Maniacal Rage. Archives by tag: web.

A Musical Baton

1 comment (closed), posted on may 22, 2005, tags: web

So the musical baton meme has been going around the past few weeks. I was passed the baton last week by Sascha, Paul and Frank, but I haven't had time until now to join in. Here goes:

Total volume of music files on my computer

3.52GB (774 songs, 1.8 days)

Five people to whom I'm passing the baton

In no particular order:
Shawn
Jeremy
Ellie
Walt
Steven

Unsolicited

6 comments (closed), posted on november 23, 2004, tags: web

I got a call on my cellphone today from an 877 number. Sometimes it happens—I use my cellphone as a primary contact point for my credit cards and such—but it is usually rare. "Gah... ger... um, uh... G-Garnet M-Murphy?" Not a good start. "Garrett," I said. She said she knew she'd mess it up. She told me she knew I had just bought a new domain, and she was calling from Aplus.net because I could use some hosting and web design services now. It took a moment to sink in.

"What, did you crawl the whois listings and call me unsolicited to sell your services?" I asked, dumbfounded. She said yes, she knew I would need their services. "This is the most atrocious thing I have ever heard," I said, to which she responded that whois listing are public records and they can do whatever they wish with the information.

Well, I'm here to say it: no you can't. This is wrong, wrong, wrong. And it needs to stop. Aplus.net sucks. Spread the word.

Gmail Giveaway Results

7 comments (closed), posted on july 2, 2004, tags: web

I'd like to thank everyone who participated in the recent Gmail giveaway. Together we raised $767.00 for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, which is pretty damned great.

Anyone who donated will receive a Gmail account, and I will have a few to spare. I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with the spares yet, but I'll keep you posted.

Thanks again to everyone who donated or supported the cause.

More Gmail Accounts!

15 comments (closed), posted on june 27, 2004, tags: web

This giveaway is now over.

I'm giving away 42 more Gmail accounts. You have until 6PM EST on Friday, July 2 to enter.

If you would like to have a chance to win one of five Gmail accounts, all you have to do is donate $5 or more to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. Simply visit the donation page and give at least $5 US. Then, when you receive your confirmation email, forward it to garrett at maniacalrage dot net. You can remove your address from the email before forwarding it to me.

On Tuesday night, I'll select—at random—42 people who donated and they'll get a Gmail account. Yes, it's true—you might not win after donating the five dollars. But at least you'll have helped to support a good cause. I made my donation, now it's time for you to make yours. Good luck!

Current Donation Total: $767.00 US
Even if you don't want a Gmail account, you can still donate!

Updates (newest to oldest):

This giveaway is now over. Thanks to all who participated. You can view the results.
Whoops, I made a mistake and accidentally counted 4 accounts twice. 42 available.
Andrew Hume donated 2 more accounts. 42 available.
SM donated 2 more accounts. 40 available.
Richard Cornish donated 2 more accounts. 38 available.
Mathew Hoy donated 2 more accounts. 36 available.
One person has donated $250 US! Fantastic!
Colin Devroe donated 3 more accounts. 34 available.
I'll also be donating any money I make from Google AdSense until the contest ends.
Erik has donated 4 more accounts. 31 available now.
[Shawn](http://morrisonfilm.com "MorrisonFilm") put another 4 accounts into the pot, so we're up to 27!
I've also extended the deadline until Friday, July 2 at 6PM EST.
Jay from Brainstir has also donated 4 accounts. Thanks Jay!
Didier Hilhorst of SuperfluousBanter has donated another 4 accounts. Thanks Didier!
I've upped the total accounts to give out to 15. Five came from Katia's account, and Greg Storey of Airbag fame has donated 5 more. Thanks Greg!
Many thanks to Geremy for supplying 3 of the 5 invitations for this contest.

Gmail Winners

5 comments (closed), posted on june 22, 2004, tags: web

I was surprised by how many people emailed me but couldn't think of a joke. I was also surprised by how many people sent me the same jokes. All in all, it was fun.

I'm giving the best joke award to Jenna Pfister, for the following joke which is simple but caught me off guard and made me snicker:

Q: Why does Snoop Dogg carry an umbrella?
A: Fo' drizzle.

The two random invitations went to Richard Chamberlain and Will Croft. I chose them randomly by putting all the names into a PHP array and used array_rand() to pull out 2 people.

Congrats to the three of you, and enjoy your Gmail accounts. I'll do this again if I get more invitations.

Giving Away Gmail

7 comments (closed), posted on june 21, 2004, tags: web

Final Update: Giveaway is officially closed, see the winners.

If you want an account, please send an email to garrett at maniacalrage dot net with the subject "Gmail Account Please." Your email should include your first and last name and your website URL (if you have one, that is—it's not a requirement). Please also include your favourite joke.

I'm going to give one account to the person with the best joke, and two accounts to random selections.

On the Subject of RSS

12 comments (closed), posted on march 22, 2004, tags: web

I'm still feverishly working on the new back-end of this site (on a development server). It's been about 50 hours so far, but I'm getting there. On the way, I've finally switched over to XHTML Strict after being so close yet so far away for a very long time. I've also consolidated the "normal" styles with the "IE junk" styles using selectors and hacks and even though it was a pain it is nice to have everything in one (albeit larger) place. There's also quite a bit of small clean-ups all over the place. I'll be done soon. You won't really notice, but I will.

One of the features of my new system is the ability to have any page turn into RSS (and now Atom) automatically. This idea was completely stolen from waferbaby, and was completely worth stealing. What does this mean for you? It means you'll be able to subscribe (using a newsreader) to any page on the site. Subscribe to the comments of a post and you'll see when new comments are posted. Subscribe to the photos page and see when new photos are added. You get the idea.

The whole idea is making everything on the site reusable. Since the content all gets dumped into XML, it can easily be restyled and/or reused. Not to mention it means I won't have to deal with data management again for a very long time—redesigning will entail simply changing the XSL stylesheet.

So anyway, RSS and Atom everywhere. Great. I should also note that all of my RSS and Atom feeds will always be full-text. That means you'll see full entries and all the content in each feed. I bring this up because I'm noticing a trend lately with people limiting their RSS feeds to only a single sentence in order to get people to visit their sites.

While I understand the point of getting people to visit your actual website, I'm getting frustrated by the number of people who are only giving me a single sentence each time they update and thereby forcing me to visit their site in a browser. Sure, you have Google ads, I get it. But still, what's the point of a news reader if you only deliver one summary sentence? Shouldn't we call them headline readers or summary readers or "tells you when sites are updated" applications in this case?

I blame two people for making me think about this tonight: Mark Pilgrim (Dive Into Mark) and John Gruber (Daring Fireball). I blame Pilgrim because he's the RSS guy. He's the Atom guy. He writes feed validators and specs and comes up with APIs and all that stuff and yet what do I see from his latest RSS update?

Most valuable asset

Daily writing is not our most valuable asset. (773 words)

Oh, that's brilliant. An absolutely useless sentence and a count of how many words I don't see. Great. That $40 I spent on NNW feels more and more worth it every minute, Mark. No offense, but what the hell is this all about? Someone tell me, because I don't understand how someone so invested in RSS and Atom can have such a useless feed.

I blame John Gruber because he's a smart guy who writes a lot of great entries and tonight when I refreshed my subscriptions the NNW "Highlight Differences" feature showed that every headline in his feed had been modified. Now they're all one sentence each. I can't remember if he's always had a once-sentence feed (he might have and I've just forgotten now), but either way I don't like it. His current top entry says:

Dive Into Markdown

Why Markdown?

Why Markdown? I don't know, because you didn't tell me. You're asking that I visit the site to find out. While I like your site, John, I don't see the point in having these headlines. I know how to work Safari. I know how to visit your site if I want to. I do, at least once a day, but sometimes I want to read all my weblogs in one place at one time. You're not letting me do that, John. You're a smart guy—what's up with this? And yes, I realize the irony in the fact that your headline is called 'Dive Into Mark'down.

I'm asking you, weblog readers and writers, to decide right now—if RSS feeds are simply for update notification, let's quit the bullshit and get rid of everything else. Just headlines. Just notification. If they're for actual content distribution, then get on the ball and start including some actual content.

Webmonkey Special Characters Reference

5 comments (closed), posted on february 17, 2004, tags: web

Since Lycos is officially shutting down Webmonkey in the near future, I took a few minutes this morning to nick the only part of the site I utilize on a regular basis—the HTML special characters reference.

I took their list, reformatted it using XHTML/CSS and Intelligence™, expanded a few things (letters and numbers) and gave it a permanent home here at Maniacal Rage:

» http://www.maniacalrage.net/projects/special

Feel free to bookmark it and use it if you're so inclined. I'll add to it in the future if I come across an entity not on that list.

Dooce, version 2.0

posted on february 6, 2004, tags: web

I've been reading Dooce for a really long time. It's one of my guilty weblogging pleasures that I've never linked to or mentioned, but that I've read nearly daily for years. The reason I mention the site today is to congratulate Heather and Jon on the birth of their first child, Leta.

Read all about it.

I Thought it Was Obvious

8 comments (closed), posted on november 20, 2003, tags: web

In the recent contest to redesign web "usability guru" Jakob Nielsen's site, Useit.com, I was astounded by how many people used pictures of him in their designs.

I don't know if I'm the only person who thinks this, but Nielsen looks frightening. It's bad enough that he has tons of ultra-high resolution photos on his website (so high you can see his pores), but now people think his face should greet you every time you visit the site? It's not a real problem for me, since I never visit the site and can't stand Nielsen at all anyway, but for people who do—should they have to see this? Dear god please no.

I was shocked when I saw design entries like this one, in which Nielsen's ugly mug and giant head are incorporated into the design. From a usability standpoint: is a website more usable if the people visiting it vomit instantly when they see the author's photograph? Is the site more usable when they continue to vomit in each section and eventually try to gouge their eyes out just to make it all stop?

How about this entry in which Nielsen is slowly coming out of the shadows, without doubt, to kill me. Or this entry in which size 60pt font fits comfortably on Nielsen's gigantic, pale forehead/bald spot. And my favourite use of a photograph is in this entry (which I really like otherwise), in which we see up Nielsen's nose and get a nice angle of his mutton chop. Fantastic! (Vomiting!)

Aisde from the photo aspect, however, there were some really great entries. I'm sure Jakob won't use them, because that's the kind of person he is, but it was interesting to see how people thought a website all about usability should look. Two of my favourite entries are George Sekera's and Stephane Curzi's.

New & Different

4 comments (closed), posted on october 9, 2003, tags: web

I thought it might be worth mentioning that Textism, one of my favorite weblogs, as been redesigned for the first time in forever. I was surprised this morning when I got to Textism's tab in Safari, at first glance thinking I had opened the wrong page.

The new design is simple and 100% fixed-width font. It's like reading a screenplay now, which isn't at all awkward since the content can often feel that way anyway. It's not like Dean Allen needs any additional traffic sent to his site, but what the hell.

Update: Unfortunately, Dean has switched his fonts back to Verdana. He says it's due to everyone complaining about Courier, which is understandable, even though I liked it.

Refer This

6 comments (closed), posted on may 25, 2003, tags: web

I've been running Dean Allen's Refer on this site for several months now. In that time, I have compiled a list of roughly 100 referral hits that I've had to block because they were spam. I am not the only person facing this—in fact, it seems as though with the wide-spread use of Refer, Dean Allen has not only created a useful and usable tool, but also created a whole new form of Internet spam.

To Dean's credit, this was obviously not his plan. In fact, as most things go, the idea was noble. He provided yet another easy way for the weblogging community to reach out and, well, touch itself, in some sort of, as it's been described lately by my live-in girlfriend, "incestuous, sick circle-jerk."

The problem, however, isn't the use of Refer. It's the misuse. And recently, the rapid misuse is making it nearly unusable. I've spent more time in the past month adding URLs to a block-list than I have writing entries. And still, every day, a URL involving "free cams" or, most recently, "massive cocks" has found its way onto my list.

So what's the solution? Well, there really isn't one. I can continue doing what I have been—adding a few URLs each day until the block list creates a 20MB text file a year down the road—or I can scrap the whole thing. I find myself using Refer on the site very frequently to see who/what is linking to ManiacalRage, but I wonder if anyone else ever even looks at it?

If not, then this has all been for nothing. After all, I have my own statistics script that I run behind the scenes. So then, do you ever check my Refer log? Cause if you don't, I'm tossing it. I'm tired of being so tempted to look at massive cocks.

Favorite Icons

12 comments (closed), posted on february 23, 2003, tags: web

Today I spent a bit of time cleaning up my bookmarks in the three browsers on my iBook. I have a habit of constantly bookmarking sites, caused by my habit of having fifteen or twenty windows open at a time and my intense fear of accidentally closing a window before I read something I wanted to and then losing the address forever. So, after a while, I have a lot of junk bookmarks.

As part of the process, I also cleaned up my toolbars, adding a few daily reads as well as consolidating some links I only use from time to time. One of the nice things about Chimera (or soon, Camino), is that it displays a site's favorite icon in the toolbar. The only drawback to this, however, is the fact that a lot of people don't have favorite icons for their websites. Those bookmarks get the default Chimera favorite icon, creating an incomplete feeling to the list of links (see picture).

What I don't understand is: favorite icons are really simple to make. A 16x16 pixel GIF image, and a single line of code in your header. I know it's been written about a million times, but I'm going to take a quick moment to describe how you make your own favorite icon. Perhaps then everyone on my list will have one. This will only take two minutes (except for the part where you have to design your icon...), and it's really simple.

» Continue reading Favorite Icons

Hot! Hot! Hot!

posted on november 28, 2002, tags: web

Weather.com is usually pretty accurate with their forecasts, or at least in previous experience. That is, until this morning. See, last night it snowed here—only about an inch—and this morning when I got up I checked Weather.com to see if it would be snowing at all today (I love snow). I opened up the forecast for my zip code, and was surprised to see that the current temperature was 108°F. Didn't seem right, since there was ice on the ground outside my window, but I guess you have to trust them. So I put on some shorts, a tank-top and went to the pool.

Other Places

posted on october 15, 2002, tags: web

I've got a few links at the bottom of my site, all of which are daily reads. But since this design implementation, I've started to read a few more sites, which I think deserve recognition. Especially now that updates are extremely slow, fill your brain with some other web goodness (in no particular order): What Do I Know, Fireland, Exploding Fist, The Morning News.

ASP Error[s]

posted on august 18, 2002, tags: web

This morning whilst working on a client site, I came across an ASP error that was frustrating me. Because ASP's errors are usually almost completely useless, I often search for the exact error message on Google to find a solution.

I damn near laughed my balls off when I searched for today's error: "Operation is not allowed when the object is closed." Sure, there were 3 or 4 hits from ASP discussion boards, etcetera, and one of those hits did give me a hint as to solving my problem. But aside from that, nearly all of the hits were the actual error on websites. How embarassing must this be for Microsoft? Check it out.

Prenatal

posted on august 12, 2002, tags: web

See, I'm not the only person who had it rough in the womb. Apparently others also wanted to commit prenatal suicide. Perhaps it's time to start a club?

Read, Play, Avoid Ads

posted on may 25, 2002, tags: web

I suggest you download and read Manual, a new jointly-written "book" by some of the Internet's greatest webloggers. You can find it here (requires Adobe Acrobat). I've only read about 3/4 of it, but I am really enjoying it.

With the money my mother gave me for my birthday, I purchased a Nintendo GameCube today. I bought it for one reason: the Resident Evil series. I love those games. And the remake of the first one is amazing. I've only played it for about five minutes, and I am blown away. I can't wait for the next few. Also, the Cube is very neat looking. It's very compact, and the games are on mini-compact-discs. Remember when you were a kid and you saw a mini-cd in a movie, and you knew that was something we would have in the future? Well, the future is now apparently.

Nothing on the Internet is free anymore. I know I'm not the first person to state that, obviously, but I've just been feeling it more and more lately. Today I had to pay for a year of access to GameSpot "Complete," which really just means I'm paying money to see stuff that a month ago was free. The content isn't any better, I just have to pay for it. The one good thing is they've removed all the advertisements from every page (including commercials before video clips). At least that's something, I guess.

The whole thing got me thinking about how much I despise advertising. Don't get me wrong—if a commercial is entertaing, I enjoy it. But I hate how annoying ads are getting. The Internet is one thing (fucking pop up ads everywhere... thank god for PopUpKiller), but do I really need a SprintPCS logo on my cell phone? Fuck no. And do car dealerships really need to etch their location into the back of cars they sell? I mean, for Christ's sake, I see more advertisements in a given day than I see people! My point is that for some reason, we have come to accept that ads are just a part of everything—we let them appear everywhere—and it's got to stop.