Scripting News

Newspapers and url shortening

Wed, 21 Nov 2007 14:23:51 GMT

Commenting on yesterday's piece, Hanan Cohen says that newspapers in Israel use TinyUrl to publish web addresses on paper. This is both a good idea and not such a good idea.

First, it's a good idea because it saves space and in print, space is at a premium.

But they're leaving money on the table. If they used their own web address they could monitor traffic, see how many clicks each location in the paper generated. Maybe stories on the op-ed page generate more clicks than those on the front page? Maybe stories by Ms. Jones get more clicks than those by Mr. Smith? There's also a chance to reinforce the brand, and drive more traffic to your site as opposed to tinyurl.com. And it's good for the web, because it helps keep us from centralizing too much on one site. Lots of reasons to put up your own url shortener.

So someday you might see urls like this in the NYT...

http:\//nyt.us/7h

It's going to be a busy day here, so probably not too many posts. If you're in the US, good luck in your travel or prep for the big holiday tomorrow.

Tomorrow is also the day when the OPML 2.0 spec is finalized. If you have any further comments, this is the last minute! As they say, speak now or forever be a ~~troll~~ turkey.

Otherwise, we'll have a new official format to deploy starting tomorrow.

Thanks everybody!!!

Party in London on December 7?

Thu, 22 Nov 2007 03:21:21 GMT

I'll be in London the evening of December 7, probably fairly jetlagged (my flight from SF gets in at 1PM), but ready to have dinner and fraternize with British readers of this blog. Can anyone help put on a little dinner? I can promote from this side, but admit to knowing little to nothing about London. If you have an idea, please post a comment.

Building TwitterGram into a really big thing!

Wed, 21 Nov 2007 23:06:16 GMT

I love TwitterGram. It's a really cool tool, I use it when I have an idea to communicate and I'm nowhere near a laptop or desktop. I call the special number, 646-716-6000, speak for up to 30 seconds and the system takes care of the rest.

Yesterday I did a gram as I drove across the Bay Bridge and was amazed that I could tap into the wifi signal of a nearby AC Transit bus.

It's for little ideas that you want to share quickly. All you need is a cell phone.

I want to keep TwitterGram competitive, to make a business of it. I need a smart young person with lots of energy to manage the product. We'll need a CEO, if it's going to turn into a company. We need to lobby Twitter to add a key feature, or figure out how to provide the functionality without Twitter. And we could use a programmer and a site designer too, to get started.

I'm interested in ideas and looking for people to help me build this tool into a product, and maybe a company.

Whit is editing Seesmic Daily

Thu, 22 Nov 2007 00:23:01 GMT

Hanging with Loic

Wed, 21 Nov 2007 03:33:52 GMT

I'm here in San Francisco hanging out with Loic Le Meur of Seesmic. We just read an announcement on TechCrunch that Mike Arrington has invested in his company. Now seems like a good time to say that I too have invested in this excellent multimedia startup. Good luck to all of us.

I also did a brief interview with Loic where he tells who else has invested. You have to watch the video to find out!

Photo: Whit is editing Seesmic Daily.

Solving the TinyUrl centralization problem

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 16:50:13 GMT

Following up on yesterday's bit about centralizing and TinyUrl, this is one of those vexing problems that actually has a solution!

Every web app that produces long urls should provide a built-in url-shortening facility. The user interface would be similar to the one in Google Maps they call "Link To This Page." You click on it, and up pops a box containing an address you can use to point to the page. Screen shot.

But look at the size of the url that Google gives you. It should be short. Why not something like: http:\//goog.us/8uj9oj.

In other words, why doesn't Google have a built-in shortnener?

When blogging software gives you a permalink, it should be short. It's okay to make the user ask for one, why clog up the system with shortened urls no one uses.

Another key point, when they give you a shortened url, it should point back to the software that gave it to you, so the shortened link will be exactly as long-lived as the thing it's pointing to. In other words, the URL shortener wouldn't contribute any extra link rot, to use an old term coined (I believe) by Jakob Nielsen.

It's a mistake, in hindsight, for Twitter to give us TinyUrl urls, because the link depends on two companies and two servers. It would be better if it just depended on one, less likely to break.

Now that URL length has become an issue for users, it might be even better for designers to view URLs as part of site design. Look at the address for the page for the Wii at Amazon. Wouldn't it be easier to find if the address were:

http://www.amazon.com/wii

Try clicking on it -- it actually works!

Why should a user ever see the longer crappy url?

In other words, url-shortening isn't just for Twitter users, it's for everyone. Maybe most people don't look at the urls, but some do, and maybe more would if they made more sense?

Update: This reminds me, I have my own url-shortener, as I mentioned earlier, but it's a dynamic app, and that bothers me. I'd much rather put a static file in my web server folder that would be understood by a browser as meaning "redirect to this location." I know there are htaccess files in Apache, and other mechanisms in other servers, but I keep coming back to this. I know that there is a <meta> option to redirect, maybe I should use this for a all-static url shortener. Hmmm. I wanted to do one of these conventions for RSS, but I couldn't sell it to other aggregator devs.

I did a test, it's not nearly instantaneous. The source.

Kindle's most interesting feature

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 13:52:46 GMT

The most interesting thing I've heard so far sbout Kindle is that it is untethered. It does its own synching, it doesn't depend on a computer to do it, eliminating the chief hassle of iPods.

Can it subscribe to a podcast feed? Can it play audio? I don't know.

Kevin Marks says that Kindle requires DRM. "It makes things do less and cost more, and means they will break suddenly without warning when the service inevitably goes bust."

David Rothman is an eBook expert with a blog. I'm subscribed. Apparently he's been following the development of Kindle for a long time. Thanks to Amyloo for the pointer.

Apple's most annoying feature

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 14:18:41 GMT

I don't use a Kindle (see above) and I suspect I never will, I couldn't get myself to spring for the $399, which is relatively cheap for a new device with EVDO built in. There's something about Kindle that creeps me out, like reserving a seat on an airplane in row 13. It feels unlucky.

I don't feel that way about Macs. I use them all the time. I'm typing this on a Mac, for example.

Until yesterday, the most annoying feature of a Mac was that it automatically launches iPhoto, a program which I loathe, every time I connect my iPhone or digital camera. I seem to remember, vaguely, giving it permission to do this, but where did I do that, so I can go back there to turn it off.

I did figure it out, but it took a few Google searches. It's in one of the stupidest least obvious places. It should be in the System Preferences app, since it's a system function. Another place I looked was in the prefs for iPhoto.

Post your theory in the comments for this post. If no one gets it in an hour or so, I'll post the answer here. But I suspect you guys already know, cause you know so much about Macs!

A Mac user you don't often hear from

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 15:16:01 GMT

Here's a comment from a photographer who is new to the Mac.

"I've been thrilled with the Mac so far and now Leopard just threw a major stumbling block in the road to getting a really simple task accomplished."

It's a must-read for people who who think that most people find the hidden features.

London and Paris in December

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 02:44:01 GMT

I'll be in London on December 7 and Paris on December 10.

Scoble will be in both places. The Americans come to town!

Looking forward...

"cheesecake"

Creating a maintainable and thriving web

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 17:00:09 GMT

I knew the day would come when users would wake up and realize that centralizing stuff is not good for the Internet. Today two signs that things are sorting themselves out.

1. Steve Rubel writes about the danger of routing all our URLs through TinyUrl. I love what URL-shorteners do, it's especially important in Twitter when you're limited to 140 characters to express an idea. If you have to include a link, that could use up a lot of the space you have. The problem is if everyone uses TinyUrl, as Twitter does, what happens when TinyUrl goes down or is sold to someone we don't like, or disappears forever? I admit I don't know the owners of TinyUrl and what their motives are. Their service is reasonably long-lived, reliable and quick. Even so I've written my own URL-shortener and am running it on one of my servers, and I try to use it whenever possible. However, like all my sites, this one will likely disappear within a few days of my passing. I have to maintain my servers to keep them running. A better solution is surely needed. Rubel's epiphany just exposes the tiniest sliver of the huge problem below, creating a sustainable web. We're nowhere as far as that's concerned.

2. Fred Wilson writes about how TechMeme is causing the blogs he loves to focus on the same topics. I've noticed the same thing. Steve Levy writes an article that appears in Newsweek about new hardware from Amazon, and it's an instant coral reef, within an hour or two it's the top item on TechMeme and there's a whole ecosystem of thought about it, published by people who have no information other than what they read in Levy's article. Did anything real happen here? Not very much, it's like the rush of information that appeared about Leopard in the first few days of its release. The real news becomes apparent in weeks and months, not days.

This way of doing news is a remnant, it's anachronistic, a relic of the way news used to work, when guys like Bezos and Jobs would go on a press tour, seed Pogue, Markoff, Levy and Mossberg, they would write their pieces and the rest of us would settle for the very limited and highly spun information they provided. It's not that way anymore. I'll probably write about the Amazon device, I'll probably have to buy one, and like a lot of the hardware I try out, it'll go into a box I keep in the den with other stuff that I learned a little from but never found a use for. We'll get to the bottom of it, and it probably won't appear on TechMeme. Nothing unusual about that -- in the past my blog posts didn't appear in MSM, and that's what TechMeme has become part of, MSM.

Don't kid yourself (and Wilson doesn't) the pubs that used to be blogs, Mike Arrington, Rafat Ali, Om Malik, etc are now pubs that compete with the other top entries on the TechMeme Leaderboard, and they function much in the same way. Are you interested in understanding Disqus? You'll get one brief piece in TechCrunch on their launch day, but if you find a blogger who uses it, you can really understand how it works, because they will know, and because the publishing tools are now distributed and free, you'll find out what they think. That's what's changed. The press still reflects what the press cares about, competing with other press. But the blogs, who aren't trying to climb the top 100 lists, are doing something else. We're just trying to share information with each other so we can learn, so we can use stuff better, make better choices, improve the products, and eventually create new products.

You can see this philosophy reflected in exciting new products from companies like Chumby and Bug Labs. Create open platforms with widely available development tools and let the blogs take over. Google came close with Android, and there's still plenty of time, but they don't really trust blogs at Google, like most big tech companies they trust other big companies first.

That's the revolution I've been writing about since I started blogging -- when product designs come from the experience of the people, of bloggers. It's already happened, it's so recursive you may not see it. We designed blogging itself on the early blogs. And RSS? It was a product of blogging too. Every company that Fred Wilson touches is affected by blogging, every pub that Rex Hammock works on is. Every political candidate that benefits from the vetting of ideas in the blogosphere is touched by this power. It's the old decentralization thing that the Internet does so well. The reason TechMeme is doomed to be part of MSM is that it goes the other way, it centralizes. It's almost mathematics.

How to mount a network volume on Leopard

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 01:40:41 GMT

Good news -- you can do everything you could do with a network drive on Leopard that you could do on previous versions of the Mac OS, and probably more, and it's probably faster. I'll have to let you know after a bit of time using it.

Here's how you do it.

1. Locate the network drive you want to work with, starting in the SHARED sidebar section, clicking as needed to make it visible. Or alternatively, you can use the Connect to Server command in the Finder's Go menu. You can even mount servers over the Internet this way. (This part can be very slow, but you only have to do it once.) Here's a screen shot showing the available disks on a computer named Illium. Note that two of these disks are actually folders, Leopard doesn't care. That's coool.

2. Now if you look in the upper-left corner of that screen shot, you'll see that I have chosen the second of four possible ways to view the contents of Illium. It turns out the dragging procedure people were trying to explain to me only works when you're in the three-pane view, as shown in another screen, not when you're in the other views. That's totally unintuitive, it's just a matter of luck which of the modes you happen to prefer. For people who use the second mode (like me), the Finder doesn't network very well. Click on the third of the three icons and things start working very nicely.

3. Suppose I want to work with the drive named WYOMING. Now, all I have to is drag it into the Devices section of the sidebar, and it stays there. And it's fast, no long delays. People tell me, but I haven't yet verified, that this mounting will survive a restart. If so, that's a great improvement over Tiger. Not sure how well this might work on a laptop that disconnects and reconnects to the LAN much more frequently than a hard-wired desktop computer. Earlier versions of the Mac OS tend to hang for long periods when you accidentally leave a network disk mounted on a laptop after disconnecting from the LAN.

In summary -- the three-pane view is the magic view for networking. Once you have the drives mounted, you can switch to any of the views you like, they seem to work fine.

This highlights something missing in the Mac community that we may need to provide for ourselves. When a new version of the OS comes out, we need good user-oriented change notes that explain what you need to do to get your newly updated systems to work like the systems they're replacing. I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of people have made this transition, but I can't imagine that I'm the only one who hadn't figured out how to get Leopard to mount network drives. That's pretty basic stuff, networking on Macs is something I just take for granted, I don't expect it to be mysterious.

We don't even have good language to explain how to use a Mac. A number of people just said "Command-K" but that didn't solve the problem. I knew how to access network drives, but they weren't mounting. Are these well-understood terms? Apparently not. How many times did people tell me to drag a folder over to the sidebar without making sure I was already in the right view? Did they know that you had to be in that view? For people who prefer the three-pane view, it would likely never occur to them that this wouldn't work in the other views. Why would they think it wouldn't? This is very far from "it just works."

And what are they thinking at Apple, in enabling this feature in one view and not in others? This is a basic software design concept -- The Principle of Least Surprise. If you find that users are likely to do something one way, instead of teaching them another, make the software "just work." We should strive to accomodate the user, not thwart or confuse.

An ad on Facebook

Sun, 18 Nov 2007 16:10:09 GMT

My Facebook news feed has an ad for Blockbuster.

It's the first time I noticed an ad in this location.

Apple's brand promise, and how blogging can fix it

Sat, 17 Nov 2007 20:27:45 GMT

Scoble has a piece today on Apple's brand promise that nails it precisely, never seen him hit the mark so well. Congrats. The other day at lunch I was telling the Uncov guys that despite what they may think, Scoble really is brilliant. Read this piece, I feel completely vindicated (though sometimes I read his stuff and shake my head in disbelief at how he could be so wrong).

Here's the key point in Scoble's piece: Apple makes a promise with its brand and doesn't come close to keeping it.

The promise of Apple is that everything "just works."

It's true that the Mac does work better than Windows, usually, but that can be masked by the expected breakage in a user's first transition to Mac. You expect stuff to break when you switch from Windows to Mac. You expect things to work differently. But it all comes home when you "upgrade" to a new version of the Mac OS and find that the engineers at Apple don't listen to designers, or understand users any more than the geeks at Microsoft do. The problem isn't with Microsoft or Apple as a culture, the problem is with the tech industry.

Google has it too. They will break us, I'm sure of it. If I told you how, they'd unleash a storm of hate at me very much like what you get when you criticize Apple. Even Microsoft used to have its anonymous assholes on the net who would make you feel pain for questioning their competence or integrity. Hey when they cut off Netscape's air supply, they cut off a lot of users and small developers too. Sun did it with the Java wars (Microsoft again), and Apple -- well read my piece on networking in Leopard, which may look like it was coordinated with Scoble's. It wasn't; we've both been stewing in the same broth -- the hypocrisy of Apple's marketing, the lack of humility that guarantees that everything we care about, as users, will eventually break if we trust the tech industry to take care of our needs.

The only way this is going to change, and the signs are good, is if the users take over from the press at telling the truth about these products. The people at Scoble's dinner should come out of the shadows and tell their stories publicly, so everyone else who has a problem doesn't feel that the problem is their fault.

You know, when I published my piece this morning, it took ten minutes for the first post to appear that blamed me for the problem with Leopard's networking. But not much later, someone sent a pointer to a piece by Glenn Fleishman, where he says that Leopard's networking is an improvement over Tiger's. I trust Glenn, and believe him. I just didn't know when I switched to the Mac that there were so many problems. I had to discover them myself. And many more were uncovered in the switch to Leopard. (So much for "just works.")

There is something special about Apple, but it really isn't all that present in the Mac OS. The error messages say something isn't operational, which isn't really a word in the English language (why not say it doesn't work). When I followed Glenn's instructions and enabled file sharing through the Prefs system, all of a sudden my MacBook which is running Tiger can't access the file server. I'm sure there's some reason for this that most Mac gearheads know, but they're missing the big picture -- the Mac makes a promise, as Scoble points out, that you don't have to be a gearhead to use a Mac. It's a big lie, you gotta assume the marketing people at Apple know it's a lie, and they keep getting away with it, and there's no reason for them to make it better, as long as they do get away with it.

I started blogging because people lied about the Mac, then they lied about the Constitution, then they lied about everything else I cared about. And since then blogging has taken off, so we have the tools to fix the problem, and if we wait for Silicon Valley to do it, we'll wait forever. The solution is simple -- tell the truth. Once you do, then someone else will feel they can do it too. And pretty soon the companies are going to have to do it, because as soon as they lie, there we will be to set them straight. Think of how much better our government would work if we applied this same principle to governance and then you'll understand why blogging is so important.

PS: Apple ought to feel they have an option to either: 1. Live up to the promise that their products "just work" or 2. Stop making the promise. I hope they choose option 1. And ideally they'd stop making the promise too, because there's always Murphy's Law to keep you on your toes.

Yet another beautiful Berkeley street pic

Sun, 18 Nov 2007 06:07:21 GMT

How do you mount a network volume in Leopard?

Sat, 17 Nov 2007 17:43:17 GMT

I rushed through this in my piece about Leopard a couple of weeks ago, I do things other than review software, so I don't always have enough time to go into depth. And I wanted to be reasonably sure it was as bad as I thought it was. But now I am reasonably sure, but maybe I'm still missing something, if so, I bet a lot of other people are too. Here's the problem with networking under Leopard.

In the previous version of Mac OS X, you would mount a remote volume, and from then on it was as if it were one of your local disks. That's how networking has worked on Macs since the 80s, and it's the way it works on Windows (not sure when it came in there, but it was present on NT and XP). It's the way networked OSes should work, it's hard to imagine them not working this way.

However, amazingly, that's not how it works on Leopard.

Here's an example. I have three computers on my LAN that I can access from the laptop I'm writing this piece on, Bucharest, Darkstar and Illium. They are conveniently listed in the Shared section in every Finder window. This is a small improvement, in previous Macs, you had to 2click on a Network item in the same place, and choose the computer from a dialog. Now you can see the names without clicking (It's a small improvement because believe me, I've got these names memorized.)

Let's say I want to look at the disk named Ohio on the computer named Darkstar. I click on Darkstar, and a list of disks appears, among them Ohio. I double-click on Ohio and the list of disks is replaced by the files and folders in Ohio. Nothing has changed in the left pane of the window, no disk has been mounted, I can access the contents of this disk only in this window, and only as long as it stays open. If I navigate to another disk or folder, I no longer have access to this disk. This is the first major step back. (There were some minor reverses on the way here, each of the steps in this process take much longer for some reason than they did on the earlier version of the OS. I have two machines that haven't been Leopardized, so I can compare, and the delays can be really long, and yes, I've rebooted everything numerous times. The pre-Leopard machines are faster. I actually replaced one of my Mac Minis because it was too slow, now after "upgrading" it's just as slow as the one it replaced. Oy.)

But here's the real kicker. Suppose I want to save a file to the Ohio disk from inside one of my apps. There's no way to do it!

This is the part I can't believe.

I can't even go through the navigation process to locate the disk (a lot of extra steps from the old method, where I could just access it as if it were a local disk). It's not that it's hard to do, it's that you can't do it. This is a basic feature that goes back to the 80s. How do they get away with removing it, and no one calls them on it, and they don't explain it anywhere? (Or did they and I missed it. In a Steve Jobs keynote, did he say "Oh and one more thing, we removed a feature so basic you don't even realize it's there.")

Now, as I said earlier, it's possible it is there, staring me in the face, and I just can't see it. I've been using computers long enough to know that that sometimes happens. If so, show me how to do it. How do I save a file to a server volume from inside an app?

Update: You can navigate to shared disks in some apps, and not in others, as has been pointed out in the comments. Note that in earlier versions of the OS you could save to network disks in all apps.

Here's a video that illustrates how the Finder doesn't let me mount a network drive in Leopard.

My Chumby is here

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 18:02:21 GMT

I've activated my black leather Chumby named Robusto, and as I write this, it's downloading a software update through wifi.

First impression: This is a breakthough device, kind of like the Cobalt Qube was in the mid-late 90s.

1. They use BitTorrent to distribute updates. There was 1 seed and 1 peer when it downloaded my updates. Very good use of BitTorrent, and it's smart to build it in there from the beginning.

2. Whoever did the animation was doing acid in the 60s, disco in the 70s, coke in the 80s and a dotcom startup in the 90s. It's really outrageous, really good and cool and funny. It makes you laugh out loud. Can't say the iPhone made me do that. The Qube, while it wasn't trippy, did too. (Update: Susan Kare did the design. No wonder it's so great!)

3. They have a built-in RSS reader, not sure how it works, but I configured it to display Scripting News.

4. I changed the clock to a cuckoo clock (from a plain blue analog clock). The device checks back with the website periodically to find out if it's been reconfigured, and now without me doing anything else, the clock has changed. If I tap on the door the bird comes out!

5. They have a Flickr widget that is very webservice-ish, and clever and complicated. I tried to configure it to show my friends' pictures, but the authentication window never appears in Firefox. Great idea and I can't wait to try it when it works! (It's similiar to something I'm doing with a Mac Mini as a settop box.) Update: I needed to tell Firefox that it was OK for the Chumby website to pop up a window, and when I did, the authentication worked.

6. It would be nice to have a USGS earthquake widget. It could be two-way since the Chumby has motion detectors.

7. JY Stervinou sends a pointer to a page that shows you how to turn the Chumby into a web server. That's what I'm talkin about!!

8. What's playing on my Chumby right now.

9. A comment from Steve Tomlin, CEO of Chumby.

10. Phil Torrone, via email: "One thing that i have been trying to tell folks about this device is that it is a great example of open source hardware, Chumby has released the schematics and files needed to improve. I think many people will use the Chumby as a low cost Linux computer for all sorts of amazing projects."

Summary: I got it set up and running my widgets within an hour and it was fun! I love this device, it just reeks of potential. And they did a beautiful production job. It's easily as innovative as the iPhone, but it isn't getting as much attention. Take a look you won't be disappointed.

My LAN is back on the net

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 23:27:46 GMT

I've been limping along here the last couple of days running on a shared EVDO connection, which is nowhere near as much bandwidth as I'm accustomed to. The problem was my DSL modem, which had burned out and needed to be replaced.

One of the side-effects of the outage was that the nytimesriver site stopped updating, as Jim Goodman noticed. Sorry for the outage, but I'm glad to see it was missed. My next task is to see what if anything I need to do to bring it back online.

Is Twitter down?

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 00:51:10 GMT

It's been flaky all day, and they removed a really key feature, and now (4:55PM Pacific) I can't get through at all.

If you can shed any light on this, please post a comment here.

The feature that's gone is they would hot-up names that appeared after at-signs, so you could click on the name and go the person's page. Let's hope it's just a bit of breakage and not something they did on purpose.

Update: It's pretty clear that Twitter has been down for a couple of hours (as of 6:10PM). It's also clear that it's become an integral part of communication for some of us, I'm one of those people. This outage is giving me ideas for a low-tech decentralized way to do Twitter with RSS and software running on the desktop.

Update: It's back up at 6:45PM Pacific. Jack Dorsey says the @ problem is a bug and will be fixed.

Good morning!

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 18:24:22 GMT

Yesterday at 6PM my home LAN went off the Internet. The DSL service was down, first time in a year, and in that year I had built a fair amount of stuff on the assumption that the connection is there. I couldn't update Scripting News, for example, because the CMS was running on an old laptop in the den.

It took some effort but I think I have the app moved, and I'm using the EVDO card while AT&T gets around to fixing the problem, which may happen as early as tomorrow afternoon, knock wood, praise Murphy etc etc.

Just as this is happening a ton of other things are demanding my attention. It's at times like this that I wonder how I ever used to get so much done. Kind of a miracle. Life is slower these days, that's for sure. At least for me.

The net went down just as I was about to put up a picture of Sponge Bob next to the bit about startups being sponges.