October 30, 2003, 3:49 PM ET
Job opportunity: Web programmer/editor in Florida
This paid advertisement is no longer live. E-mail lucas.grindley [at] heraldtribune [dot] com for more information.
October 26, 2003, 2:11 AM ET
Wanted: Browser filter features
Mozilla Firebird is superb, but it hasn't stopped me from thinking about a few power-user features I'd like to see in my Web browser:
URL filters. I want to be able to write a small script handler that is invoked every time my browser loads a new page. The script would receive the URL of the page it was about to request and could run it through various text parsing routines (e.g. searches/replacements) before the page was requested. It would function, essentially, as a client-side mod_rewrite.
This could serve as a typo corrector (e.g. rewriting "google.co" to "google.com"), at the very least. For paranoid types, it could also be a NSFW-protector, which could rewrite a URL with a naughty word in it to a verification Web page on the local machine -- just in case you stumble upon something inappropriate at work. The dishonest folks in the crowd could whip up the one-line regular expression that converts a subscription-required Wall Street Journal article into a free one. I'm sure there are plenty of other applications.
HTML filters. Same as above, but the script would be able to alter the entirety of the document's HTML -- after it was downloaded but before it was rendered. The applications for this are vast. From a design/accessibility perspective, it'd be an exponentially more flexible type of user stylesheet, capable of altering layouts completely. It could also be an advanced adult-check filter that looks out for inappropriate words and serves up a warning/confirmation page. But most importantly, it'd introduce the ability to filter plain text to users' liking -- for example, replacing text in all caps with the lowercase equivalent, or automatically linking-up URLs and e-mail addresses that aren't already linked.
Clearly, there'd have to be a "revert to original HTML" button. But with such an intense level of customization, it'd be hard to go back.
October 22, 2003, 1:01 PM ET
Gray day
Holovaty.com is in grayscale today in memory of Elliott Smith, possibly my favorite contemporary musician.
RIP, Elliott.
October 18, 2003, 11:19 PM ET
More ESPN Flash mischief
Jason Long pointed out in the comments to my earlier ESPN entry that some ESPN articles (example) display their headlines as a Flash image.
Ludicrous. Bizarre. Absurd.
Incidentally, there's a hole in their software that allows anybody to create any headline in their Flash font. I wrote a poem about it.
October 18, 2003, 6:07 PM ET
Calling all Kansas City-area Web developers
A bunch of Web developers/designers from the Lawrence, Kan., and Kansas City areas are meeting up this Monday evening to eat, drink and talk about Web stuff. We've got plenty of interesting people showing up, and the more the merrier, so if you're in the area and would like to join us, contact me for details.
October 18, 2003, 3:16 PM ET
ESPN baseball site: Flash for Flash's sake
ESPN's World Series 100th Anniversary site is a classic example of unnecessary Flash usage. The site is almost entirely done in Flash, while every important piece of it could be done -- and done better -- in plain HTML.
Some problems:
- Pages are either faded or slid onto the screen. This might impress the one Internet user who has never seen Flash animations. For everyone else, it's an annoying delay -- particularly after spending more than two minutes on the site. These gratuitous animations (the Flash equivalent of Tufte's "chartjunk") were novel in 1998. Now they're trite and make browsing tedious.
- The text is not copy-and-pastable.
- A Web browser's Back and Forward buttons don't work within the site.
- None of the pages are individually bookmarkable; they do not appear to have distinct URLs.
- The contents of these pages cannot be indexed by search engines.
For me to make these same, tired Flash criticisms is trite in itself, but it's clear such criticisms aren't being heard. ESPN should know better.
October 14, 2003, 2:07 AM ET
Mailinator changing '1 e-mail per person' mentality
Mailinator is a free service that gives anyone open access to any e-mail address at the mailinator.com domain. (Read the FAQ.) Without a password, you can check the accounts at bob@mailinator.com, or jane@mailinator.com, or george_martin@mailinator.com, or anything@mailinator.com, just by going to the site's home page and typing in the username whose e-mail you want to check. Every account's inbox is open to the public.
Like spamgourmet.com, but simpler, Mailinator is great for when you're asked to provide a valid address for a confirmation e-mail from a Web site that you don't trust with your real address. Give 'em a bogus (but real) Mailinator address, then log into that account on mailinator.com and finish registration.
I love the idea. I think it's brilliant, and I admit to using Mailinator half a dozen times since I learned about it last week. In certain situations -- like the other day, when I needed quick access behind a news site's registration wall and didn't trust it with my real e-mail address -- it makes perfect sense. We live in a world where privacy policies are either too long to read or too short to trust. And a quick look in the inbox of any commonly used Mailinator username -- bob@mailinator.com, for instance -- proves that spammers are ready to attack at any instant.
But the honest online-content provider and Web developer in me don't like what's happening here. Requiring a unique, valid e-mail address is a convenient way to limit the use (or misuse) of certain legitimate Web applications. Typical Web bulletin-board software, for instance, allows only one person to register under a single e-mail address.
Yes, I know anybody can sign up for a free e-mail account at Hotmail or Yahoo Mail, but Mailinator removes even that small barrier-to-entry -- as Paul Tyma, the site's developer smartly notes on his Web site. And I'm not so sure many laypersons (read: non-Web-geeks) are familiar with free Web e-mail accounts and the importance of protecting one's e-mail address, anyway. That is, until services like Mailinator become widespread.
The point is, if Mailinator and its ilk get popular, Web developers are going to have to rethink the "one e-mail address per person" mentality. As the ease of accessing random e-mail accounts increases, the accuracy of user-submitted e-mail addresses declines. And that is a bad thing for content providers who have a legitimate need to ensure their customers' e-mail addresses are accurate.
One advantage of Mailinator, from a content-provider's perspective, is the obviousness of the address. If you get an e-mail at the domain mailinator.com, you can be 100 percent sure it's bogus. But, really, how long will it be before more services like this sprout up? And who wants to keep up with the list of domains? Sounds like an arms race to me.
There will always be people who go out of their way to beat the system, just as there will always be people who are honest (or naive, depending on your point of view) about giving away their e-mail address. But for the people in the middle, services like Mailinator accomplish one main thing: They spread the mentality that e-mail addresses are throwaways and most Web sites are out to spam you.
I still haven't decided how I feel about that.
October 10, 2003, 12:55 AM ET
Verve Hosting Web-host problems
My Web hosting provider, Verve Hosting, mistakenly pointed holovaty.com this morning and early afternoon to the personal site of a random woman who, well, gives off a lonely vibe.
Screenshot (PNG, 120KB)
Evidently something went wrong with Verve Hosting's hard drives, and a mistake was made associating domain names and user accounts. Two of my friends, also Verve Hosting customers, experienced the same problem, although the sites they pointed to were much less embarassing.
During the mixup, which lasted about three hours, I checked the site via a number of servers across the world. Some displayed it correctly, some displayed the wrong site. (I have no idea why this is the case; DNS issues scare me.) So please accept my apology if you tried holovaty.com earlier today and got the wrong site. There was nothing I could do about it. Verve Hosting dropped the ball.
This is the kind of thing nobody should have any tolerance for, so I'm in the market for a new Web host. Recommendations welcome. I'll need Apache, Python 2.2+, PHP 4.2+, MySQL (preferably 4), mod_rewrite and SSH access. Preferably on Linux.
