Papaya Pariah

I think Techdirt got it right on the issue of ad blockers

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:32:53 -0500

If you are running a media site, if you’re having trouble making money, it’s your fault. Don’t blame your readers. Don’t blame your community by telling them they’re “devastating” a site by blocking ads or failing to pay for a paywall. As the producers of that site, it’s your responsibility to do things to get that site paid for.

via Techdirt

How to alienate your friends and block off yourself from the outside world

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 15:01:49 -0500

Aaron Swartz wrote a little blog post entitled HOWTO: Read More Books. Sounds great, right?

Wrong!

The basics of reading more books include such steps as “alienate everyone close to you”, “block your favorite blogs” (where he suggests that you unplug your TV and literally block your favorite websites at the router level) and “keep the temperature low”. Sounds fine if you’re a monk whose committed himself to a life a solitude.

I like watching TV and what’s the benefit of reading more books if it kills my social life and makes me miserable. I’d like reading as an alternative to TV and blogs, not a replacement. I’d love to see a list of tips on how to read more books that include small and practical steps that anybody can do without reorienting their life around reading.

In Aaron’s defense, he did deliver what he said he would. The post is a list of ways to read more books. And you will read more books since that’s all that will be left. But the post totally misses on the point of self-improvement. If you’re going to suggest a strategy or set of rules to improve your life, they’d better outweigh their cost.

That’s all.

Remember when I wrote this post?

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:35:11 -0500

Remember when I wrote this post? (1 year ago)

Well … it came true!

Organization

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:25:06 -0500

A Muslim, a Christian, and a crazy guy walk into a room. The one thing you can know for sure is that at least two out of three of them organize their lives around things that aren’t real.

via Scott Adams Blog

I organize myself around my TV schedule. I should probably change that.

Law of Two Feet or “The Law of Mobility”

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 14:29:00 -0500

If at any time during our time together you find yourself in any situation where you are neither learning nor contributing, use your two feet. Go to some other place where you may learn and contribute.

via Wikipedia

Basically, you’re only as good to me as what I can contribute or get out of you. It’s a pretty businesslike perspective but I think it applies really well to websites we visit or any place we spend a lot of time.

It shouldn’t be applied to relationships though. Selflessness is a virtue.

Commet about comments

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 13:13:32 -0500

Comments can be beneficial, but usually aren’t. For the vast majority of comment-enabled blogs, the comments are a net loss for the author with very high rates of ad-hominem attacks, nastiness, nonsensical responses, and spam.

via 37signals

It’s kinda ironic since the quote itself comes from a comment.

One third of the traffic on this blog is to this post:

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 15:02:53 -0500

One third of the traffic on this blog is to this post::

It’s crazy to see that a little SEO actually works. I wrote a post that would be useful to web developers, I put some keywords in the title and headers, and then I got a couple of links to it from other websites. That’s kind of a simplified version of things but it’s a repeatable process that has proven to generate (a little) traffic.

Why Your Employees Are Losing Motivation

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 14:15:46 -0500

Why Your Employees Are Losing Motivation:

via Harvard Business School

If some day I ever become a manager I hope that I excel at these things.

What restaurant websites say to web developers

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 14:35:34 -0500

“Take a look at our menu! It’s a PDF of a screenshot of a scan of a Word document printed on a dishtowel.”

– Restaurant website

There are too many restaurants with websites for all of them to be good. It’s especially difficult with tiny marketing budgets and short timelines.

These guys really know how to do “experience design”

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 12:46:30 -0500

These guys really know how to do “experience design”

This headline should be “20 Percent Of TechCrunch Readers Browse With Chrome”

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 12:34:00 -0500

This headline should be “20 Percent Of TechCrunch Readers Browse With Chrome”:

… instead of “20 Percent Of TechCrunch Readers Are Already Browsing With Chrome.” They say that as if it’s inevitable that everyone will eventually browse with Google Chrome.

This pisses me off a little

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 12:02:03 -0500

Kevin Lynch (emphasis added):

Adobe supports HTML and its evolution and we look forward to adding more capabilities to our software around HTML as it evolves. If HTML could reliably do everything Flash does that would certainly save us a lot of effort, but that does not appear to be coming to pass. Even in the case of video, where Flash is enabling over 75% of video on the Web today, the coming HTML video implementations cannot agree on a common format across browsers, so users and content creators would be thrown back to the dark ages of video on the Web with incompatibility issues.

C’mon, that’s not fair! Everyone following this story knows that Mozilla won’t include the H.264 codec because of licensing fees. There’d be no “disagreement” if it were an open standard but patent holders wanna get paid.

HAML Sucks for Content

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 14:04:49 -0500

HAML Sucks for Content:

This actually taught more about HAML than the documentation.

Flash 10.1 optimized for Mac OS X

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 14:06:03 -0500

With Flash Player 10.1, we are optimizing video rendering further on the Mac and expect to reduce CPU usage by half…

Well! That’s exciting news. I’m looking forward to a better Hulu experience.

via John Nack on Adobe

Maybe I don’t hate Microsoft so much.

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 13:36:00 -0500

The company’s chief executive, Steve Ballmer, has continued to deliver huge profits. They totaled well over $100 billion in the past 10 years alone and help sustain the economies of Seattle, Washington State and the nation as a whole. Its founder, Bill Gates, is not only the most generous philanthropist in history, but has also inspired thousands of his employees to give generously themselves. No one in his right mind should wish Microsoft failure.

via The New York Times

Human Scale

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 13:27:46 -0500

Human Scale:

I like the last paragraph where he applies “Human Scale” to website design.

Ampersands (&'s) in URLs

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:48:00 -0500

Another common error occurs when including a URL which contains an ampersand (“&”):

...

This example generates an error for “unknown entity section” because the “&” is assumed to begin an entity reference. Browsers often recover safely from this kind of error, but real problems do occur in some cases. In this example, many browsers correctly convert ©=3 to ©=3, which may cause the link to fail. Since ⟨ is the HTML entity for the left-pointing angle bracket, some browsers also convert &lang=en to 〈=en. And one old browser even finds the entity §, converting §ion=2 to §ion=2.

To avoid problems with both validators and browsers, always use & in place of & when writing URLs in HTML:

...

Note that replacing & with & is only done when writing the URL in HTML, where “&” is a special character (along with “<” and “>”). When writing the same URL in a plain text email message or in the location bar of your browser, you would use “&” and not “&”. With HTML, the browser translates “&” to “&” so the Web server would only see “&” and not “&” in the query string of the request.

via htmlhelp.com

Photo

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:14:26 -0400

Bloggers can’t write

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:41:06 -0400

Most blogs aren’t very good.
Bloggers can’t write.

The writing isn’t the only thing that makes blogs bad; the lack of consistency isn’t helping either.

And I am a victim of this too. Blogs are kinda of a chore when you know that no body is going to read them. Maybe if there were more appreciation for the work put into blogs then the writers would care enough to put more time into them. Or maybe it’s the other way around. If writers put in more time, then people might care to read them.

Just a thought … (and a personal note to myself).

Google A/B testing feels too minimalistic

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 17:42:31 -0400

Google A/B testing feels too minimalistic