Fictitious Weblog Name

Wed 26 Jan 200511:34 PM

Wheres and Whys of Blogging

Tue 25 Jan 200508:21 PM

Last Friday my girlfriend and I drove to Northern Virginia to see family, leaving just before the “Blizzard of 2005” hit and returning just after the snow finished falling. Before I left, I didn’t get a chance to update my weblog with one of those “Gone fishin’” posts to let readers know I was going to be away from my keyboard for a few days. I’ve never liked those kinds of posts, especially the times I’ve gone back over them while performing housekeeping tasks on my archives — they seem irrelevant and superfluous beyond the immediate present. I’m a bit precious, I suppose, about the idea of making my archives readable, free of that kind of cruft.

Miss Manners Guide to Opening Links in New Windows

Thu 6 Jan 200509:48 PM

At work we had a debate late in the day today about whether the links to projects in our portfolio should, when clicked upon, open up in a new browser window. My feeling is that, no, they should not, citing various usability recommendations against the practice (more here and here), and also the fact that the way the Web is evolving, popping up new windows is a practice most often used in hard-sell situations (insert links to any given hard core pornography site here).

Personally, it annoys the heck out of me when a Web site opens up a new window, as I think it’s bad manners and has the feel of amateurishness. But I admit that viewpoint could be just a combination of a skewed, blog-centric view of the Web (few if any weblogs open links in any new windows, by my count) and my own personal capacity for stubbornness.

Lose Your Head

Thu 6 Jan 200508:57 PM

The 2005 edition of Macworld San Francisco is next week, and the Mac-focused Web sites are all worked up, as is their wont, over various, rumored announcements that may or may not come during the keynote address. There’s talk of a “headless Mac” in the US$500 price range, and also murmurs (and circumstantial evidence) of a productivity suite called “iWork.” These completely unqualified murmurings have me a little worked up too.

Set My Firefox

Tue 21 Sep 200409:51 PM

In spite of my continued enthusiasm for OmniWeb, I’ve found myself using the 1.0 Preview release of Firefox more and more often. I spend about half my day in each browser, and it makes me wish that I had a system-level utility that would intercept every link I click on to let me decide whether to send it to OmniWeb or Firefox. Surely, somebody has already whipped up something like that, and I’m missing it, right?

All the News That’s Fit to Feed

Wed 17 Mar 200411:35 PM

The reigning king of Macintosh XML news readers is NetNewsWire from Ranchero software. It really is a solid piece of software engineering, but I’ve been looking for something that will let me organize all the XML feeds I’ve been collecting in a more orderly fashion. A search on VersionTracker led me to NewsMac, which has lots of great features but has been riddled with a few nagging bugs in its latest incarnation. But the author has been really responsive with fixes and updates, and has even laid out a pretty detailed road map for the application (when’s the last time a shareware developer laid out a road map?). This level of support has, over the past few weeks, gradually won me over, and I’m pretty sure that I’m settling on NewsMac as my reader of choice now.

Check It Twice

Mon 23 Feb 200410:12 PM

Friend of a Friend of a Dog

Thu 29 Jan 200410:51 PM

Google’s Orkut has gotten the lion’s share of recent attention paid to Friendster-inspired social networking sites. My interest in this form of community-making has pretty much waned, but the one derivative that actually does excite me is — somewhat embarrassingly — Dogster. Yeah, it’s exactly what it sounds like: Friendster for dogs. Here’s Mister President’s page. I know, I know.

Ghosts of Dotcom Bubbles Past

Fri 21 Nov 200305:43 PM

This will be of interest mostly to people who used to work with me at Rare Medium: the company, surprisingly, still lives, and not just in the perfunctory, diminished, managerial-only form in which it’s been limping along for the past two years. The old Atlanta office is actually still in the business of Web development and technology consulting, having bought all of that location’s assets from the parent company (at least, that’s what I understand happened) and adopted the URL RareMedium.net.