Category: User Experience

  • Bit the bullet

    Just now finally got around to upgrading the version of Movable Type driving this X-POLLEN blog. Since I installed version 2.5 there was a 2.51 upgrade and possibly a 2.52, and then the recent more substantial release of 2.6, quickly followed by bugfixes 2.61 and 2.62. So I managed to avoid a lot of interim…

  • Password-protecting a website

    Every six months or so I go back to this Webmonkey article from 1997 on how to set up the .htaccess and .htpassword files on an Apache server to password-protect a directory. I’m posting it here because I needed to refer to it today and it belongs in the RFB web-design (category “fireweaver”) knowledge base.

  • Bloggle? Googer? Google buys Pyra

    Why am I always the last to know? Dan Gillmor reports that Google is buying Pyra. In the short term, the main effect will be greater stability for Blogspot users. Over at his blog, Dan is also collecting commentary from bloggers about this move. Most seem to think it’s a good fit. I wonder if…

  • Administrivia: Redirecting visitors from 000111

    There are still so many blogs and sites pointing to this site’s old address, that I thought I’d add an automatic refresh-to-the-new address (after 10 seconds to get oriented and then again quickly disoriented) to the template for the old-school page.

  • Safari getting there

    A new build of Apple’s beta browser, Safari, is out. (Dive into) Mark has the scoop: Safari build 60 is out. Many things are fixed. Some things are not yet fixed. I have re-tested all of my Safari CSS hacks and found no differences between build 51 and build 60; specifically, the Safari Spacer Hack…

  • Parsing Osama

    Speaking of jumping to conclusion, MSNBC has retracted its original interpretation of the Osama tape as saying that bin Laden encouraged the overthrow of Saddam. Apparently, while Ba’ath socialists are infidels, it’s OK to stand with them to fight against the U.S. Meanwhile, the invaluable Mark Kleiman tries to sort out the layers of meaning…

  • Test of metaxian trackback egopendium,

    Test of metaxian trackback egopendium, Take 2. Apologies for the duplicate post. I will remove these if this works: If this works, then metaxian will include a reference to this post. … If it doesn’t, I will learn more about how to ping a site with TrackBack automatically, won’t I? Or more about how not…

  • Wishlist: autoblogged history breadcrumbs

    How hard would it be to automatically post every URL I hit in one browser to a specific category? I could go back and expand on anything that deserved comment and promote it to the mainpage, but I’d also have a running log of positively everywhere I’d been. One for the lazyweb? Something with scripting…

  • Textism preparing to release Textpattern

    Dean Allen announces that he is almost ready to release Textpattern, his long-promised web writing tool (or, if you prefer, CMS). While I’m afraid it will not enable me to write as well as he does (his predictions for 2003 are microstorytelling at its finest), Textpattern offers a feature set that has me drooling, and…

  • Have your tickets out and ready

    I’m so out of it. After returning from a week and a half in New York I’m still reading The Gawker but without that same sense of immediacy (not that it matters where you are when you read about New York, and not that that prevents me from reading the Times, the Nation, the New…

  • Michael Powell's speech on wireless spectrum reform

    FCC Chairman Michael Powell does an about-face on spectrum reform at the Silicon Flatirons Telecommunications Program University of Colorado at Boulder. (via Dave Hughes in the Well’s Inkvue conference in the Smart Mobs topic)

  • Tip for icon designers

    The globe thing is played out.

  • Taxonomy primer at Lexonomy

    Lexonomy has published A Taxonomy Primer. Taxonomies are the organizational schemes used to sort the data presented through the information architecture. (via xBlog)

  • Collaborative Internet marketing blog

    Elizabeth Spiers writes For Marketing Junkies: Rick, Robert, Olivier, John, and Steve just started a collaborative Internet marketing blog. I’m not sure what that is, but I’m keen to find out.

  • My new blogchalking icon

    Finally customized my blogchalking icon. I never liked that spiky haired face as my blogchalking icon. I kind of like the tourist icon and the anarchy one is nice for livejournal users (ducking!). But I wanted to make one that kind of resembles me in my sloppy pixelated way. I just grabbed the gif I…

  • Hidden query tip for custom Google search

    Rod Kratochwill read my posts about setting up a Google search for your blog when you don’t command the entire domain name yourself. I had mentioned that my solution does put the site:blogs.salon.com and inurl:0001111 queries in the text box on the results page, which could confuse the user or even end up getting deleted,…

  • Finally getting around to learning Radio's outliner

    I’ve never been that happy with my blogrolling.com blogrolls. The service is easy enough. Too easy, in a sense, in that it’s undermined my motivation to learn more about the best ways to present links and directory information in this weblog context. Also, it relies on Javascript, which makes the links invisible to some crawlers…

  • Microsoft's killer weblog app?

    Thanks to a tip from Rebecca Blood, I read the article by Anil Dash in his cool new magazine. He writes about MS SharePoint Team Services and its “list” feature, which incorporates most or all of the functionality of weblogs for an intranet environment. I remember when the portal brand of SharePoint was supposed to…

  • I document my failure

    The fact that that metalinker stuff never worked and was causing error messages in IE6/Win browsers like a piece of toilet paper stuck to my shoe, and the fact that I still haven’t been able to get a TrackBack ping-based metablog working, or RSS monkey installed, for that matter. I’m not perfect, and I think…

  • Post-move considerations

    Whew! It appears that the move over last night was successful, except in the sense that many people will start missing new posts as they continue to look at or poll the old address. Suddenly I need to learn about the RSS feed redirection stuff Dave was posting about last week. Also, I need to…

  • First p0st at radiofreeblogistan.com

    Well, the non-blog-related categories have now been redirected via FTP to various branded locations, so it’s time to start posting new entries to radiofreeblogistan.com. I’ve just switched the streaming over to FTP, so this post should automatically stream to the new location (and not to the old one). Next, I have to figure out the…