Apathy Sketchpad

I’ve been playing about with the new version of Wordpress, with FriendFeed widgets, and my skin and so forth.

I’m going to get all Ann Maurice on my sidebars’ collective ass (I imagine they have one collective ass, much like two legs do, assuming they’re the same person’s legs) and do a major de-clutter on them. First plan is to widgetise both sidebars and thereby collapse the frankly ridiculous archive list into a drop-down menu. After that, I don’t know what I’ll do. I should really fix the search page, although I doubt anyone sees it much. Suggestions welcome, even after I’ve done it (such is the joy of widgets — non-Wordpress users, you don’t need to know what I’m talking about, just trust that this all makes sense).

The FriendFeed widget on the left is one I found on the internet somewhere and have hacked and modified to show comments, and I use it primarily in place of Google’s practically unstylable, commentless and Javascript-dependent Reader Shared Items clip. I much prefer my new version. You may have also noticed a “recent comments” panel has appeared beneath it.

To be honest, I’ve found Friendfeed more useful for syndicating to other sites, such as here and Facebook, than for actually using as a website. This may be because I have two ‘friends’ on Friendfeed and neither has shared a single item. If you would like my customised version of the widget, then email me and I’ll send it to you. Note that my nickname is hardcoded into it so unless you change it, it’ll display my comments about your items, not your own. (This is more a feature than a bug, really.) Google Reader, on the other hand is fantastically useful, and I keep meaning to put up a post about the clever system I have slowly evolved with about four Google services and a Firefox plugin that have between them made my online life so much simpler.

I’ve switched my RSS feed to full-text, so you don’t have to visit the site any more unless you want to post comments, or link to it, or look at anything but the blog posts. I’ve also moved the main feed to Feedburner, in case that makes my life better somehow. So, now you can read all my posts in your feed reader, except for this one, which cuts off moments before the really Read the rest of this entry »

This comment was posted on the My New Coins page the other day, by someone calling himself “Boggus Wartus”:

Fuck off with your bullshit comments about browsers.  If you like Firefox that’s fine, but don’t tell other people what they should or should not be using.  Wanker.

I deleted it, because it was abusive and not relevant to the page, and I don’t really need that on a page which, since being featured in the b3ta newsletter, has racked up over 5000 hits and 97% of the site’s total pageviews. But I pride myself on the openness of my comment system so I thought I’d air it here and respond properly.

First of all, fuck you, Bogwart. The notice in question appears at the top of the page when using Microsoft Internet Explorer, and is there because the browser in question fails to correctly render my website, and I’d rather people realised it was because I can’t be bothered making special efforts to accommodate bad browsers than they thought I was just incompetent. Internet Explorer makes up less than 40% of the traffic to this site, usually, but if I made the site render properly in IE it would probably have taken 70% of the effort involved in making the layout. That doesn’t suit me. The “bullshit comment” reads

Note: Your browser is displaying this page incorrectly because your browser is crap. I know it comes with Windows and I know it’s easy to find and I know it’s the simple option, but honestly it’s the worst browser available. Get Opera or Firefox if you want to browse webpages. (I recommend Opera.) Go and do it now. It’s okay; I’ll wait.

I don’t think I’m being overly political there. I’m not saying people ’should’ switch for any reason other than “Firefox is better”. I don’t even say I like Firefox: I explicitly recommended Opera over it. I’m no more being a wanker than a critic is being a wanker when recommending one film/book/videogame over another.

But ultimately, I could have got political. I could have said that Internet Explorer’s non-standard and proprietary behaviour makes it distinct from true HTML web browsers, and the fact that it’s bundled with the only widespread operating system for non-technical PC users means that its rules, which other browsers aren’t allowed to mimic, become a de-facto standard. This is clearly either an abuse of Microsoft’s monopoly designed to make other operating systems impractical or else it’s just incompetence.

I could point out that IE is full of security holes — they even managed to sneak one into the JPEG display code, which I wouldn’t have thought was possible — and that this meant I was forced to choose between ’standard’ looking websites and security. I could point out that, while Firefox and Opera certainly crash sometimes (and to be honest I’ve never used a browser I really like — Safari is gorgeous but just doesn’t have enough functionality for me) they don’t do so nearly as often or spectacularly as IE — taking down the taskbar and any file browsing windows I may be using.

There are moral, standards-based, functional, security and practical reasons to avoid using IE. I don’t think I’m a wanker for advocating that.

I’m just amazed that Bogwart took it so personally.

As you probably noticed, the site was not working for most of yesterday. This is the reason, according to my hosts’ offsite status page (which you can check during any downtime to find out what’s up): Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve just installed the magic new Google Talk badge, on the right-hand sidebar. This allows you, the humble reader, to talk live with me at any time that I happen to be sat near my PC with Google Talk turned on, which is some evenings and weekend daytimes. Please don’t assume that when it says “Available” I am, and please don’t be offended if I don’t answer. I’m probably just doing something else and have left the computer turned on, where it will be failing to find signs of extraterrestrial life almost as completely as people running SETI@home. Or I hate you.

Since this update was not very funny, here is a nicely ironic quote from an article I read the other day:

Remember that although English is NOT your NATIVE Language, your writings should conform to the conventions of standard written English (sentence form, grammar, spelling, etc.). Your ideas will have little impact, no matter how well the research, if they are not communicated well. Remember always that scientific terminology very often has precise meaning. Be certain you choose your words correctly and wisely.

Quite. Lastly, an observation.

Every so often Adobe Acrobat Reader updates itself, and every time it makes a little shortcut on the desktop. I have to delete it. Usually it makes a couple more around the place, too. What are they for? Who clicks them? When has anyone, ever, run Acrobat Reader from a shortcut? You double click files, that’s how you get it. You browse to PDFs online and it appears in Firefox. You don’t run it, then click File, Open. It just doesn’t happen. Does it?

Do they just want a tiny, free advert on your screen? Well, they can’t have one.

I’ve just added a new feature to my blog. Users can now “star” any post they like. When you star a post, it will appear at the top of the “recently starred” list on the right hand side of the blog. It will stay there until other people push it off the bottom of the list by starring other posts. Since I presume almost nobody will use this feature, this means that lots of people will see a link to the page you star.

I read the other day about how to put popular pages on a list using Google Analytics, and very clever it was, although it seems a massively over-engineered solution. So I thought for a while and came up with starring. I think it should be a little more interesting — this way the pages like How To Crack Captchas which feature heavily in search engine hits because apparently people just love cracking captchas won’t drown out that one person who randomly happened across a two-year-old rant and liked it. We shall see, though.

You can’t have the same page on the “starred” list twice. Starring a page already on the list will just bump it back up to the top again. At the moment, the list is set up to display ten posts (once people star ten posts), but that could change. I keep meaning to redesign the sidebars anyway.

I’m not really sure why I called it “starring” when there isn’t a little star graphic. Maybe there will be one day, but probably I’ve just been spending too long using Google Reader. If anyone would like to add this to their WordPress blog, they should get in touch.

I’ve had an idea in my head for a short time now. I thought it’d be good if there was a website that stored all your usernames and passwords for things so that if you were using a different computer (say, in a hotel or a cybercafé or something) then you could just go there, put in one set of login details, and then it’d log you into all the others. So I wrote it, and put it up at logmein.apathysketchpad.com. You give it a URL, by edit-box or bookmarklet, and it extracts all the forms and shows you them. Then you fill in the login one and it remembers what you typed. Next time you come back to logmein it will show you a login button, with no input fields, for each site you’ve added. You can then loginto each one without typing anything. It stores and transmits your passwords unencrypted, pretty well by necessity, but there you go.

Only problem is, it doesn’t work. Not properly, anyway. Works a bit. There were a few problems. First, the URL the login is submitted to. It’s usually given relative to the page, and parsing the source URL to find out what the submission URL will be can be a pain. But that’s a problem I solved. Turns out, though, that some websites fill the login form with all sorts of weird stuff: expiring session IDs, gibberish I couldn’t figure out… I just replicated all hidden fields, and it usually seems to work, although some sites need their gibberish up-to-date and fail. But other websites, like vBulletin forums (like RealVG’s), didn’t accept POST requests from external websites — specifically blocking this kind of site from working. How annoying. (Particularly annoying that it probably does work it you’re running a crappy firewall.)

Feel free to play with it, or even use it, though. Some sites won’t; other sites won’t. I promise I won’t look at the password database. (Really, I ought to encrypt the database a bit — I’d still be able to decrypt it but I’d not see things by accident if I had to do maintenance. But since it doesn’t work, I didn’t bother.) If people think it works well enough I might make it look nice. But as it is I’m happy enough to chalk it up to just a good idea that didn’t work.

Ho hum.

The site is now readable and non-hideous with Internet Explorer. That’s all you’re getting until you download a real browser.

I’ve redesigned the front page, and I’ve activated the new Welcome Messages thread. There’s not much in it, so feel free to post and claim a healthy percentage of screentime. Also feel free to re-post things from the old Welcome Message thread. Especially the “rules” one and the terrific drug song.

I’ve activated my new theme. Please feel free to discuss it in the forum.