Archive for January, 2005

The Onion’s coming to San Francisco

My brother is coming to town next week from Brooklyn. He’s a writer for The Onion. He’s on a panel as part of SF Sketchfest, a sketch comedy festival.

He’s joined on the panel by two other Onion writers (of six total) and the editor, as well as Dave Eggers. They go 8pm, Monday January 24th, at Cobb’s Comedy Club in SF.

Digital-proof that you should stop using Internet Explorer for your browser.

The goal is simple: to collect a database of every single article ever published on the internet about why one should not use Internet Explorer.

I have found this a useful way to use http://del.icio.us, the excellent social bookmarking site that is based on tagging.

Let’s review quickly. I post all my bookmarks to delicious. They are all viewable by the public. Mine are here: http://del.icio.us/natekoechley. One great thing about delicious is that every page on the site - every node - has an RSS feed. If all my bookmarks are viewable on the web at /username, then the feed of that content is /rss/username.

Looks like this:
http://del.icio.us/natekoechley
http://del.icio.us/rss/natekoechley

The second thing that’s great about delicious is that I can quickly and easily annotate my bookmarks with tags. For example, I have bookmarked Industrial Drawings from the Smithsonian. In addition to storing the URL, I have tagged it with the following words: industrial, drawings, smithsonian, museum, design, art, history.

Each tag becomes a node.  When you are viewing my total collection of bookmarks, my username "natekoechley" is the node. It is likewise possible to view all my bookmarks for a particular tag, such as
http://del.icio.us/natekoechley/art
http://del.icio.us/rss/natekoechley/art

If you want to widen your view, you can view all "art" bookmarks for everybody on the network:
http://del.icio.us/tag/art
http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/art

There is no limit to the number of tags you can have, either in general or with a single URL.

As you can see, each node - tag - get’s it’s own RSS feed. This is the functionality that creates my personalized feeds.

Reduce Email with Personalized Feeds

If you’re like me, there are a couple people in your life that you want to send links too. For me that’s my girlfriend Aimee and my family. Email isn’t perfect for this — even with family, too many urls can quickly feel like spam. A blog isn’t perfect either; links for family and close friends are often boring, in jokes, or off-topic to a wider blog audience. My solution is to use tags and RSS in http://del.icio.us, in conjunction with an RSS aggregator — My Yahoo! works perfect for this.

Step one is to flag content that they’ll like. Tagging makes this super easy, I just create person-specific tags with the format, "attn:aimee". (Use any convention you want; the colon isn’t important either, a hyphen, prior or other mark will work fine.)

With sites tagged, the special tags will begin generating RSS feeds. Any aggregator will work of course, but for family I had success recommending My Yahoo!. Now, when every my family checks their My Yahoo! page, they’ll see any new links that I flagged for their attention…. To me, this is ">100% Awesome.

While I don’t think that RSS will replace email any time soon, this is a great way to remove some unnecessary noise from the inbox while still maintaining intimate and personal relationships.

Disclaimer: I saw the "attn:xxxx" syntax on another site, it is not my original idea. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to re-locate the source. Please send me and help me locate any prior work on this approach, so that I may give proper credit. Thanks!

Update: Here is an earlier mention of this technique, though this still isn’t the place I saw the idea first. Thanks for pointing this out in the comments Brian. [2005.01.19 12:01:00]

Here are two great sites reviewing tips, tricks and extensions for the Firefox browser from the Mozilla Foundation. (You are using Firefox, right?)

First is the thorough article from Scot’s Newsletter. Well written, it includes Firefox Extension Recommendations and Firefox Customization Recommendations. The extensions are grouped by type, including “tab-browsing” and “UI-fixing”, as well as broad groups for “tried ‘em, like ‘em” and others.

The second article is “Secret’s of Firefox 1.0“, from Windows Secrets Newsletter. This one is focused on tweaks available through Firefox’s about:config interface. Check it out for many speed tweaks.

(both via)

Rule: Volume controls and a Mute button must exist for all online audio.

I ended up on a promotion page for American Airlines. I was actually interested in the demo they offered, so I clicked to watch. The demo had an audio track but no way to turn off the volume. Because I couldn’t turn it off, I immediately closed the window. For me, this reaction is sometimes nearly automatic - almost a type of panic. In this case, I was listening to music.

Unfortunately for American Airlines, I wasn’t as interested in their audio narrative as I was in the music I already had. Plus, I didn’t want to switch over to iTunes and then back again. If you want be successful online, forget about the audio. If you really can’t, make it opt-in. No matter what, leave the user in charge, or they’ll leave you.

A Romanian couple named their son Yahoo as a sign of gratitude for meeting over the Internet, a Bucharest newspaper said Thursday.

Daily Libertatea said Cornelia and Nonu Dragoman, both from Transylvania, met and decided they were meant for each other following a three-month relationship over the net.

They married and had a baby this Christmas, whom they decided to name after one of the worldwide web’s most popular portals. “We named him Lucian Yahoo after my father and the net, the main beacon of my life,” Cornelia Dragoman was quoted as saying.

via Reuters