web

This guy does better work asleep than I do well rested, fully caffeinated and amped. Brett's CSS iOS pop-over.

Here's an idea: instead of putting cartoons on top of avatars and websites, call and email your damn representatives. There's way too much whining and not enough effort. It would take less time to make the call than to add the cartoon on top of your cartoon. EFF has a tool to look up your representative's contact info.

I wrote about the Mac application “Fake”[1] awhile ago. From my very first use, I thought it was an incredibly clever tool. Fake is like a super-charged automator for Webkit. It makes automating interactions with webpages easy and simple. But why would I want to use Fake instead of Automator or curl or even a Python script? Here’s an example that I just started using. If I want to add an affiliate link for a Mac or iOS app, I need to visit the Apple Link Maker page with my affiliate id as a get-parameter in the link.

Yahoo has become the joke of Silicon Valley. But while they may have let their lead in search die of neglect, they should be applauded for one of their greatest contributions it JavaScript. The YUI libraries are great. I learned JavaScript while hacking around with YUI stuff. It made me feel like I could actually hack something together that worked and looked professional. YUI 3 is even better. Take a look this Nettus tutorial for making a Twitter widget.

Let's get this straight, now that SOPA appears to be loosing steam and GoDaddy has been threatened with a user revolt, they are no longer supporting SOPA but are in favor of similar legislation. Seems likely that they will just support whatever the next anti-internet legislation the Big Media shills cook up with their congressional employees. I hope Ben Huh doesn't buy this turnaround and still moves his domains. GoDaddy are a bunch of jokers that abused their lead in the market.

Think Vitamin has upped their post frequency recently and the content is great. They have a new post about creating JS bookmarklets for doing more than opening a URL. Besides a great feed, they’re also associated with Treehouse training, which is an interesting take on learning iOS and WebDev.

Fake[1] is so much fun. I expect to do a lot more with this. It really does make me giddy for some reason. Maybe because I’ve been doing some of this with Python scripts and it’s very difficult to do well. Fake is like Automator for the web. But it’s better than that. It’s graphical programming for the web. It can automatically find and populate forms. It can submit logins and extract content.

In the past month, I’ve read two things that have given me a different perspective on News organizations. First there was the history of Django and now today, I just read about the NYTimes “hack-day." Both of these make me hopeful for a future of growth in the publishing and News media. Both cases show that there are great opportunities to apply what companies like the NY Times does well. They gather and process huge amounts of information and produce web content on a dizzying scale.

Over on the Pinboard blog Maciej is reminding everyone that we get what we pay for. If you love something that has no sustainable business model, expect disappointment. I agree with him completely. But in a continuation of the discussion, Patrick Rhone on Minimal Mac makes the suggestion that users should make a donation to Tumblr. I do not agree.1 I say “DO NOT DONATE!!” Get a Business Model, Hippie A real business should have a business model.

If you’re not interested in running a blog on WordPress then this post will not be interesting to you. However, if you have an interest in hosting and domain servers then read along. I was previously hosting this site on Bluehost.com. My domain had been hosted there since 2006 with a few hiccups. I changed domain names on December 30th, 2010 and lost quite a bit of content from the previous year.