Josh Staiger's Weblog ~

March 23, 2005

A critique on the design of joshstaiger.org

As I've been meeting more and more bloggers in person, I've also been becoming more and more self-conscience of the design shortcomings of my site.

Here are some of my own criticisms of joshstaiger.org (in rough order of importance). Feel free to add your own in the comments.

I have no about page explaining who I am, and no prominent photo of myself (this is always the first thing I look for when I happen upon a new blog).
Entries are not categorized, making it difficult for regular readers to find things they may recall reading in the past, and also difficult for new readers to get an idea of what I tend to write about.
I have no site map. Thus, for instance, it would be very difficult to find the most popular service of my site, the Xanga RSS Fixer, by entering through the front page or casual deep link.
A search box only appears on the front page. It should appear on every page.
Visited links do not have a distinct color, flaunting users' expectations of the common web interface.
The calendar on my front page is a waste of space.
The recent entries links on my front page are a waste of space. Readers need only scroll down the page to see recent entries.
The light grey text coloring used in different portions of the site (such as "Posted by") does not have enough contrast with the white background.
Permanent links for entries are currently represented using the time the entry was posted. These should instead be explicitly say "Permanent Link"
The light blue that I'm using for links could be a bit darker to contrast better with a white background as well.
My temporal archive list is getting somewhat long and ungainly. This could be consolidated on a separate page perhaps.
It is not obvious to the casual user what my XML syndication feeds are supposed to be. It would be helpful to take a page from Blogger's book and apply a special stylesheet to feeds that says something to the effect of "This is an Atom formatted XML site feed. It is intended to be viewed in a Newsreader or syndicated to another site.".
My site is not fully accessible.
My photo.net snipits use html that does not validate

I just wanted to say publically that I am very much aware of these flaws. I hope to fix them soon, and document the fixes as I implement them.

Posted by Josh Staiger at 02:24 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

March 17, 2005

Using c-mode to edit Javascript in Emacs

As part of my foray into the Greasemonkey world, I've been on the lookout for a good environment for editing standalone Javascript files.

Emacs being the One True Editor, you'd think that there would be a decent major emacs mode for editing Javascript, and you'd be wrong.

I tried installing:

http://www.brigadoon.de/peter/javascript-mode.el

Using Emacs 21.3.50.2, I get the following message when trying to switch to javascript-mode:

File mode specification error: (file-error "Cannot open load file" "c-mode")

I tried a few things to fix this, but they only seemed to make things worse.

Just using straight c-mode with Javascript works fairly well, although for some reason c-mode in Emacs 21 out of the box has an irritating indentation offset of only two spaces.

We can fix that up right quick, however.

Add the following to your .emacs file to fix the indentation problem and associate .js files with c-mode:

; Indent c code four spaces

(setq c-basic-offset 4)
; Associate c-mode with the .js extension
(setq auto-mode-alist (append '(("\\.js$" . c-mode)) auto-mode-alist))

Posted by Josh Staiger at 12:14 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

March 16, 2005

On the third Raleigh/Cary Bloggers Meetup

The latest Raleigh/Cary Bloggers meetup took place tonight.

In contrast to the sparse attendance last week, we were able to draw a fairly nice crowd this week, with some new faces in attendance. Participants in addition to myself included:

Interestingly, both Vincent and Martin happen to be IBM Extreme Blue interns, although this was my first real correspondence with either of them.

Given that everyone who attended this week had a technical background, the discussion immediately took on somewhat of a technical flair. My memory can't possibly do justice to all the topics we covered, but here is my best shot:

We discussed Mark Pilgrim's Butler script for the Greasemonkey Firefox framework. We agreed that Greasemonkey opens up the door to some very interesting hacks, especially in conjunction with XMLHTTPRequest (aka Ajax) - the technology that drives Google maps.
Martin pointed out a in interesting bookmarklet that animates a Google maps route, as demonstrated by John Udell
Vincent would like to see a method of allowing readers to rate blog entries, and remarked that he would like a way of exposing only the highly rated posts to new users, when it might otherwise get burried in a flurry of blogging randomness.
It was discussed that someone is trying to patent a method of only exposing higher quality entries to new subscribers of an RSS feed, as an introduction, while regular readers will receive all content.
We discussed tags on flickr and technorati. This lead to a discussion on Metacrap, and the limits of metadata.
D remarked that del.icio.us is a lifesaver.
We discussed various ideas for automatically highlighting interesting content across the blogosphere, including Steve Gilmore's attention.xml, even though none of us really had any clue on what attention.xml actually is or how it is supposed to work.
We talked about Gmail, and using algorithms to scan the content of an email and automatically group related content without having to resort to manual labeling (avoiding metacrap pitfalls)
We were quite pleased with Google's offering of free POP access to Gmail (along with smtp), but wondered how they could possibly have no future plans to charge for it.
Podcasting was discussed, and it turns out that I'm not the only one who has stopped listening to Adam Curry because I'm sick of hearing podcasts about podcasts.

Marty wondered about how the concentration of bloggers in the Triangle compares to the rest of the country, and remarked that it would be interesting to see a map illustrating the density of bloggers by region.
Dave mentioned that GeoURL had recently come back online, and could possibly serve as the geographic map that we envisioned
YouSendIt.com was mentioned - a service that seemlessly allows one to temporarily host large files too big for email (up to 1GB) in order to "send" them to another user.
Comment spam was discussed, including the usual suspects of nofollow, captcha, and methods of defeating captcha.
Dave wondered how clickthrough pricing is determined for systems such as Google AdWords. It is actually a marketplace system where advertisers bid for keywords. Although Google doesn't do so, Overture allows you to view advertisers' max bids for specified search terms.
The Super Shuffle, a blatant Taiwanese rip-off of the iPod Shuffle was also discussed.

Please feel free to leave a comment if I left out anything important or got anything wrong.

We came to a consensus that bi-weekly would be a good frequency to meet. Given this, I propose that we meet on the first and third tuesdays of the month.

Hopefully this will keep my readers from lynching me for having to hear about a Raleigh meetup every other entry...

Time to sleep...

UPDATE 2:

Alternate perspectives on the meetup:

UPDATE 3:

The next Raleigh/Cary meetup will be Tuesday, April 5, 2005.

Details:

When: Tues, April 5 2005 @ 6:30 p.m.
Where: Cafe Cyclo, in Cameron Village

2020 Cameron St
Raleigh, NC 27605 (map)
(919) 829-3773

Informally RSVP at the Raleigh/Cary Bloggers meetup.com page.

We will meet on the first and third tuesdays of the month, at the same time thereafter.

Posted by Josh Staiger at 01:56 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

March 15, 2005

MT-TrackbackAntiSpam

In an effort to curb the trackback spam I've been receiving, I've installed the MT-TrackbackAntiSpam plugin from James Seng (the same guy who brought us the scode captcha plugin for Movable Type).

Installing the plugin is very easy. Just drop the script in your plugins directory, make sure it's executable and you're good to go - no additional steps necessary.

It's been a few days and so far I haven't received any new trackback spam and genuine trackbacks are still getting through. We shall see what the future holds.

Posted by Josh Staiger at 12:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

March 14, 2005

Raleigh/Cary Bloggers Meetup, Tuesday March 15, 2005

Join us tomorrow (Tuesday March 15) for the third weekly Raleigh/Cary Bloggers meetup.

What: An open meeting to talk about blogging, podcasting & whatever's on your mind
When: Tues @ 6:30 p.m.
Where: Cafe Cyclo, in Cameron Village

2020 Cameron St
Raleigh, NC 27605 (map)
(919) 829-3773

Who: Bloggers & people who want to blog

Optionally RSVP at the Meetup.com Raleigh/Cary Bloggers Meetup page.

Amongst other things we will talk about this week is the frequency of future meetups.

See notes on our last meetup.

Hope to see you there!

Posted by Josh Staiger at 11:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

March 13, 2005

The utility of a blog post calendar

Is the post calendar that appears on the front page of many a blog really all that useful?

Let's think about our blog reading habits. Does anyone say to oneself "I really must know what the Philip Greenspun has written on the ninth of this month vs. the previous Wednesday"?

The most useful feature of the blog post calendar is that it gives a succinct overview of what an author's posting frequency. Is he a diurnal poster or a twice quarterly poster?

Regular readers will already have a fairly good picture of an author's posting habits.

The calendar is therefore much more useful to the new visitor, who stumbles upon one's site and wonders what it is all about. It logically follows that calendars should be relegated to the "about" page of a blog, rather than chew up screen real-estate for all users (who haven't yet accepted an RSS reader as their lord and savior) on the main page .

Indeed, most prominent bloggers that I read have long since ditched the calendar idea altogether.

Something to consider for the redesign of joshstaiger.org.

Posted by Josh Staiger at 05:03 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (1)

March 09, 2005

On the second Raleigh/Cary Bloggers Meetup

The second Raleigh/Cary Bloggers meetup went down earlier this evening.

Present were Dave Johnson, Rick Ross, and myself - an impressive concentration Java geeks if I've ever seen one. Sparse though the crowd may have been, there was no shortage of excellent conversation.

We convened at 6:30 at Cafe Cyclo (where, unfortunately [or perhaps not], the wi-fi didn't flow quite as freely as the wine, coffee, and beer) and talked for slightly more than three hours.

Topics included:

many things Java
Javalobby and Roller
Dave's upcoming book: Blogs, Wikis, and Feeds In Action
PHP as a movement
cpanel and other types of web administration software
the b2evolution PHP multi-user blogging engine
20Q, a really interesting sounding kids' toy
Blogging Carnivals
The Internet Search Engines FAQ and search engine optimization

and many more that I can't recall off the top of my head.

Dave and I wondered aloud on perhaps making the Raleigh/Cary meetup a monthly event (as opposed to weekly), given the level of interest thus far, and also on possibly moving the meetings to Wednesday. Comments on these matters would be greatly appreciated.

Posted by Josh Staiger at 01:10 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

March 08, 2005

On my one year in the real world

On year ago today, I began work at IBM.

I cannot express my thoughts and emotions regarding this past year any more perfectly than Paul Graham does on page 230 of Hackers and Painters:

'Many people feel confused and depressed in their early twenties. Life seemed so much more fun in college. Well, of course it was. Don't be fooled by the surface similarities. You've gone from guest to servant. It's possible to have fun in this new world. Among other things, you now get to go behind the doors that say "authorized personnel only." But the change is a shock at first, and all the worse if you're not consciously aware of it.'

-- Paul Graham

How true, how true.

Luckily I think that I'm getting the hang of the "having fun" part, and by that I mean more than just the superficial definition of "having fun."

The game of life is a constant learning experience. It doesn't end with college and it isn't limited to equations we read in text books. Any person who hasn't figured that out is a poor soul, indeed.

Posted by Josh Staiger at 11:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

March 07, 2005

Raleigh/Cary Bloggers Meetup

Join us, tomorrow (Tuesday, March, 8 2005 ), for the second weekly Raleigh/Cary Bloggers' Meetup.

Details

What: An open meeting to talk about blogging, podcasting & whatever's on your mind
When: Tues @ 6:30 p.m.
Where: Cafe Cyclo, in Cameron Village

2020 Cameron St
Raleigh, NC 27605 (map)
(919) 829-3773

Who: Bloggers & people who want to blog

Alternate perspectives on the last meetup:

Anton Zuiker
Andy Wismar
Grace

I'm noticing that we don't yet have an entry in the blog together wiki. I'm hoping to remedy that when I get home from work this evening.

UPDATE:

The wiki entry has been created. Check it out for further details and feel free to add your own!

Posted by Josh Staiger at 09:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

March 06, 2005

Adventures in Chapel Hill

Adventures in Chapel Hill Photo.net folder

Posted by Josh Staiger at 10:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Adam G arrives on the scene

My roommate, Adam Gunther, is now blogging (again, after much prodding and poking by yours truly)

Sweet Jesus, not 48 hours later he's already doing an in-depth analysis of the Philadelphia Eagles lineup.

Look out blogosphere!

Furthermore, some of ya'll had better start writing before I cast you from my blogroll.

Posted by Josh Staiger at 10:27 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

March 02, 2005

A typical skier's learning curve

Skiers and snowboarders lounging at the top

As I recounted in my last skiing entry, I've been pleasantly surprised with my progress on the slopes (after only my third time out in my life) and I wanted to write about it while it is still fresh in my mind. I think that it is easy to get intimidated and label yourself "not a skier" if you have never gone by the time you reach your early to mid 20s. I know that I certainly felt this.

I don't think that many people realize just how easy it is to get up to speed and have a lot of fun in the process. Below is my experience with the skiing learning curve. Others may find it useful as a gauge:

Date	Location	Experience
Winter 2002	Boston Mills *	This was my very first time touching skis period and began with the very basics of learning how to put on ski boots, snap into the skis, walk in skis, and go down a bunny hill. I had help from a rather experienced friend, who was a very good instructor. Only about a half day was spent on the slopes. Periodically much hilarity would ensue when I would fall down while standing in the lift line with my skis on and not be able to get up. By the end of it I was able to make it down a fairly small green slope without falling, and was able to make it down a very small blue slope without killing myself (but not without falling).
<three year interlude>
January 2005	Snowshoe	Two days were spent on the slopes in total. Even the small slopes at snowshoe are considerably larger than slopes of equivalent difficulty at the imitation resort of Boston Mills. On day one I started off on real green slopes right away. By the end of day one I was barely able to make it down certain green slopes without falling. By the end of day two I was able to consistently make it down all green slopes without falling and was able to make it down an easier blue slope without falling.
<one month interlude>
February 2005	Snowshoe	Two days were spent on the slopes in total, with the first day including roughly three hours of night skiing. As usual I started off with green slopes, but it quickly became apparent that I could easily make it down any green slope on the mountain without falling (this was quite surprising to me). Early on in the first day I moved on to some easier blue slopes, which I was able to take without falling. I moved on to some intermediate blues, which I was able to initialy take without falling about half the time. Difficult blues would still regularly trip me up. By the end of the trip, I was able to regularly take any intermediate blue slope on the mountain without falling. Though it happend rather infrequently, I would still fall occasionally on blue slopes, and these falls would tend to be considerably more serious than I was used to (as recounted here).

* Boston Mills is a really small ski resort in Akron OH, with a website that should be featured in suck.com. Don't click on the link above if you can help it. UrbanWildernessDesign, the company who designed the Boston Mills site, should be ashamed of themselves. A note to the UrbanWilderness guys when they find this page while searching for themselves in Google: websites that play sound in the background make me want to poke my finger through my eye up into my brain and swirl it around, especially when there is no apparent way to turn the sound off. I would watch network TV if I wanted to listen to advertisements all day. Therapy.

The future:

My next time out, I'm planning on taking some of the harder blue slopes until I can make it down them consistently without falling. I anticipate this taking about a half a day. I then plan on moving onto my first black slope.

Posted by Josh Staiger at 11:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Swagat Indian Cuisine in Roanoke, Virginia

On our way home from Snowshoe Sunday night, rather than take the normal route down 77 back to Raleigh, we decided to mix it up a bit and take highway 220 on the theory that it might be a bit more direct and therefore quicker.

Unfortunately, we ran into a snow storm midway through Virginia that followed us all the way to Greensboro, so our findings are inconclusive.

On the upside, however, highway 220 took us through Roanoke, Virginia right around dinner time, and we happened upon a wonderful Indian restaurant called Swagat Indian Cuisine (map) in downtown Roanoke. Their Roti was incredible! The Samosa, rice, and Tandoori Chicken were also excellent. The service was fantastic, and the portions quite large.

All in all, one of the best Indian meals I've had in quite some time. Highly recommended if you happen to be looking for Indian food in the Roanoke area.

Note: Swagat's website also has their menu available as html, saving Firefox the pain of having to grind over the Acrobat plugin. This is also very commendable.

Posted by Josh Staiger at 12:36 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

March 01, 2005

What happens when you eat a battery?

We got into a heated discussion at lunch today about what would happens if a person eats a battery. Obviously, if the seal on the battery is broken then very bad things happen. But what are the chances that the battery seal will stay in-tact and the battery will simply pass through your system?

One argument that was proposed was that the battery casing was designed to keep the battery acid in, so is it also enough to keep stomach acid out?

Perhaps some of you engineers-turned-med-students would like to chime in?

Posted by Josh Staiger at 09:43 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

Snowshoe Skiing Redux

Those of you who know me in real life or otherwise live vicariously through my away messages will know that I went skiing at Snowshoe again this past weekend.

Again, it was a lot of fun! I went up with Jon and Kerry again, only this time a bunch of Kerry's friends met us as well, resulting in fourteen people staying in two condos.

The skiing was very good. After skiing all day Saturday and hitting the hot tub for a bit, we went out for night skiing, a first for me, and very cool. Sunday was about as perfect a day to be on the slopes as one could wish for - sunny and just cold enough to keep you pleasantly cool.

I was surprised with how much I had improved since the last time I went. I fell much less often, but given that I was trying more advanced slopes, the falls that I did take were a bit more serious. During night skiing, I took a particularly hard head over heels fall, losing my poles, skis, goggles, glasses, and hitting my head on the slope. Uf... I think I'll be investing in a helmet before going out again.

I got back on the horse, though, and all in all it was a *very* enjoyable weekend.

I took considerably more pictures this time. All are available in my Snowshoe Skiing February 2005 photo.net folders. Here are some of the highlights: