Slightly Remarkable

The best part about this book, I’m not quite sure about yet. Thus far it looks to be very informative and useful as a resource, but there’s much more to this book for me.

Before the book was published, sometime mid-summer, I got an email from Mark Pilgrim asking for permission to use my Smart Firefox Greasemonkey script in his book (the script is featured on pages 86-89). Although I would have consented immediately regardless, Mark offered in return a free copy of the book when it was published and a small paragraph about me in the credits section. Thus, for writing a free Greasemonkey script, I got a free book and some publicity (as my web address is printed in the “about me” paragraph). Is that cool or what?

After installing, most of the extensions still appear and claim to be compatible, but not all of them work. On its site, the Web Developer Toolbar is supposedly compatible with Fx 1.5, but the toolbar doesn’t appear when I open (or restart) Firefox. A number of extensions behave this way, including FoxyTunes, my alarm clock. What’s more, themes do not work, even ones that claim compatibility. In addition to all of that, Firefox freezes every time I try to change the options of an extension. It just freezes.

This is the problem with upgrading Firefox. I want to use the new features such as SVG and so forth, but I want to keep the functionality of the extensions I installed. Well, hopefully all the extensions are updated and work properly, and the freezing problem is fixed in Firefox soon as well.

So, there’s that. I haven’t had a chance to play with SVG and all the new cool stuff in Fx 1.5 yet, but I just wanted to rant on how I’m disappointed with not only the fact that my extensions failed to work (yet claim to), but also that Firefox still has obvious bugs. If anyone has any tips on fixing, please let me know. Until then, I’m going to look around for a way to solve the issues I’ve experienced thus far, and update this post with new information if I can get my hands on any. Peace.

The changes probably won’t affect most users, but for those of you who’ve subscribed to blogs which have ampersands in their URL, you may have discovered that your HTML page is invalid. This is something I hadn’t thought of previously, due to the fact that I’ve never subscribed to a blog whose default location contained an ampersand (usually the default location is the domain name, for example blah.com).

Dave brought it to my attention, and thanks to him, I’ve issued this fix.

You can still download and install the plugin at the same location, so if your plugin is producing invalid HTML, it’s time to upgrade!

My entry is the third one that was published. It’s nothing exceptional, but I like the bold colors and thought that I could contribute to the project by submitting a design.

An exhoration to anyone reading this: are you up to a CSS challenge?

Lately, I’ve begun to wonder if these “courtesy links,” as I call them, are adding to the cruft of unnecessary information on my site and the time that I spend reading web content on a daily basis.

In order to help reduce the amount of time I spend daily reading blogs or other sites, I’ve removed a number of sites from my list because the associated content was dissatisfying. Yet those which link to me I’ve loyally continued to read. I find this hypocritical, seeing that I am not interested in anything more than asserting a courteous reputation by linking back.

Obviously, this means that I’m reading and linking to a number of sites for all the wrong reasons. After some thought, my conclusion is to remove sites which are of no interest to me (specifically, personal blogs), even if they link to me. It is more important to be honest than to be courteous, especially when that courtesy only exists for personal gain. In addition, I feel that it is most responsible for me to point out the reason why a link from my site to yours may disappear, rather than to remove it. This way, I can maintain my courteous appearance more honestly.

Now, I mentioned that, specifically, I’m no longer reading personal blogs, but before you yell, “I’m reading your blog, and your blog is personal!” realize that my blog is not exclusively personal. There are topics that I write about (and attempt to write about most often) that are of interest to a number of people, so I am not worried if people do not read my personal entries, because those entries are useless. The entries which are of interest to people — the entries that give something (usually information) to the reader — are the main focus of this blog, and the personal part is just a side dish for anyone interested in learning more about the author and his day-to-day life.

This is also the reason why I’ve stopped reading some extremely popular blogs such as Binary Bonsai, Jason Kottke, and Airbag Industries — sites that, evidently, a large number of people find most gratifying. I’ve tried to understand the worthfulness of the content of sites like these by reading them often, but have found no interest in what they have to offer, since these sites rarely address topics that are interesting to me. Over these blogs, I prefer more straight-forward and insightful sites, such as 456 Berea St. and Signal vs. Noise.

These role-models are what Slightly Remarkable is shaped after, and my zero-tolerance for hipocracy policy is a forthward step in making this site more informational and useful to those interested in the topics addressed herein.

Now, to evoke some reader response (assuming I’ve not scared you all away at this point). What do you think of my newly established policy? Do you courtesy link? Why or why not?

Hi Jonathan

I have used this technology [Ajax] on my system I developed. The login system uses this and especially the large result sets from financial information that gets generated on the remote server. All the dropdowns which supply the criteria is loaded on the web page, and you select your criteria, then I fetch the results from a .net page I configured to accept xml postings to it.

I then generate my HTML results on the server and send only that html back to the server.

Other way I used it is by building a .net Charting component, the image gets rendered on the screen, but while I draw the image on the server, I capture all the plotted values’ coordinates and generate imagemaps on the server, I then sent the javascript back to the page with the image to remotely go and fetch all the imagemap points and html div’s for these points that need to be displayed on mouseover.

Anyhow, thought Id just let you know that I love this “Ajax” and makes my life a lot easier, especially trying to limit the size of data I send across the network/internet that is obundant.

Unfortunately, due to the fact that a login must be provided, we cannot see his work in action.

Thanks, Jo-Pierre Lerm, for letting me know about how you’ve used Ajax! It sounds like you’ve done some wonderful work!

The preemptive measures I took were things like a simple blacklist of keywords that were almost definitely spam and moderating comments that contain three or more links. Evidently that was failing as well, so I began searching for a plugin.

Recently I found that Michael Heilemann uses Akismet as his comment spam plugin. According to him, it is his first-ever comment spam plugin and works like a charm. That’s a good enough testimony for me. I proceeded to download it, only to discover that I needed a Wordpress “API key.” What the?

It turns out, in order to use Akismet, you have to register for a blog at Wordpress.com. How do you do that? There’s no “register here” place or anything. I typed my email in the invite box and received an invitation a few hours later. That gave me the ability to register. Man, all that just to register. Good grief!

Anyway, so if you’re wondering how to get an API key, you have to get invited to Wordpress.com and sign up there, then go to your profile and copy the API key. The Akismet plugin works absolutely beautifully and has thus far caught 8 spam comments (all of which were indeed spam, by the way). I only installed it yesterday. Thanks, Akismet!

I hate to blog about personal things, but this is one of those times where I have to publicly apologize to everyone who’s waiting for me to get work for them done, and then provide a detailed explanation of why I’m “sick.”

Here’s the rundown. I’m doing the regular daily multitasks (T.V., homework, programming between commercials) and suddenly my right eye suffers excruciating pain, as if someone were poking it with a needle. For a minute I thought there was simply something in my eye, so I attempted to wash it out. Since that didn’t work, I removed my contacts, which helped some, but there was still some major pain. My eye is still bloodshot, and I’m being forced (no, I do not want to go) to spend an hour or more at the eye doctor this afternoon analyzing the problem. I’m not against eye-droppers and so forth, I just don’t have the time to spend at the eye doctor. There are too many things to do. I don’t have time for stupid things like this!

Admittedly, I’m ranting when I should instead be working on things before something (God only knows what) happens and possibly prevents me from working the rest of the day. So, if you’re reading this, and waiting for me to send you this, that, this thing, that thing, the other thing, or finish that project, please forgive me, I’m doing the best I can.

All right, I’ll shut up now. You didn’t really have to read this. I had to get my thoughts out. (Okay, two more quick thoughts: who has time to practice guitar when all this is going on, and why in the heck does school have to take so long?!) Okay, that’s it. Good bye.

Update: Okay, fortunately my mother was incorrect, and the problem was an irritation caused by my contacts (and the fact that I didn’t dispose of them when necessary). So now I can see again and get back to work.

After a few days, Mike Rundle emailed me the following response.

Hey Jonathan-

Thanks for the inquiry about the 9rules logo, Paul sent your email over to me so maybe I could answer some of your questions :)

The original goal with the 9r logo was to give the organic sense of a growing community, so I chose the concept of many leaves coming from one stem to show the organic part, and then made the leaves larger as you go from bottom to top to give the sense that they are a living, breathing part of the logo.

As for the color choices, 9rules has a ton of different members talking about all different topics so I wanted to visually represent the diversification of our members within the mark itself. I chose many different colors to show the different types of members, and I happen to like green because of the obvious leaf association :)

Let me know if there’s anything I can answer Jon, thanks again.

Best,
Mike

My initial logo design looked cool, but was virtually meaningless, which makes “just cool” not good enough. Thanks to Mike’s excellent response, I’m further on the road to understanding how to better design logos.

Oh, and while I’m talking about logos, some may be interested in learning how Fedora created its new logo. Good stuff there.

So, does anyone else have any tips or resources on designing logos? If so, please share them!