Jeff Atwood wrote a fascinating article on different methods to use to discourage trolling on social websites , including some discussion of their ethical merits. I wasn’t aware of slowbanning and hellbanning before, but I think they’re very clever ideas.
All posts in Miscellaneous
Michael Botsko has a good writeup on cloning and pushing updates to shared GitHub repositories, as opposed to the traditional method of forking a repository.
Check out A Tour Through the Visualization Zoo for a good introduction to the concept of data visualization and some interesting examples of the more exotic techniques being used to describe complicated data sets.
PoducateMe has created a comprehensive guide to podcasting that covers planning, equipment, recording, editing, hosting, feeds, etc. I think it’s just the right depth of information to get started with; it touches on all the major topics and gives some practical recommendations, but doesn’t overwhelm you with too much information. Update: The Reel Reviews podcast has an episode dedicated to how the show is recorded , and… [more]
Kroc Camen makes a good argument for why RSS is important and points out how web browsers can better support it.
Google doesn’t give you a link to export placemarks that you add to a saved map, but you can change the ‘output’ parameter in the iframe URL from ‘embed’ to ‘kml’ to download an XML file with all of the map details, including the placemarks and custom icons. I got an error when trying to… [more]
“A Printer driver is a folder with one ‘.ini’ file, and a couple of ‘.dll’s and that’s it. It is not a 50 MB download. It is not an IE Toolbar, and Side Pane. It is not half-baked photo software. It is not a splash screen when your computer starts. It is not a tray icon.” - Kroc Camen… [more]
Nettuts+ has a good article detailing the current state of the various video codecs supported by desktop and mobile browsers . Basically, there’s still no single format with universal support; Flash is still the best option for the desktop, and H.264 is the only option for mobile devices. In the future browsers will natively support HTML5′s video element through WebM/VP8.
Twitter has always offered RSS feeds for user’s tweets, but unfortunately they stopped publishing the URLs awhile back. The feeds are still active, though, so you just have to manually figure out the URL. The first thing you’ll need to do is use this website to find their ID based on their username . Then, just insert that ID into this URL: http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/[ID].rss…. [more]
If a client wants their site to be mobile-friendly (and is actually willing to pay for it), then the best way is to create a separate site designed specifically with mobile users in mind. Little Springs Design discusses this in their article about Mobilizing vs Miniaturizing . If the client’s on a tight budget then you’ll need to… [more]
There’s a conflict between Comodo Firewall and the built-in firewall in Cisco’s VPN client which can cause blue screens. You’ll see a DRIVER_IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL error caused by inspect.sys or vsdatant.sys. One way to work around it is to install the VPN client without the built-in firewall: msiexec.exe /i vpnclient_setup.msi DONTINSTALLFIREWALL=1 The other way is to remove vsdata.dll, vsinit.dll and vsdatant.sys from the Windows\System32 directory. https://forums.comodo.com/install-setup-configuration-faq-cis/system-bsod-with-cisco-vpn-client-and-cis-installed-t41948.0.html
David Wang writes about troubleshooting 400.x “Access Denied” errors in IIS . The first step is to pull the substatus code out of the logs, which will give you more information on what’s going wrong and narrow down the list of causes.
ISINC has a writeup on how to pass a batch file of commands to Window’s command line FTP client . You can then create a Scheduled Task to automate them.
If you’re troubleshooting an htaccess file and aren’t seeing any changes, no matter what you put in the file, make sure that you have permissions to execute the directives you’re using. Check Apache’s conf file to see if AllowOverride None is set for your site or directory. If it is, add the directives that you want to use, or just… [more]
Joel Spolsky wrote an interesting article on ways to make coding mistakes obvious , like using semantic prefixes on variable names. If you have unfiltered data from the user, you can make the variable something like $usFoo so that you always remember that the data is unsafe, and won’t output it unfiltered (therefore preventing malicious code injection).
Mapki has a detailed list of URL parameters for Google Maps . Setting daddr is useful when you want to create a link for a user to get directions. You can also control the zoom level, type of map (normal, satellite, terrain, etc), overlay information and lots of other things.
Skeleton is a CMS Made Simple module you can use as the base for writing a new module. It has all the basic code in place already.
WordPress’s creator, Matt Mullenweg, expresses my sentiments on blogging exactly: “I used to think constantly about building an audience for my blog but now my attitude is that if I’m not blogging for myself it’s not worth it. I don’t force myself to post once a day, I just do it when it feels natural. Sometimes people complain —… [more]
These are some of the better free icon sets I’ve seen: Axialis Photoshop Style File Icons Silk Fugue Chalkwork HTML
I’m not a big fan of CMS Made Simple , but I end up doing a lot of sites in it by request. It’s taken me awhile, but I think I’ve found a way to structure templates that doesn’t make me want to club baby seals out of frustration. First, what I don’t like about it. There are… [more]
