Category: Computers

Be it a discussion of software or hardware; it will be under here.

Coleco Adam computer

PC World is running an article about the 10 Worst PCs of All Time and as a whole the artcle is a refreshing trip down nostalgia lane. However I must strongly disagree with their top third choice, we had one of these Coleco Adam computers when I was a kid and it totally ruled. We never had any of the problems mentioned in the article and that Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom game was sooo rad. I mean after you beat the game once; you got to flip the cassette tape over and play the game all over again. Only on the second time through, you got a different color spaceship. Beating it a second time got you back to your original ship. Beating it repeatedly let you keep switching between the two colors of ship. I wasted spent hours of my youth playing that game and I don’t consider one minute of it wasted. So if Dan Tynan keeps spouting all this nonense of the Adam being a crappy computer; he’s going to get his arsed kick something fierce! :p

Note: The image used in this article was found under the Coleco Adam article on Wikipedia and was released under a Creative Commons Attribute-ShareAlike 2.0 license by Andrew Lih.

In my day job, I deal with massive databases of business listing information. Occasionally, I am required to go through those listings to review the sites attached to the listings. And for the love of god, people you’re making my eyes bleed. In hopes that some of you out there find this blog post and are willing to fix your site, here’s a few tips.

Give your homepage the title of your company.

When you build your site, make sure your company’s name is the title of your home page. It should not be things like: “Welcome!”, “email”, “under construction” or “index”. This makes your site both more professional and easier for search engines to properly index your site.

Do not use massive amounts of Macromedia Flash/Javascript/Animated Gifs.

Some truly amazing things can be done with Flash. Using it to animate your navigation is not one of them. Flash is best used sparingly as it limits your audience, blocking the blind for your site and users of mobile internet devices (e.g. cellphones).

Likewise, javascript should be sparingly and the site should degrade gracefully when a user without javascript visits. Which is to say if your navigation or other major site features break without javascript; then you’ve done something wrong. So go back and fix it!

The occasional animated gif can add impact and interest to your site; while dozens are annoying and look amateurish.

Color is important, but try not to blind your site visitors.

When you blind your site visitors with odd bad color choices; they will move on to your competitors. Along the same lines if you have overly complicated background images behind the text of your website; you are marking it harder for people to read what you have to say. Keep it simple for maximum impact.

Make sure all your links have logical names.

Naming your various pages as: “Page 1”, “Page 2”, etc… might seem simple and easy, but it makes those links useless to your visitors. How can anyone other than you know that “Page 1” is the page where you sell dildos or whether it is the page where you’re selling balloons? They can only find out by clicking the link.

Avoid Comic Sans MS

While Comic Sans MS may seem like a fun, cheery sort of font to you; it’s been greatly overused and most people find it annoying/unprofessional.

So faithful readers that’s my list of big tips for the small business owner who wants a web presense. Did I miss one of your hot button issues? If so, please add it in a comment!

Updated: 2007-03-19

Kind readers have added some extremely good tips that I should have remembered in the comments on this post!

As part of my upgrading to the latest/greatest version of WordPress, I switched over to using the Now Reading plugin from AMM. I switched because development on AMM seems to have come to a complete halt and it was acting somewhat flaky prior to the upgrade. One of the big problems with switching over was I didn’t want to have to manually enter in all books I’d already read and rated. As Now Reading supports storing so much more data, I had to write a bit of custom SQL to import my existing info. It’s not a great solution, mostly because AMM didn’t store all of the same info (e.g. date entered, started and finished).
INSERT INTO wp_now_reading(b_added, b_started, b_finished, b_title, b_nice_title, b_author, b_nice_author, b_image, b_asin, b_status, b_rating, b_review)
SELECT amm_dateadded, amm_dateadded, amm_dateadded, amm_title,
REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(
REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(
REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(
REPLACE(REPLACE(LCASE(amm_title), ',', '' ), ')', '' ), '(', '' )
, ' ', '-' ), '...', '-' ), ':', '-' )
, '!', '-' ), '?', '-' ), '&', '-' )
, '\'', '' ), '--', '-' ), amm_author, REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE( LCASE( amm_author ) , '.', '' ) , '&', 'and' ) , ' ', '-' ), amm_smallImageURL, amm_asin, 'read', amm_rating *2, amm_userComments
FROM wp_amm amm
WHERE amm_ProductGroup = 'Book' AND amm_asin NOT IN (SELECT b_asin FROM wp_now_reading);

This short script copied over all my books for me and got everything setup as well as could be expected given the differences in the data. Below is a list of the assumptions I made in writing this script to convert to Now Reading:

  • AMM only stores one date, so I used that for all dates on the books I copied over.
  • The above script limit itself to books and skips any already in your wp_now_reading table.
  • Now Reading has additional fields the title & author. I’m not sure what the “b_nice_author” field is used for, but the “b_nice_title” is used when you go to edit a specific book. The format of the “b_nice_” fields seems to be to replace anything other than a letter or a number with a hyphen and to have all the letters be lower case. I tried to make sure I did the same with my script, however you may need to double-check your data before running this to make sure I didn’t miss a symbol you used.
  • I marked all the books I was copying over as “read”.
  • AMM only allowed ratings of 1 – 5; while Now Reading allows 1 – 10. So when I copied the ratings over, I doubled them.

NOTE: If you have questions about this script, post them in the comments here. Keep in mind that I’m not providing full fledged support for the script and if you don’t know how to run this without asking, then you probably shouldn’t be messing with it. Also, if you’re really going to try running this script, then for god’s sake backup your database FIRST!

Ever since I heard WordPress was going to release 2.0.x; I’ve been planning my upgrade. Unfortunately RL kept interferring. Once I got my RL mostly settled down, I started working on those upgrade plans again. But then so many new/cool/wowser themes and plugins were coming out that I ended up scrapping and restarting my plans multiple times. I’ve finally decided to stop scrapping my plans and implement one of them, though this means all my faithful readers will be treated to some sort of blog insanity as I get everything upload, altered, activated, tweaked, upgraded and running the way I want it. After the disruption, I look forward to sharing some new features on this site with you.

And yes, that’s a teaser to make sure you come back once the dust settles around here.

It’s certainly been a couple of bad days for Flickr and Yahoo!. First on 30 January 2007, Flickr made a couple of very unpopular announcements. Here’s the full-text of those announcements.

30th January, 2007

A pair of items for your attention:

1. In our ongoing efforts to Make Flickr Better®, we’re introducing two additional limits: the new maximum number of contacts is 3,000 contacts (good luck with that), and each photo on Flickr can have a maximum of 75 tags.

We love your freedom, but, in this particular case, limiting these things will actually improve the system performance, making pages load faster across the site for everyone and cut out some unwelcome spammy behaviors. Both of these new limits apply equally to free and pro account members.

If you have questions or comments about these changes, we’ve opened a topic in Flickr Help.

2. On March 15th, 2007 we’ll be discontinuing the old email-based Flickr sign in system. From that point on, everyone will have to use a Yahoo! ID to sign in to Flickr.

We’re making this change now to simplify the sign in process in advance of several large projects launching this year, but some Flickr features and tools already require Yahoo! IDs for sign in — like the mobile site at m.flickr.com or the new Yahoo! Go program for mobiles, available at http://go.yahoo.com.

If you still sign in using the email-based Flickr system (here), you can make the switch at any time in the next few months, from today till the 15th. (After that day, you’ll be required to merge before you continue using your account.) To switch, start at this page: http://flickr.com/account/associate/

Complete details and answers to most common questions are available here: http://flickr.com/help/signin/

If you have questions or comments about signing in with a Yahoo! ID, speak up!

Then Yahoo! decided to start using pictures posted to Flickr for their new Wii portal. As near as I can tell no announcement was made about this; they just started doing it.

To many these things seem petty an unimportant but it’s caused quite the uproar in the Flickr community and said uproar is bleeding over onto other sites (e.g. Digg). Are these things really worth all the anger spilling out? It’s all a matter of perspective. The new limitations on contacts and tags aren’t anything I forsee as causing me problems. I don’t have anywhere near that many contacts and cannot imagine having them. As for 75 tags, that seems like it would take an obsessive amount of work to get that many tags on a photo.

Since that’s more of a none issue let’s move on to one causing a much bigger stink, the forced merger of people’s Flickr & Yahoo accounts. For those unfamiliar, Flickr used to be a separate company. Back in those days one could sign up with Flickr using nothing more than an email address1. Signing up with Yahoo! requires considerably more detailed personal information. This by itself is enough to cause some people to be very nervous about merging their accounts. There have also been reports about people having problems merging their accounts and concerns about how Flickr/Yahoo! will handle some people having multiple Flickr accounts. Especially since Yahoo! has a habit of deleting accounts they think are inactive if you don’t log in frequentally enough. It’s a lot to take in and many of the “Old Skool”2 Flickr users aren’t happy about it. While I do have a Yahoo! account, I’ve yet to merge my Flickr account with it. I liked having them separate, but very soon I won’t have any choice. While I sympathize with the Old Skoolers, I’ll be combing my accounts before the deadline and find the excitement over this issue to be more than a bit overblown.

The last issue is probably the most interesting as from a quick reading of Flickr’s TOS and an immediately small knowledge of copyright law; this seems like a sticky widget of a situation. According to Flickr’s TOS, any images pulled from Flickr must link directly back to that photo on Flickr. What Yahoo! did with their Wii Portal is to take thumbnails and initially link to a secondary page before linking back to the original photo on Flickr. Plus, Yahoo! was originally just grabbing any photo on Flickr tagged with Wii. This included photos marked as © All Rights Reversed and photos marked with Creative Commons licenses forbidding commercial use. This angered even more of the Flickr community and Yahoo! did eventually change their Wii portal to only grab photos with appropriate licenses.

Personally, I any one of these issues would be enough to stir up a hornet’s nest of trouble within the Flickr community. But having all of them happen so close on top of one another was enough to really get some people’s blood boiling. Will I be abandoning Flickr over all this? No, I like the community too much and I still plan on integrating this gallery on this site more into Flickr. However I will be keeping a much closer eye on where Yahoo! takes Flickr as we move on into the new year.

1 For the free accounts anyway.
2 This is what some of the Flickr users who signed up in the pre-Yahoo! days call themselves. For the record, I also signed up (for a free account) in those days and I don’t consider myself an Old Skool user.