Duke Street Alley

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I’ve had this conversation a few times recently with various people, and I figured I’d get it written down. I don’t like podcasts. This is not because I have some concealed Luddite tendencies, nor because I’m looking for something popular to dislike and be controversial over.

Putting it simply, podcasts are slow, irritating, and inconvenient - a step backward from the efficiency of text. No, I don’t like radio either.

Slow: I can read way faster than anyone can talk. I can read the transcript of a podcast in less than a quarter of the time it takes to listen to it, and that assumes the speakers aren’t stopping to hem, haw and um their way through a conversation. My time is valuable to me - give me the transcript.

Irritating: With at least one podcast I listened to a while back - and this was a twenty-something Irish male - if you removed the word “like” from the stream, it would have been about half as long. Other accents can be difficult to understand, or just plain unpleasant, and people who are perfectly well able to express themselves in text end up incomprehensible in speech. Sound quality isn’t always what it might be, and having to listen very carefully to make out what someone is saying is, well, an irritation.

Inconvenient: First, I have to get the podcasts onto some piece of equipment where I can hear them. Since listening to voice takes a huge amount of my attention, I can’t do that in work, and I usually have better things to do at home, so it has to be something portable. I have a small MP3 player, but the rigmarole of downloading the file and transferring it to the player and so on is tiresome. Then, unless I actually am concentrating all the time, I miss bits. I can’t just look back up the page; I have to rewind a bit, and hope I got the right spot. Neither can I easily flick forward through the bits I’m not interested in. “45 minutes in” is no use unless I can see a timer, and my MP3 player doesn’t have one. For that matter, finding 45 minutes in on Winamp involves messing with a slider.

So, in essence: give me writing, dammit. Sound is for conversation and music.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

There’s a story on SEOmoz at the moment, detailing how an “upper member of regional management” in a radio company told employees that:

if you want your page to show up in Google, you need to pay, say, $30 to be listed on maybe the 200th page, but you can increase your bid and show up on the 7th or 8th page, and you can pay even more to show up on the first page of results.

Good gods. And this guy’s company have a “partnership with Google”. Now, chances are, given this guy’s comprehension of how search engines work, that the partnership consists of carrying Adsense ads on the company website, but even so… the level of sheer misunderstanding that’s in there is unbelievable.

I know, at some level, that this is one more manifestation of the news-reporters-know-nothing-about-my-area phenomenon. This is the one where, when there’s a news report on your area of expertise, you cringe and shout at the TV, “that’s not how it is, you idiots!”, but then in the next report, they’re talking about someone else’s area, and you’re going, “well, it’s on the news, it must be true”.

The thing that bugs me is that if this guy - and the newsreader - can get things so utterly wrong about areas they’re not familiar enough with, it follows that I must be, on a near daily basis, producing statements that are so far from being accurate that they’re out of sight. And I don’t know. I try hard to be accurate in everything I say. So, uh, if I’m spouting bullshit on something (aside from the times I’m winding someone up, mind, in which case you’ll just spoil the joke), could you do me a favour and call me on it?

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

There’s a BBC report about the Amazon Mechanical Turk effort to find Steve Fosset’s missing plane from satellite imagery. One of the bits of information in it is a bit mind-boggling:

The search in Nevada by the Civil Air Patrol and many private pilots has discovered six previously unknown wrecks - some of which were decades old.

This is a part of one of the most completely mapped, intensively satellite-covered countries in the world. Further, a lot of it’s desert - rock and mountain, not much in the way of trees to conceal a crash, or water to crash into and sink. One plane taking days to locate is bizarre enough, but to find six others that nobody knew about in the process? Were they ones that were searched for before and not found, or are there planes falling from interdimensional rifts over Nevada?

EDIT: A bit more information on the other wrecks.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

There’s a lot of talk across the ‘net in the last couple of weeks concerning Facebook. An article from Read/WriteWeb, Is Facebook worth the hype? queries, well, just that.

I’ve been using Facebook for about a week now. I’ve made contact with people I hadn’t heard from in over ten years. Some of my less technically-minded older friends are using it with as much enthusiasm as the kids who can’t remember not having email.

The Read/WriteWeb article essentially questions two things; the stickiness of Facebook and the monetisation.  It notes that (according to the people who run MySpace) MySpace handily beats all comers in nearly every metric: visitors, page views, stickiness, etc.

What’s stickiness? AdServer Solutions says it’s “A performance metric based on the ability of a web site to hold a visitor’s attention. A web site’s stickiness is average duration per user session or per unique visitor.”

MySpace is “sticky” in those terms precisely because it’s badly designed, badly put together, and hard to navigate. Most MySpace profiles look like they were ripped directly from GeoCities around 1997. You have to spend a long time on MySpace because getting to the information you want takes time. On Facebook, by contrast, the information you want is there on the homepage, and a few clicks gets you pretty much everything else necessary. Facebook’s design is better, cleaner, and more usable, and over time, that is going to make a difference.

As for monetisation, well… Facebook’s ad placement is, putting it kindly, sub-optimal. They’re currently using untargetted ads, placed low on the left-hand side of pages. Once they start to target ads based on what’s in user’s profiles (and why they’re not doing this already is a mystery to me), and place the things a bit better, their advertising benefits are going to rocket.

In my opinion, MySpace’s days are numbered, and Facebook will win out - at least until the next big thing.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

So I was in at a little after half-past eight this morning. My machine had slowed to a complete crawl, so rebooting was the first thing. After that, I set into some work that needed doing, but found that there was something wrong with some javascript. In starting to debug the javascript, I found that there was something wrong with the session management on my local copy of the development environment. In trying to fix that, I found there was something wrong with my local installation of Cold Fusion. Then I had a meeting. Then I fixed the local install of CF, fixed the session management, grabbed some lunch and got back to work, fixed the javascript, and went to work on some CSS. Found I couldn’t reach the files. And now I’m waiting for the network administrator to fix something on the network so that I can get to the files I need.

Total time in work: five and a half hours. Total useful work done: ten minutes. I hate days like this.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Jill Whalen’s High Rankings Advisor newsletter carries some breaking news about an “unavailable_after” tag, for use by Google to determine when information is past a nominal “sell-by date” - the special offer is over, the event is past, or that article is gone into the subscription-only archives.

It’s not clear yet, however, if that’s going to be a meta tag, for use on a per-page basis, a tag in the proper HTML sense that you could use for a section of a page, or something else entirely like a class or a command in a robots.txt file. If anyone knows, let me know - in the businesses I’m working in, that functionality would be gold.

UPDATE: It’s been confirmed by Google as a meta tag.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

We’re in the process of a major site design here, and as we get to grips with better and better CSS, there are some odd issues coming up. The main one is working out where the styles go, and the thinking for that seems to take more time than any other element. Is that a 10px padding on the containing div, or a 10px margin on the p tag inside?

So far, I’m settling for whichever is more universally applicable - it’s not going to happen that the div has contents which fall outside that 10px “inner margin”, but the p tag might need other rules - so the padding goes on the div. I’d like to abstract that out to a rule I can communicate to other people, though, something like “apply styles to the outermost element possible” - but I’m not sure if that can really be done.

It’s all complicated by the existence of an IE7 bug, wherein floated elements have the bottom margin completely ignored, so that you have to put the padding on the containing element…

"As the vote is a tool of the state, and the state is largely a male structure or institution, is it possible for the United States as it is currently constructed to achieve some of feminism's goals?"

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I dunno, nothing for weeks and then two posts in a single day. Here’s a set of German postcards from the early 20th Century, depicting Life in the Year 2000. It’s bizarre to see how much it’s like the 70s and 80s ideas I grew up with - it’s essentially the technology and dress codes of the time, with ideals like “people will be able to fly”, “the weather will not affect us as much”, and “different technologies will be combined”.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

So, a wee while ago, Google bought Doubleclick. As the rest of the market realises what’s happening, there’ve been howls of indignation, and the amusing notion of Microsoft complaining that that’s anti-competitive. The Financial Times, however, first took a while to notice, and then produced this article, which has got to be closing on award level for incoherency and poor research. For incoherency, I give you:

Google plans to acquire the oddly named Doubleclick - most web adverts land you in an online casino with one or sometimes zero clicks - for $3.1bn.

and for poor research or perhaps complete loss of contact with reality:

The real questions are why Google wants to be in advertising, and whether agencies such as WPP should be worried. Google is good at wacky stunts and has unusual office furniture, both advertising staples, but its laid-back computer engineers probably lack the necessary lunching skills.

That’s a hangover-written article if ever I saw one, and the editor must have still been drunk.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

In Firefox, and now Internet Explorer as well, you can open a new tab by holding down the “Ctrl” key and hitting “t”. In Dreamweaver - my production environment of choice - open files look like tabs. So I keep on hitting ctrl-t in Dreamweaver, when what I mean is either ctrl-n for a new file, or ctrl-o to open one. The nearly-the-same-but-not-quite tabs are driving me nuts.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

The Pig, head writer at Wandering Goblin, has published an open letter to Uwe Boll on foot of Boll’s offensive 9/11-related opening to Postal, recently leaked on Youtube. His proposal is to fight Boll, in a boxing match, face to face, and if he wins, Boll is to agree to cut the opening sequence from his film. It’s an interesting proposal, and seeing as Boll’s methods of promotion appear to consist of being ever more offensive, I do hope it’s taken up - and that the Pig wins.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Since I was beating my head off this problem all weekend, I figured I’d post the solution for the benefit of anyone else who’s looking for it.

The Problem: Moveable Type (which I’m using for The Wizard of Duke Street) changes links so that they have the attribute ‘rel=”nofollow”‘. This is annoying, as when I post a link, or allow through a comment which has a link to the commenter’s site, I intend that link to be seen by search engines as a mark in favour of that site. Nofollow prevents that from happening - while the search engine spider sees the link, it won’t credit it in terms of the algorithm that calculates how popular a page is.

Solution Part 1: Disable the “nofollow” plugin in Moveable Type’s plugin page. This will allow links in the body of your post to function properly, and depending on how MT is configured on your server, may also work for links to commenters’ sites. If it doesn’t do the latter, though, leaving in a redirect function rather than a direct link, you’ll have to move on to part 2.

Solution Part 2: There’s an almost undocumented attribute which you can apply to the MTCommentAuthorLink tag, which you can do under Templates -> Archives -> Individual Entry Archive. Your tag should look something like:

<MTCommentAuthorLink no_redirect=”1″>

Rebuild your individual entry archives, and you’re done! Links should now have no nofollow “functionality” attached, and should go straight to the target sites, with no clumsy redirect.
Credits: I eventually found mention of the no_redirect attribute on Eat Drink Sleep Movable Type

Links: You can find more about how to disable nofollow on various blogging platforms on Andy Beard - Niche Marketing.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I’m looking for an archive - PDF, transcribed text, whatever, I don’t mind - of early newspapers, preferably British, but anything in English will do. I’m thinking pre-1800, but anything up to 1850 will be useful. I found archives of the Penny Illustrated Paper, but it started publication in 1861, which is a little later than I’d like. Anyone able to point me at anything older?

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

This is aimed mostly at Dubliners, but if you live anywhere that I might turn up, feel free to tell me about your local purveyors. I’m planning a series of collage-style projects, and I need stuff to go into them. I’m thinking of old postcards, newspaper clippings, doorknobs, hinges, toy soldiers, cogs, old hand tools, railway tickets and, well, similar junk. Does anyone know of “antique” shops, flea markets, car boot sales, or the like that sell this kind of stuff? Ideally, I’m thinking of rummage boxes marked “Any thing in this Box £1″, but that might not happen anymore.