Thursday March 10Brainboost.comI quite like this new type of "answer engine". It works like askjeeves.com in which you type in the search query in the form of a question. It will then analyse the question and develop a criteria to recommend a few links which it thinks will answer my question. I never really liked askjeeves.com because when I tested it, it never gave me satisfactory links compared to google.com. But brainboost's recommendations and usability is winning me over. I'll start using this more often in concurrence with gooogle.
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sticky footer using CSSAn interesting CSS hack that realises the nirvana of CSS: the browser-scalable layout. It lets you create a footer that's 100% visible and sticks to the bottom of the page, no matter the size of window or screen. It uses a teased bottom property on the footer container and a forced height on the page container. But a hack is still a hack. For what it's worth, it's really inventive. http://solardreamstudios.com/learn/css/footerstick/
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Why blogging is good for your careerTim Bray wrote a good article listing 10 reasons why blogging is good for your career. http://tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/03/08/BloggingIsGood
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strike tag bring it back! strike tag bring it back!Of all the decisions that the WC3 made, the worst was deprecating the strike tag. I love the strike tag. Why did they have to deprecate that? Those It was one of the most useful tags around! You can't have a weblog and a sense of humour without using it every once in a while. "Oh wait..." gets really tiresome and isn't as succinct as the strike tag to suggest irony, sarcasm or satire. When used in those situations, the strike tag was as subtle as applying a sledgehammer to an egg. But it was so effective. Now we have to have the inconvenience of defining a new class in CSS in every website we want to use a strikeout. Hey look, undeprecate.com and undeprecated.com are still available!
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Zopa.comThis is an interesting concept. Zopa is the middleman website for peer-to-peer money
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Wednesday March 09How to deal with trollsProbably the best definition of a troll I've seen is an online personality or content that upsets people (paraphrased from wikipedia.org). People who have been made upset is one of the strongest indications of a troll problem. The term trolling is often applied (wrongly, I think) to suggest inflamatory motives of the person who creates the content or message. It is wrong because in a mediated and remote environment like the internet, it is impossible to tell what the motives of a person are. Worse still, suggesting a person's motives is sometimes used abusively to slander someone. The belief that trolls know what they are doing is a myth. Most of them don't even realise they are upsetting people and sometimes believe they are being thought provoking. So like all other moderators and weblog owners, I find the hardest part of handling trolls is determining whether it is a troller in action or not. I usually draw the line as soon as the troller attacks someone on a personal level, even if the content is meant sarcastically or as a parody. This approach may sound a bit anal, but I prefer nipping the bud early over having to handle a full blown flamewar. Flamewars upset me and when they occur, it reduces the pleasure I get from visiting my favourite websites and I want less and less to visit them. Once you have determined that you have a problem, there are a few techniques on how to handle trolls. There is no such thing as a fool-proof automated method of handling trolls. As moderators you must be prepared to wade in, get your hands dirty and take responsibility for your actions. Trolling is a human problem and cannot be handled adequately by a computer. I looked up more popular forums like slashdot and kuro5hin to create the following list.
Whatever you choose to do, you cannot leave a troll situation on its own. At best it will fizzle and die out. At worst, you will lose good community members. Or, just as bad, your community could get a bad reputation. If you handle a troll situation, no matter what happens, you will at least gain the reputation of being a responsible moderator. More tips here: Handling online vermin
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Tuesday March 08The Male Turd Ratio (MTR) - How to choose the right online dating siteI don't post my profile on just any website. First of all, it requires a lot of thought and effort on my part. If I want to be open about my personality and my likes and dislikes, I also want to be really certain it is going to be displayed in the best light. So before determining whether the online dating site can help me find a match, I have to determine whether the online dating site is a match for me. It's not enough to just check out the women on the site. I always check who the competition are. The straight men are the main determinant. I scan through the list, paying special attention to the paying customers. If there are too many of the type of customers I call the "Male Turds", then they will chase off the good women. It makes sense to go with an online dating site where there is an abundance of good competition rathern than bad competition. An online dating site with a high Male Turd Ratio (MTR) will have women who will assume I'm a male turd just like all the other male turds. As a result, they are less likely to respond or less likely to register and post a good profile. Male Turds are those who have profiles that are turn-offs. They typically use explicit usernames or profile titles. Or they post explicit photos or post photos that are obviously fake. Or the profiles are scantily or just badly-worded. Altogether, these profiles give the women the impression that the site is filled with untrustworthy Male Turds who are there for shady reasons. Or that there just aren't any good males on the site. Unfortunately, most of the online dating sites are filled with Male Turds. But an online dating site's MTR always fluctuates. The good online dating sites periodically erase bad profiles or attract more good profiles. So I have to scan the straight male section of online dating sites to determine the MTR every once in a while. Lavalife.com seems to have a decently low MTR. I rather prefer that site to Match.com which also has a decently low MTR because Lavalife.com requires payment on a per usage basis, whereas Match.com's price structure is a time basis (monthly) package. I may not always make the best use of the site in the time I have.
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Monday March 07P*rnzilla: Free tools for surfing p*rn with FirefoxThis site has bookmarklets that remove redirects from thumbnail galleries that sometimes redirect you to an advertiser. And much more. Very useful. http://www.squarefree.com/p*rnzilla/ (As you have noticed, I am now very careful about putting the word p*rn on my website. I want to have the freedom of broaching the subject. But I hate it when the search engines deliver traffic that's only looking for p*rn.)
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Sunday March 06Creating Brand Buzz in ForumsThe key to creating buzz marketing in forums is first of all get the forum administrator's cooperation. Once that happens, there's a lot more you can do. Such as the use of sticky topics, branded signatures in every email exchanged on the forum and in every newsletter and you won't run into the problem of getting banned by the forum as long as you remain non-intrusive and non-interruptive. More tips: http://www.leavcom.com/imedia_brandbuzz.htm
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OS9 enthusiast support groupLet me talk about They Whom Must Not Be Mentioned. OS9 users. Yes, like ghosts of Christmas Past, there are still some lingering around unable to resolve their issues with the new OS and unable to let of their old one. It was brought to my attention yesterday that there are legions of them. But they have gone underground like modern pariahs. The fact that nobody talks about them doesn't mean they don't exist. The fact that Apple still maintains a OS9 support forum and that Versiontracker still gets submissions every day to its new software list is evidence that they are still an important market. As I said yesterday, I respect anyone's choice of operating system, whether it is Windows or Linux and I don't begrudge them of it. And I apply the same principle to OS9 users. Many of them are using G5s and iBooks they bought as late as 2003. But since then, Apple has stopped making hardware for them and have cut them off. Yet, I doubt that will nudge them to an upgrade. Mainly because they don't see OSX as an upgrade. They see OSX as simply a different OS. As different as Windows is to Mac. And I do understand where they are coming from. I spent a year like them when I bought my first iMac (a lime-coloured one), booting up in "Classic" and refusing to try OSX. That is, until I felt I couldn't live without a multi-IM-service client like Fire. And then I "switched". So OS9 users are now like orphans. They are enthusiasts with no forums for them to congregate because all the Mac forums only support OSX to the exclusion of all others. And they're shy of making themselves public for fear of mockery and derision, especially from fellow Mac users. They want more software companies to support their choice of operating system, but they have no voice and are afraid of speaking up. And so I'm proposing to one of the local Mac User Groups that is in contact with several OS9 enthusiasts to create a special forum site just for them. A safe haven where they can form their own OS9 support group and discuss their software and hardware issues openly. If you know of other OS9 enthusiasts, please let them know that help is on the way. And if there is such an enthusiast site already in existence, please let me know so I can tell them.
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