Progressive charts
Posted on April 12th, 2009
Back in 2001 Tantek Çelik dreamt up a little polygonal CSS hack, using the bevels of borders to create angles in-browser. Eventually, Lasse Reichstein Nielsen made the technique accessible. Back then, I was thinking about CSS and wanted to try my hand at unobtrusive DHTML.
So I was inspired to implement simple rendering of HTML lists as area charts. Naturally, once it mostly worked I lost interest, and let it rest assuming someone would have the same idea and take it much farther.
Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: geek, web | View Comments
Keep Digging
Posted on April 11th, 2009
John Gruber has called attention to Digg’s shameful revival of site framing, and I share his disgust. Though I’ve no expectation of Digg traffic to my little blog, on principle I feel compelled to participate and block the DiggBarr from obscuring my URLs.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: code
Filed under: web | View Comments
Facebook Yelps
Posted on November 18th, 2007
Facebook’s new advertising model includes publication of activity from partner sites in news feeds. Their official list of affiliates does not include Yelp, but tonight, I had a little DHTML “toast” pop-up inform me my latest review would be shared on my Facebook profile.
A little investigating shows that this was pulled off via a JavaScript include, http://www.facebook.com/beacon/beacon.js.php and there’s already a bit of kerfuffle about it.
It does appear that authentication is being handled entirely via facebook.com cookies, and participating in this integration requires they recognize your site as a registered source.
Tags: marketing, web
Filed under: marketing, web | View Comments
Spellbot
Posted on January 31st, 2007
As part of the day job I’ve had an index built that is fed from limited web crawling and blog pings. The point is to feed a data warehouse that is used for social media research and analysis, the sort of thing you might use Technorati to do manually until you realize just how big the blogosphere actually is.
We’ve had lots of ideas for how to use this infrastructure to do other things: some just silly, some promising, and a few that would be fun but just can’t be justified. In the latter category is tonight’s thought.
We’ve toyed with the idea of taking some of the fun out of QA’s life by pre-scanning content for spelling and punctuation errors. Perhaps that same code could be aimed at blog posts, automatically adding comments that offer corrections. We could then accuse people who use human-detection of being pansies that are afraid of spellcheck.
Obviously we’d never actually be so rude. Well, maybe to splogs. Spamming the spammers with “I think you ought to capitalize Viagra” comments could be fun.
Tags: blogging, funny, idea, language, web
Filed under: web | View Comments
This blog is now Safely Ignored
Posted on January 29th, 2007
About a decade after putting up my personal website, I’ve finally come up with a name for it.
Wither “Safely Ignored”? Jason and I had just finished trying to introduce some clients to the 21st century and the whole Bubble 2.0 universe. This included the usual cluetrain rambling about conversing with your customers rather than shouting at them, and a lesson on long tail markets. All part of the usual attempt to shake marketers of their old “push the message to the golden consumer” habits.
Afterwards, we engaged in a bit of catharsis among ourselves. Sure, there is money in the long tail and it’s never wise to ignore any person with an important message, regardless of how obscure they seem.
But not everyone has something important to say. And the short tail of highly-influential people are still more likely to spread any given message. There are still a lot of people out there who have small audiences and nothing groundbreaking to add to the conversational market… witness most Usenet posts from aol.com, most pages on Geocities, most posts on MySpace, and most little personal sites like this one. We may be safely ignored.
Tags: blogging, marketing, meta, web
Filed under: marketing, meta, web | View Comments