prefetch a few porn and shock images, just for fun. Not that you can't do that already in several ways, but prefetch is the most 11-year-old-h4XX0r-friendly way to plant filth in someone's cache folder that I've yet seen.
I'm dead philosophical, me
1 November 2006 — danSo I was reading The Daily WTF again (shut up, I understand some of it), and it led me to the Wikipedia page on anti-patterns, which all right-thinking people should find at least somewhat entertaining. Most anti-patterns are applicable to all sorts of systems beyond programs and office processes.
Take the Big Ball of Mud, for instance. It's what you get whenever anything - a program, a business, a house, a war - is built and fixed in a completely ad hoc fashion, with no overarching plan or control structure. Letting stuff just grow works fine for small and simple things, but if you let a major project of any sort go to seed, unspeakable abominations will, inevitably, spring forth.
Anyhoo, the Big Ball of Mud concept reminded me of the shiny-ball-of-mud, or "dorodango", an unusual pastime that swept the blogs a while ago. Instructions, relevance to developmental psychology, Zen, et cetera.
It just strikes me as rather neat that it is both literally and figuratively possible to polish a Big Ball of Mud until until it becomes very attractive, and may even seem quite valuable.
(Insert link to Microsoft and +5, Insightful moderation here.)