Report web spam to Google. Please.
I’m thinking splogs here. Specifically for splogs is SpogSpot.
Category Archives: Internet
Snippets of geekitude
Gmail geekitude — In GMail with US English set, when you delete mail it goes to the “Trash” folder. Set it to UK English, and it’s “Deleted Items”.
TV geekitude — See how the ABC News titles look with no stories and no voiceover.
Google Video geekitude — Lots of snippets of info here, including the fact that Google’s video format is pretty much just a renamed DivX AVI.
Webmail geekitude — My web mail (Horde) puts a little flag against the country of the domain name of the sender. Of course it’s a little misleading when a message from someone using fastmail arrives, as it reckons it’s the Federated States of Micronesia…
Web design geekitude — The best freebie DHTML menus I’ve found so far are here. (Which I’ve implemented here and here. I reckon without too much trouble, WordPress’s categories could drive it automatically. Maybe something to put on the list for Geekrant 2.0.
Quick look at Google Spreadsheets
Here’s what it looks like. Click it to see it bigger.
Not bad, but looks very simple compared to Excel. This could be a good or a bad thing. Does a lot of Excel-like things. This kind of comparison is inevitable, as most users are familiar with it.
Doesn’t feel as refined as Writely. Right-click not harnessed.
Linked to your Gmail/Google logon, of course.
Exports a reasonably clean HTML table. (Certainly better than any released versions of Excel/Office.)
Watch out if you lose your connection:
My immediate reaction is this could be useful for some things — like Writely, if you want to be able to edit from anywhere connected, and/or share the document realtime with others.
But like Scoble, I can’t see it replacing “offline” apps for individual users just yet. Hosted apps within a corporation however, that could (eventually) be another matter, especially as the technology matures.
See also: Josh and I look at Writely.
Google spreadsheet soon
It’s widely reported that Google will be releasing an online spreadsheet on the 6/6/2006 (presumably US time).
Probably limited signup initially, but keep an eye on spreadsheet.google.com, which is currently showing a 404 (rather than a “Host not found”).
Update 20:15. Sneak peak and sign-up (they’ll email you when it’s available).
Update 22:00. Now at spreadsheet.google.com I get “Server Error. The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request. Please try again in 30 seconds.”
Captchas are just Turing Tests
The comments on Jeff’s post that Software development is basically a religion found themselves talking about Jeff’s captcha, which is the word orange. Always has been. Basically, there’s a mandatory field. Fill it in wrong, and you get no comment. But because having this mandatary, when’t a spam bot going to figure that out? You may as well have the word “orange” as text, not a graphic, and then the vision impaired can play too.
I think I’ve talked about this before.
BTW: welcome to the 6th of the 6th of the 6th. Finally Americans and the rest of the world can agree on the date.
htaccess Generator
Daniel would love this htaccess Generator, not that he needs it, what with him being a htaccess-loving-geek and all
Database war stories
Databases have long been part and parcel of web development, but it seems that some of the big 2.0 sites have a few things to say on databases. Some love them, others hate them, and all are dealing with really big databases.
Second Life (database has grown and grown and split), Bloglines and memeorandum.com (lovers of flatfiles), Flickr (almost a Tb of data – and we’re ignoring images here), NASA, Craigslist (dealing with masses of data), O’Reilly (doing interesting data mining / transformation), Google (not much gets said here), Findory and Amazon (Findory try to keep it all in RAM), finally MySQL repsonds saying “Flat files suck”
Wikipedia domain worth half a million bucks
The Wikipedia.org domain name has an estimated value of $448,814.
Geekrant’s estimated value is $13,254, while hotblowfishdogcat.com may be worth as much as $1,176 – given it costs like $10 to register, you’re looking down the barrel of a massive profit if you register hotblowfishdogcat.com now!
The Gwigle Game
Test your googling skills by playing The Gwigle Game. You need to know a fair bit about pop culture ‘tho. Actually, it’s a rather good training aide. Maybe Google will give the guy a big pile of cash.
I got so far as the paintings before I got bored. What comes after that?
More on human comment spam
Update to this post about human comment spam, about a new trend in blog comment spamming, using real life human spammers, to get around the fact that most bloggers can see the robots coming from miles away.
I’ve had a large number of these come through on my blogs in the few weeks. They’ve all been leaving links to sites like the one pictured. This one’s about antioxidants, but some are purportedly about computer viruses, drugs, whatever.
I really should update all my remaining blogs to use NoFollow, so if any get through, they don’t gain any PageRank. Time to chuck WP-Hashcash into the fray on all of them, as well.
Uh, so many blogs, so little time.
Update 26/5/2006: Another example added.
Are you referencing sites Banned By Google?
There’s a tool to test a website for references to sites that don’t appear in Google, which implies that the site has been banned. I’m not sure what the implication of referencing such a site is, but it would be reasonable to guess that Google would punish your site for being a collaborator.
Broken URLs still abound
The mob I work for, eVision, are looking for an extra person, so they put an ad on Seek for the position.
Seek’s URLs are broken. The only way to get a URL that you can link to or send to somebody is to use their own “Email this job to a friend” feature and send it to yourself. That way you get a sensible, working URL, such as:
http://www.seek.com.au/showjob.asp?jobid=6946759
rather than the broken one you get by copying it off the browser (even after clicking through the above), which is something like:
which goes to an error page that complains that your browser doesn’t take cookies (even if your browser does take cookies).
Dick Smith Electronics’ otherwise excellent web site suffers from a similar problem.
Jakob Nielsen’s article URL as UI remains as relevant — and as unfollowed — as ever.