überblog geek life, humour, insights, and meta stuff
Even dorks need a break some time, and this dork is taking off the month of July. I am going to visit all my old friends in Nuevo Leon that I haven’t seen for about 10 years and I plan to check email every other day or so and possibly upload pictures from the road if I can. Part of the time we will be hiking in the desert so I may be offline completely for a while.
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Always those pesky mobiles and the lack of standards for them. Bleah! I looked into mobile support for web a year ago. If you think web browser CSS support is flaky, it goes double for mobiles.
However, I can envision mobile professionals wanting to chill out and browse blogs on their handhelds while they wait ridiculously long times for replacements for their cancelled flights in our failing airline system (ahhh don’t get me started on that!) We wouldn’t want to exclude these mobile users from potentially reading our blog, now would we? That’s what mobile feeds are for.
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Do you ever want to know who your blogging neighbors are? Or websites geographically near you in general? Even better, would you want an easy way for them to find you?
GeoURL is here to help. GeoURL asks you to place two metatags in the head of your website and it helps you generate them based on the address you want to associate with your blog. This was of great interest to me, because I have a local blog called WazzupLocal Blog (of all things!!) about local goings on.
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Stumblers, readers, friends, and surfers, I beg your indulgence just this once. Permit me to take a break from providing you the high quality dorkage that you’ve come to take for granted and let off a major bitchy rant. If I don’t do this I’m going to blow a gasket! What’s causing my consternation? Rampant mediocrity! Basically I am fed up with sucky blogs. Why do we put up with sucky blogs? In theory free market Darwinism would cause them to wither away, so I can only venture a guess that there is still a need for education on just what constitutes a sucky blog. Perhaps you aren’t so confident a blog connoisseur. If not, please allow an experienced dork to educate you.
How do you know if your blog sucks? Some clues….
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Ping.fm purports to let you update a bunch of social sites all at once. It is in beta now, and you have to have the current betacode to get an account. The current betacode is “letmeping”. They keep changing it. I have no idea how long that code will be good.
I found a valid betacode somewhere, and was let onto the system.
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It seems most bloggers are very busy trying to suck money from the internet. If tweaking and promoting of your blog doesn’t eat every last second of your time, consider giving something back. I recently found out about Librivox — an all volunteer project to provide audio of public domain literature. Librivox is the natural audio follow-on to the Gutenberg project, from which all their readings are sourced. It’s funny how I heard about Librivox the same day I just spent the afternoon with a 100% blind person.
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A old school phish typically involves an Instant Messenger or email message asking you to click a link. This tried and true technique uses bogus links, and this article shows you how to detect them. Newer phishes bite you at a different level. They feed you “good” links but then they cause the good links to turn into bad ones at the network level where you normally don’t go. These phishes will work even if you manually type the good URL into a completely virgin browser. About the only way to be safe from these is to protect your computer overall. The section where I describe bogus URL’s may seem a little long, but consider that it is easier for human brains to spot patterns than it is to talk about them. An accurate and complete description is necessary so your brain can learn what to look for. Don’t sweat it — with just a little practice you’ll be able to sniff a bogus URL in a matter of seconds just like an IT security pro.
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I have been struggling to get started with Dojo and Ning lately. Both these technologies are fairly new and the number of books about on Dojo is severely limited, and as far as I know there are no books on Ning. So I would like to hook up with some other developers who are knowledgeable about these technologies, because I learn best from humans. I’m in several social networks, but they are general, and I haven’t had much luck finding anyone with these narrowly defined brands of geekery. I have been hearing about Scoutle. Supposedly it scurries around the web and locates people for you. That did it for me. I’m kind of a tryer of new things, and anything with the word “automation” in it gets my attention. Apparently, once you’ve installed Scoutle, every time someone visits your site, your Scoutle agent takes two steps toward finding your online soulmates.
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Another database: CRACKED A recent security breach of a local online merchant prompted me to write this post. As a shopping cart software author and former security analyst at Symantec I know the nuts and bolts of security from several perspectives. Credit card fraud is a huge and growing problem. See my article about credit card security online for a detailed discussion on how credit card security works and what the vulnerabilities are. There is a solution, but it will not be implemented until pressure is brought to bear on the key players.
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The body of this post is audio. You should be seeing a little player icon. One of my test computers failed to display it. If you can’t see it, leave me a comment with your OS, browser and version so we can compile some data for the plugin author. Thanks!
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