scratch that niche!
Finally, I’ve managed to put together a little video on using Twitter. Sorry for all the false starts, my first attempts were made using a PC. I know, what was I thinking, right? I eventually got back to my beloved MacBook Pro, and voila, easy as pie. Shot the screencast, did some quick edits, uploaded, done.
But that whole “Mac is for people who actually want to get things done” thing is a post for another day.
Here’s an oldie but goodie but from XKCD, a webcomic about “romance, sarcasm, math, and language.” Check it out to get an inside peek at how a geek’s brain works. I love the recursive humor in this piece called Marketing Interview. I’ve felt like this many, many, many times: get called to the prospective client, get grilled, then get asked to make a pitch. Hey, you called me, right?
Marketing Interview
Hallelujah, amen, and glory onto Google. They’ve finally addresses the issue of duplicate (or extremely similar) content with a rel attribute for the <link> tag.
Okay, okay, I’m backing up to explain. Let’s say that you have some content that is available via multiple URLs. Let’s say that you have example.com/page.php?id=123 that displays a review of a restaurant (or something similar). However, because most dynamic sites might also allow different sort and display options, this exact same content might also be available via:
example.com/page.php?id=123&catid=4
example.com/page.php?id=123&catid=4&authorid=3
Furthermore, the same content might be reached as example.com/reviews/restaurant/el-taco-loco. In the old days, Google, having discovered all these URLs, would simply assume that you’re up to no good by duplicating content. Whoosh, there goes you page ranking.
Starting this morning, you can add a <link> tag to the <head> section of your “duplicate” content, providing a canonical URL that Google will then treat accordingly.
<link rel=’canonical’ href=’http://www.example.com/reviews/restaurant/el-taco-loco’/>
Need more info? Check out the original posting over at Official Google Webmaster.
So I get this email this morning from a guy in North Dakota basically telling me that I’m a cretin for having written an article about XML with bad XML in it that won’t run. He includes a link to the article, and then proceeds to give me advice on how to fix my stuff.
Okay, cool. Here’s the link he sent, by the way. If you read the piece, you will indeed find a ton of errors in the code, plus little misspellings and other things along the way.
The piece, entitled “Building a Simple Ajax Application” was first written by me for PHP World and published in their issue #6 way back in November of 2006. It was only made available in print, and was only online for a week or two. I have a copy of the magazine here in my closet, and even a quick perusal reveals none of the errors in code or misspellings you see in the link above.
So, not only has this outfit (S & S Media, in Germany) reprinted my piece without paying me, they’ve also taken the liberty of adding changes and errors (presumably to avoid detection by search engines???) that would frustrate anyone who would try to run the code. Oh, and along the way, cause people to sully my reputation….and hey, I can do just fine on that front all on my own.
Merry Christmas! Grrrrrr.
So there we were at iPhone DevCamp Austin (an official satellite of the iPhone DevCamp going on in San Francisco), trying to come up with a nice little app we could put into the Hackathon Contest for the weekend. The idea is, could we, a bunch of iPhone noobs, code something up in a weekend and submit it by Sunday at 4pm central?
Well, we were all miserably hot (it was like 104 degrees outside, with 20 developers crammed into a room with a Mac Pro and countless MacBooks, and a projector) and feeling a bit spiky about the whole NDA mess (our individual NDAs didn’t allow us to show each other our code or even talk about the iPhone SDK), so Chris Cooley, Steve Stedman and I got together and put together iHrrl.
The game is really simple. There’s a rat in a box. The idea is to agitate the rat so that it gets to a certain level of nausea. Once it gets into the “zone” you start making points. If you stop agitating the rat, the nausea level goes down, as do the points. Agitate the rat too much, and it hurls, game over. Let’s just see who had enough control to score the highest points.
The process broke down like this. Stedman did all the art in Fireworks. Marvelous rat, as you can see from the screenshot. I clarified the initial idea (a rat in the box that you make hurl) into an actual game that required skill, with some outside advice from our friend Joe Licari. I was also put in charge of animating the eyes, limbs, tail, and mouth of the rat. Chris did all the heavy iPhone coding, with me doing a bit of XP-style QA as we neared the deadline.
Now, I can’t talk about how he coded things up, as that would break the NDA. And I’m not sure where the game is posted right now (we emailed it to the committee in San Francisco, who laughed when they played it) so you could see it or play with it (not that you could unless you had an iPhone, as it requires an accelerometer). But take it from me, it’s DAMN funny, especially when the rat hurls.
In any case, now you see what you’re dealing with…a twisted, twisted mind.
Thomas Myer is a consultant, author, and speaker. He's also on a quest. No, it doesn't involve armor, dragons, white horses, or riddles. Ask him about it if you see him.
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