weblogs

A collection of 52 posts

music

Said the Gramophone's best music of 2022 is out!

Said the Gramophone is one of my favorite old school blogs that's focused on music. I wouldn't say music is absolutely vital in my life, but I do like to hear new bands and go to shows occasionally, but ever since I left college I basically

web development

Extremely tiny Wordpress improvement idea

At Slack, we had an internal channel designed for posting small good ideas from employees as well as any we spotted on twitter from Slack users. Software engineers at the company would hang out in the channel and start a discussion thread on the viability of implementing any of them

me me me

SEO spammers wearing a printout of my face as their mask

Over the past year, I've cut way back on my plethora of wacky domains used on long-lost web projects. I've let loads of domains go and only updated the few I still use or need. As a result, most projects have been lost to the ether

amazon

Does Amazon enable comment spam?

Comment spam has been around for many years now and I've seen all the tricks of the trade blasted at me and my sites. Lately, it's gotten tougher and tougher to weed out every last bit of spam because it's clear comment spammers are

personal

I'll miss you, Brad

"I try to be my own hero. That may sound flippant, but 15 years ago when I was really trying to grasp a direction for my life, a friend wise beyond his years reminded me that no one is perfect, that heroes fall and white knights on horseback are

weblogs

Going, going, gone

This should be exciting: Around 2PM today (Pacific) the PVRblog auction will close.

advertising

Dear PR people: How to Pitch Bloggers

In the wake of my previous post and Gina's PR blacklist that sprang from it, it seems like a good chunk of the PR industry is blogging about the things they should and shouldn't be doing, but I'm not seeing a lot of practical

advertising

Stop asking, start filtering

I know it's a cliché as a blogger to complain about public relations flacks sending you giant PDFs and weekly emails on topics you don't care about, but recently I noticed my tried and true polite email saying: Thanks, Matt totally stopped working. Turns out that

weblogs

Testing upgrade

Just testing out to see what broke in moving to WP 2.5... update: amazingly enough, nothing broke, even a bunch of old plugins I still use.

ask the readers

Bottom line, all weblog apps suck in some way

I spent most of the weekend elbow-deep in weblog archives and templates, trying to update my site to MT 4.01 and WP 2.3.2 (the former required the latter to export/import). After several hours, I started looking at Expression Engine and Tumblr and even considered Blogger to

meta

Trying something new

I've been meaning to redesign this site for a while, to set aside more screen space for writing, both to make it easier to read longer pieces for readers but also to help me focus more on just plain old writing instead of all the other junk I

weblogs

Top 10 Reasons Why Your 5 Tips About 7 Cutting-Edge Technologies will annoy me

Seriously, the top of digg, delicious, reddit, and every other link aggregator seems to be clogged with Lists of Vital Things You Should Know. After seeing dozens of them fly by every single day, I'm starting to think it's just lazy headline writing that gets promoted

weblogs

Vox Love

From an interview with Jason Kottke: When I first started putting my thoughts online in the mid-90s, there was little about my life that I wouldn’t put online, but now it’s almost the opposite situation. What he said. A year or two ago I realized I didn'

weblogs

Buzzplant: none more crass

Lately I've been getting a steady stream of unsolicited bad marketing and PR mail. People promoting products are stooping to new lows in order to try and get legitimate weblogs to promote their clients for them. It's fake viral buzz hidden behind whatever legitimacy a participating

weblogs

Lifehacking this week

I should have mentioned earlier that I'm helping edit Lifehacker this week, as a favor to Gina and Keith. The last time I did it, I went a bit nuts writing a ton. For some reason I was motivated to get as many big posts in as possible.

weblogs

Pave the Planet

I'm impressed with Google Earth. I hadn't totally got what was cool about it until I built my first Google Earth app earlier today. The documentation is pretty slight (it'd be nice if they simply broke down which elements are required and which ones

weblogs

Most Improved, 2005

This is a long time coming, but I've really been enjoying Jalopnik the past few months. When Jalopnik and Autoblog and others like it launched, I was disappointed that these new car blogs were so boring. Cars are one of the most universal of hobbies, and you'

weblogs

The zeitgeist

12/10/2005 - Saturday Night Live does a joke commercial on the complexity of the Medicare prescription drug plan, and the joke includes a bit about RSS feeds and podcasts. 12/12/2005 - Arrested Development episode has a joke where the twin brother Oscar is told he can&

weblogs

The revolution will be ajaxified

I was delightfully surprised when I visited Blogger today without a cookie and saw a new ajaxy recently updated scroller on the front page. Here's a 1.2Mb AVI file of it in action. Just to reiterate a point I made early this year, there was a version

weblogs

Putting the fun back in fundraiser

When you run a large community, you invariably get some members rising to the top in terms of participation and reaction from others. It's a natural part of any community and as fast as you can dream up ways to temper their contributions or wait for them to

weblogs

Blogger on spamblogs

Blogger Buzz: On Spam describes Google/Blogger's ongoing fight with spamblogs I wrote about a few days ago. They've even published a blacklist of spamblogs to help indexing services weed them out. I forgot to mention it in my earlier post, but the big white elephant

weblogs

When it rains, it pours

(67spamblogs, originally uploaded by mathowie) I have an ego feed I check every few days for my last name (fairly rare) from technorati. On a normal day there might be one or two mentions of my last name and it's not always about me, but it's

weblogs

Flag day

Someone should organize an international blogspot flagging day (all about flagging blogspot sites). We could pick a day, say, a saturday in September, then collectively cruise blogspot through the "next blog" button, flagging all the spam blogs that contain 10 links to a single site in every post,

weblogs

All new, all the time

If anyone reading this knows the group at Yahoo that recently purchased and is in charge of my favorite blog update service and aggregator, blo.gs, could you let them know the system is completely broken now? For some reason, every blog I've ever tracked with it is

weblogs

heh

Dear preshrunk