Web Design
Gmail: Please Bold the Hidden Labels Button when there are Unread Messages
I love Gmail. It does everything I could possibly want an email client (web or desktop) to do. All of my non-junk email accounts are Gmail or are forwarded to Gmail accounts. That said, occasionally something occurs to me that would make my Gmail experience a little bit better. Sometimes these crop up as Labs features, which I think is great, and is part of why I enjoy using Gmail so much.
› Continue reading
Dark and Disquieting Portents
Have you noticed an increase in the margin on the left side of the Google search results page recently? My coworker started noticing it yesterday, but I thought it was just him. Then I noticed it when I got home, and saw it mentioned on Twitter as well. The weird thing is the platforms where it shows up. My friend first started noticing it with Firefox 3.5 on Windows. I noticed it at home with Firefox 3.0 on Ubuntu, and on this Windows machine I see the effect with Chrome, but not Firefox 3.5 or IE 7:
Ctrl-C is Back
My (indirect) host, fsckvps.com, was pretty messed up by hackers using a HyperVM exploit. Fortunately, the server I use seemed to be OK, but the DNS servers were down and due to one thing and another I wasn’t able to set up alternate nameservers until just now. I’m using free service from afraid.org. It seems kind of slow, but it’s definitely better than nothing. Anyone know of any alternatives? Is it possible to roll my own?
There is a slight improvement; http://www.ctrl-c.us/ now redirects to http://ctrl-c.us/ :-)
OK, it’s now way past my bedtime. I’m getting up in just a few hours to go on another epic hike. Pictures to follow.
Seven Document Formats Worse than Scribd
The other day while searching for some LaTeX information I came across this page on Scribd, and I was reminded once again how much I loathe this website. If you aren’t familiar with it, Scribd is a site which hosts various books, articles, and other documents. For reasons that are an impenetrable mystery to me, these people have decided that the way to bring together potentially many different formats of print media is to turn them all into shockwave flash. As in, this beautifully typeset LaTeX document, compiled to PDF, was turned into a scrollable flash…thing. Combine this with the rather sorry state of flash on Linux, and you get just about my least favorite website on the entire intertubes. Just getting it in a Google search makes me almost as mad as getting a link to Experts Exchange.
So, to keep my blood pressure down, I put things into perspective for myself by making a list of seven document formats Scribd could have chosen to use, but didn’t.
Yet Another Wordpress User
After dealing with spam again tonight and facing the prospect of reworking my captcha and adding user registration, I completely gave up on the whole site-from-scratch thing and have replaced it with the Wordpress site you’re looking at now. I found this process to be very simple and straightforward, and I especially liked all the import options (in my case, I got the articles from my old RSS feed). After spending about an hour changing settings, adding plugins, and tweaking CSS, I think that I’ll be able to live with it.
Facebook Chat, Making My Life More Complicated
When Facebook added the chat feature a few months ago, I found it to be entirely unnecessary. All the people with whom I wished to chat were already in my MSN, AIM, and GoogleTalk contact lists, which are all tied together by Pidgin.
Spam
I’ve had to disable comments because I’m getting spammed. Unfortunately I’m going to have to put in a captcha to prevent this, so that kind of sucks. I’ll try to do this as soon as I get a chance. Blarg.
Comments, Please
I just put up the comments. This took a few hours of work to get right, and I suspect that there are still bugs. The formatting seems to be great, but I think that there might be problems with submission. I’ve tried to make it somewhat secure by stripping most of the nonsense you could put into one of the form strings to cause nasty things to happen. So (fingers crossed) it should be safe from SQL injection, XSS trickery, or html that messes up the page too much. › Continue reading