Web Posts

• 04.19.08 Why They’re Doing This (Social Software, Web)

  I don’t want to make a habit of replying on my blog to posts on other blogs, because (a) it’s dorky in an autistic way, and (b) it only encourages the annoying practice of blogs that don’t allow comments.

  But I’ve seen a couple of references now to Dean Allen’s complaint about sites that offer multiple RSS feed formats, none offering comments, and since it directly relates to my past job monkeying with feeds I feel like I should answer.

  There are two reasons why a web page would advertise multiple feeds.… MORE

• 04.13.08 Cloudy As Buzzwords (Social Software, Web, Computers)

  I have many ideas for applications, but most of them seem to rely on similar kinds of infrastructure, in particular a distributed, secure application-level messaging system. Unfortunately, this doesn’t really exist yet, at least not in any form that meets my needs.

  What am I talking about here? More colloquially, it’s a mechanism for letting applications all over the network send messages to each other, without requiring a central server, and without allowing messages to be eavesdropped upon or faked.

  Let’s take it one buzzword at a time…… MORE

• 03.26.08 Japanese Advertisers Discover Zooko’s Triangle (Social Software, Web)

  Cabel Sasser, of indie developer Panic, reports from Japan:

  “Within minutes of riding on the first trains in Japan, I notice a significant change in advertising, from train to television. The trend? No more printed URLs. The replacement? Search boxes! With recommended search terms!” [*]
  

  He goes on to note how common it is for people to type URLs or domain names into their browser’s search box instead of the address field. To American geeks this … MORE

• 01.30.08 96 Characters Ought To Be Enough For Anyone (Web, Languages, Computers)

  Paul Graham: “Arc only supports Ascii. … But the kind of people who would be offended by that wouldn’t like Arc anyway.” That last bit [emphasis mine] sort of flummoxed me. Is he saying that LISP only appeals to native English speakers?… MORE

• 01.09.08 Web Frameworks vs. Hosted Environments (Web)

  There’s a fascinating post on DreamHost blog about how frustrated they are with trying to make Ruby On Rails work for their bread-and-butter market of shared web hosting. I’ve run into this intermittently ever since I first tried out Rails two years ago. It’s fun to develop in, it works great on my local machine, but it’s been impossible to get any Rails app to run correctly on my DreamHost-ed web site. I’ve been told … MORE

• 12.02.07 Facebook and Decentralized Identifiers (Social Software, Web)

  I finally made myself a Facebook account. The most interesting thing I noticed is how the service has no visible identifiers for user identities; this has a surprising amount in common with experimental decentralized-PKI systems, and holds out hope for the prospect of distributed online social networks, saving us from the technical, social and privacy problems of centralization.… MORE

• 10.26.07 Leopard Feature #301 (Social Software, Web, Computers)

  Even though I’m still recovering from a bad cold, I can ring in the new OS by pointing out yet another little improvement, one that didn’t make it into the official Top 300 list.… MORE

• 01.05.02 DXM, Big Fun, And My Favorite Hypertext (Ideas, Web)

  By way of introducing my favorite hypertext, I have to digress a bit. Last March [2001] I had a particularly nasty flu for about three weeks, which ended up as a wretched dry cough. I couldn’t go one minute without coughing, and I had a horrible sharp pain in my ribs caused by a sprained chest muscle. One night I was lying on the couch (so I wouldn’t keep Diana up all night) trying in … MORE