made a few enhancements to ol’ virtual homestead today. amazing what you’ll get done when you’re trying to avoid breaking up a concrete sidewalk [don’t ask]. mostly minor color and css changes, but you’ll also notice that you can now search via google. the best general purpose search engine on the web now lets you easily set up the option to search a specified set of domains or the whole web. i’m leaving the old atomz search box up because, although it’s harder to get relevant site-specific searches, atomz indexes my site more frequently – but
i don’t like having two search boxes since it introduces clutter so it’ll probably come down sooner rather than later. if you’re keeping score at that would be: relevancy 1 frequency 0.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
duck! incoming entries to the annotated bookmark bin. i’ve had some rss/rdf links piling up and it’s time to shovel them somewhere where there is at least a tiny chance i’ll happen upon them. i imagine most of these are snarfed from you know who, but i can’t really remember for sure. first, a semi-interesting thread on definitions, then an older, but still gooder bit on what rdf is good for from tim bray and finally a more recent piece on xml and rdf as enablers for the so-called “semantic web“.
zeldman examines the inevitability of the natural life cycle of mailing lists on dreamless:
“Everyone loves online communities, until they start hating them. Communities always evolve and change, and as they do, the earliest members begin complaining.
A few months back, half the comments at metafilter.com seemed to be about how metafilter had changed.
Before Dreamless was two weeks old, one or two people were worrying that it might go downhill.
Yesterday Astoundingweb.org got its first (well written and intelligent) complaint that the community was no longer fulfilling its mission.
Online communities are always changing. That is their nature. Is this change always negative? Or is it something we should expect and learn to appreciate?”
The usability lifecycle by Jakob Nielsen:
“Doing things right will only add a few percent to the cost of a development project. You will save many times this cost by not having to make expensive adjustments and dot releases. Plus, the resulting user interface will probably be around 50% to 100% easier to use, reducing training budgets dramatically and increasing user productivity. If you happen to be running an e-commerce site, you will have the sweetest
gains of all: customers will finally start making purchases now that they can find what they want on the site. Rule #1 of e-commerce: if you can’t find it, you can’t buy it.”
[words and images via mersault*thinking]
tim responds publically to dave’s public rhetoric yesterday.
dave wonders why he doesn’t get to see oreilly’s strategic investment strategy. others speculate as to why dave would reinforce a stereotype.
phew. finally some relatively good news for lefthanders:
“The most focused study of the issue can be found in the December, 1994, issue of the British Medical Journal (BMJ). The authors examined all first-class cricketers born before 1961 whose bowling hand was specified — 1,132 left-bankers, and 5,041 of the adroit. They concluded that “left-handedness is not, in general, associated with an increase in mortality.”
“Nevertheless, a troubling finding in the BMJ study showed that left-handedness was associated with an increased likelihood of deaths of a certain kind — those from unnatural causes. There was a 37% greater risk for such deaths among left-handers.”
i’m not sure about the whole “unatural causes” clause, though. in any case, any news is good news considering the spate of bad news related to my being unfortunate enough to be born both premature and lefthanded.
[via genehack]