February 2009
11 posts
3 tags
Problems and Complaints for the Safari 4 beta
A list of things that have annoyed me so far about Safari 4. I don’t know how
many of these things are intentional.
Tab titles no longer says ‘Loading…’. Title does not change until page is
loaded.
Tab title text is incorrect size and weight.
Page-load progress is impossible to determine. Now there’s a generic spinner
on the right side of the address bar, rather than the previous bar chart...
5 tags
‘Media-Morphosis: How the Internet Will Devour,... →
Cory Doctorow:
The Internet chews up media and spits them out again. Sometimes they get more
robust. Sometimes they get more profitable. Sometimes they die.
It’s a scary thought, especially if you’re personally attached to an old
medium like movies, books, records, or newspapers.
The article briefly covers the concerns of newspapers, films from major
studios, music labels and...
4 tags
lastfmdump script
Due to the news that last.fm may have given the
RIAA user data, I’ve thrown together a
Ruby script that will dump out a user’s listening history. Having
exported my own data, I’m now free to cancel my last.fm account while keeping
my play logs. Of course, if you’re not interested in jettisoning your last.fm
account, this still serves as a convenient backup method.
This is no major loss to me, as...
7 tags
‘Hulu’s Superbowl Ad and the Boxee Fight’ →
Media companies won’t move forward. They’re being left behind.
3 tags
The Decline of Books
In an 02008 article for Harper’s,
Ursula Le Guin argues that book sales are
declining because publishing corporations see volume as the only way to
maintain business growth. She further argues that despite the hand-wringing of
those who mourn the death of books, reading was only a significant part of life
for a relatively brief span of history.
I see a high point of reading in the United...
3 tags
Update to Google Analytics Bookmarklet
Back on the fourteenth of January, I published a bookmarklet to jump
to the current day’s stats in Analytics.
This originally used google.com rather than www.google.com. Somewhere
around the ninth of February this stopped working. I initially thought
this was due to a missing referrer header, but today I discovered the
issue was the missing www. I don’t know what changed on Google’s end, but...
5 tags
Transcript and commentary for ‘Whither Magnolia’
Transcription of Citizen Garden episode 11, ‘Whither Magnolia’.
As you may or may not be aware, the Ma.gnolia bookmarking service recently
lost its entire database.
I was not personally affected by this loss, as I instead use delicious and
back up my bookmarks daily. I had briefly tried Ma.gnolia; after
a lengthy wait while it processed my bookmark collection, I soon
decided that the system...
3 tags
Adding rel-canonical to Tumblr themes
Google recently introduced a way to tell their crawler which address
variant you want indexed:
Now, you can simply add this <link> tag to specify your preferred version:
<link rel="canonical"
href="http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish" />
This is very simple to set up with Tumblr. Go to the customization page,
and just before the </head>, add the...
3 tags
Custom CSS in Safari
Although many of the web’s visual scars can be eliminated with the help of an
ad blocker, there are still times when you’ll want to change a page’s actual
appearance. Because there’s no official way to do this, there are a variety of
solutions. I think Firefox’s is pretty good: wrap a stylesheet in an
@-moz-document rule and you can target your editing. But Safari
doesn’t support this (and doesn’t...
1 tag
Portfolio launched
I’m in the process of applying to a number of jobs, most of which require a
portfolio (who’d’ve thought?). I’d known for a while that I’d need one, but
kept finding more interesting things to do.
Last night I decided to just get it over with, since it’s actually
necessary now. It took four to five hours to collect the designs, crop them,
code the HTML, and make up the layout as I went.
It’s...
1 tag
See My OPML
When I wrote about journalism the other day, I noted that I generally
follow my rule that sources should be open by sharing all my bookmarks. That
neglects a major set of sources, though — feed subscriptions. So today I’ve
pushed an OPML file with my
subscriptions to the site’s repository. It’s almost exactly what I see,
with two exceptions: the OPML export didn’t
include the folders I use (so...