pf » Archives for November, 2005

Thinking and Making has a good article called: Friendly URLs improve usability and user experience. I've always been a big fan of the friendly urls, when I see a site that uses friendly URL's I get a sense of elegance, and cleanliness.

I learned something new from my brother the other day about unix job processing. We had written a script to do some specific analysis of the logs for dealazon.com, and it would take about 30 seconds to a minute for the script to complete.

The folks at del.icio.us/ have been pretty busy kicking out new features. The latest was just announced on the del.icio.us discuss mailing list about a half hour ago - a firefox extension. The extension basically replaces various bookmarklets that you may have used. Get em while their hot.

I built a simple tool that lets you create an amazon wishlist blog badge. It generates compliant HTML via some javascript that you can insert into your blog or website template, and style with CSS.

Here's an example:

img.

SANS has published a list of the top 20 internet security vulnerabilities of 2005. The list is not however cumulative, it features security vulnerabilities that have been the most prevalent within the past year and a half.

If you're like me, every year you plan on doing your holiday shopping online, but wait too long, and end up in the mall on Christmas Eve. Well now is a pretty good time to do your online shopping without paying high shipping costs to ensure your stuff arrives on time.

It appears that Google has expanded on the stats that they offer to webmasters. The stats were previously available only to those with a sitemap defined, but now you can access them just by telling them your url, and verifying.

They also provide more stats than they did a few months ago.

Remember how technology was supposed to make our lives easier? In practice it actually tends to make our lives more complicated. This paradox has led many to embrace simplicity.

Here's a collection of quotes about simplicity, and keeping things simple.

I just noticed today that you can tag products on Amazon, check out this screen shot:

I wonder if they will be providing access to this through their API? Perhaps Jeff Barr, or someone else over at Amazon Web Services could let us know.

I just threw in support for Gravatar in my blog comments. If you go and sign up for a gravatar account, you can assign a picture to your email address, then when you post a comment on my blog or other blogs that support gravatar, your picture will show up next to it.

Rob Cameron has just released version 0.1 of ColdFusion on Wheels a MVC framework for ColdFusion, and inspired by Ruby on Rails.

There's no better way to get started than to check out his 8 min. video tutorial. And if your new to Ruby on Rails check out their 15 min video.

My friend Tim Fanelli has built his own blogging software called Blosxonomy. It's written in Ruby, and is based on the python blogging software pyBlosxom (same schema, so no import is necessary).

Here's an even simpler flex example that I showed in my Flex presentation today. It uses a horizontal slider component to change the alpha transparency of an image.

<?xml version="1.0" ?>

<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.macromedia.

I've been learning Flex for a presentation at my local CFUG, and I'm actually quite impressed with how much you can do with so little code.

Apple's affiliate program just sent me an email pointing to some

great deals on refurbished Apple products

from the Apple Store. You can get 20-45% off the price of pretty much any product.