Google Site Search Change

Google has a made a subtle but big change with site searches. You can now do a "site" search with no keywords and Google will return all pages in its index for that site. Here's one for this site, though I'm curious how Google thinks it has 7,170 pages. You ...

Published: January 25, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 1000

The Five Rings of Usability

When you look at the usability of an entire Web site, I want to propose that there are five levels of it. From widest to narrowest, here is what I dub The Five Rings of Usability (man, I love making up important sounding names for stuff ) Site Existence At the ...

Published: June 20, 2008 Geek Popularity Factor: 981

The Site Access Pattern and the Joy of eZ

I was working on a somewhat complex eZ publish-powered site today, and I acknowledged an important point that makes eZ publish -- in my opinion -- perhaps the greatest CMS ever built -- eZ is built around the concept of a "site access." The way the system looks at it, ...

Published: August 19, 2005 Geek Popularity Factor: 974

Web Site Tours

Last year, I built a nice little Web site for my church pre-school. Go take a look -- it's really well-done, and has served the school well. (Look hard enough, and you might find my wife in there somewhere...) However, one of the problems with the site is that new ...

Published: June 6, 2006 Geek Popularity Factor: 974

Lindows Claim Site Under Fire

Microsoft, Lindows scrap over claims site: Microsoft is not happy about the site Lindows put up encouraging people to file recovery claims against Microsoft. "Microsoft has demanded that Linux seller Lindows.com take down a Web site that offers to process customer claims from the settlement of a California class-action suit ...

Published: September 29, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 968

The Death of the Web Site?

From the "Let's Jump To Conclusions" Department with my acquisition of Zempt, and my continued use of NewsGator, I can produce and consume content without ever using a browser. I get information in Outlook via NewsGator, and I can turn it around (or create it from scratch) in Zempt. ...

Published: July 2, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 967

Pidgin Site

I ve always wanted my site to get Slashdotted. That hasn t happened yet, but my company did just design and implement a site that got Slashdotted. Does that count? The GAIM IM client had to change its name AOL wasn t pleased. Somehow (to be honest, I don t remember how), we ...

Published: May 5, 2007 Geek Popularity Factor: 964

Your First Web Site?

Wayback challenge: When was your first site?: Great idea. I'm putting some thought into what my first one was...and drawing a blank. I'd like to challenge anyone who has designed a web page to find the oldest site in the archive that they authored and post the Wayback Machine link ...

Published: January 3, 2007 Geek Popularity Factor: 962

NOAA Web Site Traffic

Public storms NOAA site: Ivan hasn't been the only thing the National Oceanic and Atmopheric Administration has had to worry about. Keeping their Web site up hasn't been a rose garden either. Also collecting up-to-the-minute, high-resolution images, NOAA's Web site has received a record number of hits during this hurricane ...

Published: September 17, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 953

Pirillo's RSS Site

Lockergnome's RSS Resource: Chris Pirillo has started a site about all things RSS. Via Adam Kalsey.

Published: August 9, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 949

Best Buy's Secret Web Site

Best Buy Web site pricing probed: If Best Buy actually did this, then they're brutally stupid. Blumenthal said his office received at least 20 complaints after a columnist for The Hartford Courant reported the experience of one Connecticut man who found a laptop computer advertised for $729.99 on BestBuy.com, then ...

Published: March 6, 2007 Geek Popularity Factor: 946

Business Card Web Site

Download details: Hosting a Business Card Web Site: The new version of Small Business Server includes a feature called the "Business Card Web Site." "A business card Web site enables you to establish a Web presence for your company. It can contain basic information about your company, such as name, ...

Published: October 10, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 945

Fixing Micah's Site

Two Selections from Seth Godin: I stumbled on this e-book over at Amazon. It's a short, free, PDF from Seth Godin (Permission Marketing, Purple Cow) about an attempt to improve a specific Web site that sells CD duplication services. Godin claims that too many designers just put up a site ...

Published: November 30, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 943

Hack this Site

Hack this site! Test your skills on these hacking challenges!: Someone tried posting a URL to the a login form on this site to a comment URL. Interesting enough. Hack This Site gives aspiring computer users a legal environment in which to test and expand their hacking skills. Put your ...

Published: February 23, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 942

If Jesus Had a Web Site

Free Church Web Site Design Advice - If Jesus Had A Website: I love the name of this Web site. It s kind of along the same lines as Mean Dean and healyourchurchwebsite.com. Welcome to If Jesus Had A Website, where we strive to help churches make their websites all they ...

Published: October 22, 2007 Geek Popularity Factor: 940

Site Traffic

I just pulled a log file for the last week and cranked up Webalizer. It took me 30 minutes or so to screen out all the spiders I could find and all IP addresses that might be someone associated with this site, but after finally getting some clean stats, the ...

Published: August 14, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 934

TypePad Beta Site

Incidentally, here's my TypePad beta site. As you can see, I'm doing a whole lotta nothing with it, but it sure is purdy.

Published: July 15, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 932

Site Owners Not Liable for Third-Party Postings

Court says blogs can't be sued for postings: This is some good news...or bad, I guess, depending on if you've been defamed or not. Bloggers and website owners cannot be sued for posting libelous or defamatory comments written by third parties, the California Supreme Court has ruled. The court said ...

Published: November 22, 2006 Geek Popularity Factor: 929

Redesigning Nielsen's Site

ReUSEIT: There's a contest on to redesign Jakon Nielsen's site. Apparently Nielsen himself has blessed it...sort of. "Web usability maven Jakob Nielsen has been writing his "Alertbox" column on web usability since 1995. His web site, UseIt.com is read by millions of web professionals and other interested parties each year. ...

Published: August 16, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 927

Including Template Code With Your Site

About Ben Hammersley: Here's a nice little addition to a site the complete code of all the Movable Type templates to make it work.

Published: September 26, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 927

Columbia and the NASA Web Site

NASA mulled nixing Web site after shuttle loss: The recent report on the Columbia disaster shows that NASA got worried about how current the information on its Web site was and how this would be interpreted by the press. "...one proposal by a midlevel employee at headquarters for a 'complete ...

Published: August 29, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 926

About this Site

I finally did an "About this Site" page, if anyone's interested. It will perhaps give you some insight on the bizarre social experiment that is Gadgetopia.

Published: December 3, 2005 Geek Popularity Factor: 925

Your Visitors Don't Care About Your Site

Feature Richness and User Engagement: Nielsen makes a point which we all know is true: on balance, user s don t give a crap about your site, only about what it can do for them. They are not engaged enough with your site to learn how to use it, so higher level ...

Published: August 6, 2007 Geek Popularity Factor: 924

CSS Site

Book of Styles | No table? No problem!: A nice site on CSS layout with lots of free templates. The first one I looked at was actually pretty good.

Published: July 18, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 920

Firefox 3 Adds Per-Site Settings

implement site-specific preference service: It will be interesting to see how this manifests itself, but it looks like Firefox 3 will add support for something I ve wanted for a long time. Implement a site-specific preference service that lets callers get and set arbitrary preferences on a site-specific basis. I complained ...

Published: November 20, 2007 Geek Popularity Factor: 918

Triggering Seizures via a Hacked Web Site?

Sick hackers start seizures: If this is true, it s pretty messed up. SICKO HACKERS posted JavaScript code and flashing computer animation on an epilepsy site with the aim of triggering migraines and seizures in users. The non-profit Epilepsy Foundation shut the site down to kill off the offending messages and ...

Published: March 31, 2008 Geek Popularity Factor: 917

One Page Web Site

Puremedia Brisbane : Web Design, Development, New Marketing and Media: This is a very interesting Web site, and I maintain quite effective for the right kind of company. It s a Web site in one page. This probably isn t the type of website you were expecting to see for a Brisbane ...

Published: July 24, 2008 Geek Popularity Factor: 913

Usability and the Coolness Factor

Does a good looking Web site get used more than a plain one? If so, why? Consider two Web sites: Site A is written in plain HTML / CSS / JavaScript, etc. It s a traditional Web app, well-designed and aesthetically-pleasing, but no attempt has been made to engineer a slick ...

Published: September 8, 2002 Geek Popularity Factor: 913

Google Custom Search Business Edition: Back to Reality

A few months ago, Google released Google Custom Search Business Edition, which is a way to use Google as the search engine on your own site, while having more control over the search results page. When we posted on it a couple months ago, I said this: This will cannibalize ...

Published: December 29, 2007 Geek Popularity Factor: 912

Cybersquat Your Own Site

Alternate URLs : Some good points here. "What happens if someone visits wwe.yoursite.com? Or doesn’t add the www? Will they still find your site? Typos in URLs are common. how many times have you ended up on a site you didn’t expect because you mis-typed the domain name. Your customers ...

Published: October 3, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 911

Berkshire Hathaway Web Site

BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY INC.: Take a look at this Web site. It belongs to Warren Buffet's company. He's the second-richest man in the United States (the world?). You'd think his site would be a bit more...professional? On one hand, this is refreshingly non-corporate. But on the other hand, it's very...1995-ish. Any ...

Published: May 3, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 911

RIAA Site Hacked Into Oblivion

RIAA site disabled for five days: Five days and running. As the Recording Industry Association of America continues its push to shut down digital pirates, the industry group suffered its own defeat online. According to data from Internet watcher Netcraft, the trade group's site has not been reachable for nearly ...

Published: March 23, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 908

European Experts Exchange

EEE :: European Experts Exchange: This site is a competitor to Experts Exchange. Read the entire front page of the site, as their are quite a few digs in there. Welcome on EEE (European Experts Exchange), the one, the only one collaborative site for IT people from all over the ...

Published: October 27, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 907

The Impact of Text vs. Graphics

Does the graphic content (or lack thereof) of a site contribute to a feeling of dynamism by site visitors? When I visit a site heavy on the graphics and Flash, I get a feeling that the site is stagnant, because, as a Web developer, I know how much inertia is ...

Published: January 3, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 906

The LINK Tag

A while back, I wrote about Mozilla and the LINK tag. The LINK tag is one of the great unexplored corners of HTML. No browser ever implemented it for years (except for an obscure Mac browser called iCab), and consequently, the LINK tag is used mainly to connect CSS stylesheets ...

Published: November 17, 2002 Geek Popularity Factor: 905

Selling Site Thumbnails

Alexa Site Thumbnail / Amazon Web Services: This is brilliant. For $0.20, you can access 1,000 thumbnail images of Web sites from an Amazon Web service. The Alexa Site Thumbnail web service provides developers with programmatic access to thumbnail images for the home pages of web sites. It offers access ...

Published: August 4, 2006 Geek Popularity Factor: 904

One-Page Web Sites

Are Websites Over-rated? A $500 website and email strategy: Here's an article about something I've always thought would fit a lot of situations: a one-page Web site. There's nothing worse than a site which has obviously stretched its content to the absolute limit because the designer thought that site simply ...

Published: July 7, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 901

Where Have All The Writers Gone?

Over the years, I've learned a big secret about building information-focused Web sites. This big secret is the single most important thing you can do for your Web site. It is the absolute make-or-break characteristic of successful Web sites. Without this, you really don't have much. With it, it doesn't ...

Published: July 30, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 899

Web Site Mixmaster

website mixmaster: Something to do when you're really bored: enter two URLs and this script will take the layout from one, the content from another, and show you the result. I really like the White House site mixed with quizilla.com.

Published: January 21, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 897

Google and PageRank Revisited

Last year, I theorized that since blogs allowed people other than the site owner to enter hyperlinks (by adding a comment), this fundamentally hosed the concept of PageRank. Remember that the entire point behind PageRank is that a link from Site A to Site B is a "vote" for the ...

Published: January 17, 2005 Geek Popularity Factor: 894

Cross Site Scripting Museum

XSS (Cross Site Scripting) Cheat sheet: Here's a fantastic list of hundreds of different ways people will try to obfuscate cross-site scripting attacks. Some of these are just devious. This page is for people who already understand the basics of XSS attacks but want a deep understanding of the nuances ...

Published: December 7, 2005 Geek Popularity Factor: 894

Lindows Will Not Take Down Site

Lindows.com Thumbs Nose at Microsoft: This is about the MSFreePC.com site that Microsoft is awfully upset about. "Lindows.com defiantly told Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday it will not remove a Web site that offers to process claims for Californians entitled to proceeds from a $1.1 billion class-action settlement with the software ...

Published: October 1, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 893

Yahoo Offers Site Management Tools

Yahoo launches Web site publisher: How long until they offer a blogging tool? "The tool, called SiteBuilder, lets customers create a Web site using an array of templates and interface options. The product also lets people develop pages while offline through an application download and then upload publishing changes onto ...

Published: July 21, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 890

The Michael Jackson Prosecution Site

Jackson Web Site Unites, Divides Legal Profession: Michael Jackson set up a Web site to counter child molestation charges. Now the prosecutor's office has done the same. There's an interesting debate on the effectiveness and appropriateness of this. Some legal experts said that posting documents detailing the criminal charges against ...

Published: December 25, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 889

BuiltWith

BuiltWith.com - Web Technology Profiler: This is a very cool idea that isn t quite what I hoped it would be. Web Page Technology Profiler [ ] Find out what a site is built with. You can enter a URL, and it will contact that URL and do some analysis on what ...

Published: August 15, 2007 Geek Popularity Factor: 887

"Better" is a Relative Term

A couple of years ago, I was trolling for Web design clients and I found a site that looked a little dated and that could use some help. So I sent the owner an email which was unintentionally a little condescending. I told him that his site was a little ...

Published: September 8, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 885

The Joshua Project Update

I announced The Joshua Project over two months ago, and I've been awfully quiet about it ever since. Well, I'm proud to announce that Joshua has just released its first Web site. Command Two is a prayer ministry focused on recruiting prayer supporters in community neighborhoods, workplaces, and schools. They ...

Published: November 23, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 885

Error Message Primer

Error Messages: More Important to Your Web Site Than You Think: Good error messages are an often-overlooked detail of every Web site. This article dissects them, from "Placement and Format" to "Voice" (is "pompous indifference" a good voice?) to "Length." Well-done. Error messages are essentially the driver’s side air bags ...

Published: December 2, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 884

Non-CSS Version of this Site

One of the great things about properly-done CSS is the ability for your site to degrade gracefully. Here's a link to view the Gadgetopia home page without ANY stylesheet at all. Gadgetopia Sans Style Doesn't look half-bad. It may be even more readable that way.

Published: October 25, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 882

Stealing Web Site Content

Stealing My Content... Again: Shirley's got a problem with a certain Web site. "One of the things that hits me the wrong way is to continue to find people blatantly stealing website designs, content, and anything else. Many of us have had our hard work and efforts stolen, unfortunately. ... ...

Published: September 26, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 876

The Posting That Gave Birth To a Web Site

A long time ago, in the wee hours of the morning, I made a post to Gadgetopia entitled Fake Escrow Sites. It was a posting about how crooks use fake escrow sites to cheat people out of money. It was just one or two sentences, and it linked to a ...

Published: June 10, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 876

The Ultimate in Web Site Marketing

Animal rights activist changes name to GoVeg.com: Someone call Chris Pirillo. "It might sound more than a little odd — but it's true. A young animal rights activist from Indiana once known as Karin Robertson has legally changed her name to that of a Web site run by her employer, ...

Published: August 3, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 875

Spamming Referer Logs

Spammers have sunk to a new low: spamming HTTP referer logs. Now that a lot of bloggers display referer hits, and a lot of bloggers monitor them to see where they're getting links from, spammers have started sending HTTP requests with their site as the referer, just to get people ...

Published: January 4, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 875

AMG = Ack! My God!

The All-Music Guide has long had a pretty irritating web site. The design rendered poorly in non-IE browsers, almost all of the links were javascript-driven for no apparent reason, etc. So, when they recently redesigned, you'd expect them to fix these problems, right? No such luck. The new design not ...

Published: July 15, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 872

Content Quality and Search Engine Placement

Link Building for Top Search Engine Placement: Here's an article on link acquisition and how it plays into search engine placement. In my opinion, the whole things boils down to this: "The most significant factor that will affect your ability to attain incoming links to your website is the quality ...

Published: August 12, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 872

The Business of a Shock Site

Shock and gore: This is an interesting article about one of the legendary shock sites on the Internet. I've never been to this one in particular, but I've seen others on occasion, and some of the stuff there makes want to be able to selectively delete parts of my memory. ...

Published: January 14, 2006 Geek Popularity Factor: 871

Cross-Site Request Forgeries

Cross-Site Request Forgeries: An interesting article about a vulnerability that's probably present in a lot of apps. [...] cross-site request forgeries, a style of attack that lets an attacker send arbitrary HTTP requests from a victim user. That's worth reading a couple of times, and it will likely not be ...

Published: October 22, 2006 Geek Popularity Factor: 870

Rent A Coder

While searching for a script today, I stumbled across an interesting site called Rent a Coder. The site serves as a meeting point between software buyers and software coders. Buyers place requests on the site for programming projects which they need done. Coders who are registered through the site can ...

Published: September 11, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 869

Preventing Image Leeching

Smarter Image Hotlinking Prevention: Here's a great antidote for hotlinkers people who embed images from YOUR Web site in their page (so they get the image at your bandwidth expense). This system will prevent images from loading in pages not on your site. These fixes aren't uncommon, but this ...

Published: July 21, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 868

Lorem Ipsum

You know that dummy text you see all the time? "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amit..." etc.? Well, here's a site devoted to it. This site has exactly one-page and one CGI script a dummy text generator where you can get dummy text by the word, sentence, paragraph, etc. This ...

Published: November 25, 2002 Geek Popularity Factor: 866

CSS and the Design Litmus Test

I've discovered yet another use for the Web Developer Toolbar; I can perform The Site Design Litmus Test, heretofore known as "Joe's Razor" (named for no one in particular): Open up a site you've done in Firefox, and take a look at it. Now, open up the 'Edit CSS' sidebar ...

Published: August 24, 2005 Geek Popularity Factor: 865

Why You Shouldn't Build a Web Site When You're Angry

Jill Whalen - the SEO Bitch: This guy went to extraordinary lengths to put this woman in her place. I wonder if a lawsuit resulted. The reason that this site exists is because Jill Whalen continually, and publically, insults, deceives and misleads people, and even lies about people and what ...

Published: June 18, 2005 Geek Popularity Factor: 865

Godsend Film Site

Godsend Institute: On the heals of the fake sites for the movies I Robot Now and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, we have this site, in support of the new DeNrio film, Godsend. The Godsend Institute is a fertility clinic and practice, specializing in the replication of cells for ...

Published: April 20, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 865

Standard Site URLs

A Standard for Site Organization: This is just a first-rate idea. This was actually written six years ago, and many sites still haven't pulled it off. A selection of well-chosen and well-named root-level directories, implemented across as many sites as possible, would go a long way toward easing the complexities ...

Published: February 7, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 864

Government Web Site Content Editing

White House Web Scrubbing: An interesting story about how government Web sites are changing their content to avoid...what? Offending people? I guess with content as sensitive and controversial as what goes on these sites, and the fact that they have to speak to the entire nation, and that is an ...

Published: December 18, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 862

The Original Balthaser Studios Site

* Balthaser Studios classic 1998 *: I found a link to the archived version of their site on one of their pages. It's not as cool as I remember, but for 1998, this was insane. This is what made me want to do high-end Web work. Sadly, they appear to ...

Published: February 24, 2006 Geek Popularity Factor: 862

Web Site for GPL Violations?

What is the Best Way to Handle a GPL Violation?: There should be a Web site solely to track GPL violations. It'd be a nice way to keep everything in the same place. When you find that somebody is violating the GPL by distributing your code or a derivative of ...

Published: January 16, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 862

2003's Web Site Mistakes

Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2003: Love Nielsen or hate him, there's some good advice here. 8. Products Sorted Only by Brand. Sites that offer many items ought to provide winnowing and sorting, which is a highly useful way to deal with lists and is fortunately fairly common. Unfortunately, ...

Published: December 22, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 860

20,000 Leagues Site

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - The Ride: Thanks to Boing Boing for this pointer to a site devoted to the "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" ride that used to be at Disney. I rode it three or four times as a kid and loved it. Never read the book, ...

Published: August 11, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 858

Oceanic Airlines

I'm pretty addicted to the TV show "Lost." The first season has wrapped up and left some amazing cliffhangers. I finally got all the episodes watched (thanks BitLord), and I started looking around to see what was on the Web to hold me over until fall. It turns out that ...

Published: June 13, 2005 Geek Popularity Factor: 857

How to Make Your Site Look Good on the iPhone

Put Your Content in My Pocket: Doesn t everything just look naturally good on an iPhone? Macs just make everything prettier by default right? So what does this mean for you? Millions of visitors accessing your content on a small display with very high resolution. At some point in the near future, ...

Published: September 10, 2007 Geek Popularity Factor: 856

S.D. Library Web Site Controversy

S.D. governor pulls plug on part of library Web site: Our governor, Mike Rounds, ordered some links removed from the youth section of the South Dakota State Library Web site this week because they linked to "inappropriate content." The governor's office isn't identifying the links, but sources say they were ...

Published: July 13, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 856

MyBlogLog

MyBlogLog: This is a service that will track what links your users click on, so you know where they go when they click away from your site. More importantly, it should show you what visitors to your site are interested in enough to click on. Our Outgoing Link Tracking shows ...

Published: December 28, 2005 Geek Popularity Factor: 852

Site Design Piracy

Pirated Sites!! Aaarrgghh...: Ahoy mateys, site design hijacking ahead. Like this one and this one. Or this one and this one. "Pirated-Sites.com showcases side-by-side comparisons of web sites that are suspected of borrowing, copying or stealing copyright-protected content, design or code without permission." Then there's this one and this one, ...

Published: September 26, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 851

Defining Moment

Samsung HDTV Defining Moment of the Weekend: Football nuts rejoice Federated Media has a slick little blog to decide what the Defining Moment of the NFL weekend was each week. The Defining Moment web site is produced by Federated Media and brought to you by Samsung, the official HDTV ...

Published: November 6, 2007 Geek Popularity Factor: 849

Octo Site Compiler

Octo Site Compiler: My buddy Chris found this app that will take an ASP-driven Web app, database and all, and wrap it all up into a single EXE file. When run, the EXE will launch the user's default browser and sit on port 5050, acting as a little embedded Web ...

Published: March 29, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 848

Shawn Hornbeck Posted to his Parents' Web Site

Report: Shawn told police in 2003 about stolen bike: Man, this is just spooky. On Friday, Shawn's stepfather, Craig Akers, said he was haunted by having dismissed a series of messages Shawn apparently posted on a Web site his parents had created in their search for him. "How long are ...

Published: January 20, 2007 Geek Popularity Factor: 848

Web Design from Scratch

Web Design from Scratch: A good-looking site full of good-looking content about building Web sites. If you're a professional developer, I don't know how much you'll get out of it, but if not, it seems to be worth a look. This site is for everyone involved or interested in creating ...

Published: February 4, 2006 Geek Popularity Factor: 847

Origami Project

Unfolding Microsoft's secret site: It's not like Microsoft to be all secretive like Apple. A cryptic Web site that was set up by Microsoft but does not bear its name appears to hint that the company will reveal information about a new consumer product on Thursday. The site caused a ...

Published: February 26, 2006 Geek Popularity Factor: 847

Ford Fusion Web Site

Ford mines consumers' wants: This is pretty brilliant. Ford is using a Web site to let people outfit fantasy Fusions a new sedan coming next year. But they're not just throwing away the data. It's an attempt to more closely align consumer demand with actual production, which often can ...

Published: March 22, 2005 Geek Popularity Factor: 843

IE Is Costing You Money - An Angry Rant

Are you paying someone to make web pages? By now I'm sure that everyone is sick of hearing web people wail and moan about how much they hate IE. But the sad truth is that aside from giving your security guy nightmares, and serving as the source of a lot ...

Published: February 15, 2005 Geek Popularity Factor: 843

Foreigners Blocked From Bush Campaign Site

According to a Register article, President George W. Bush's campaign website is blocking access from Internet users outside the US (but apparently Canadians can still reach it.) The Register theorizes that it could be "fears about future attacks by hackers, concerns about keeping bandwidth costs to a minimum or an ...

Published: October 27, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 841

Mozilla 1.1 and the LINK Tag

I could kiss the developers of the Mozilla browser. They just released version 1.1, and with it, another browser finally supports the LINK tag. The LINK tag, you see, was an abandoned HTML tag. It was intended to allow a page developer to describe a page's position in the "big ...

Published: August 28, 2002 Geek Popularity Factor: 838

A Web Site Is Like An Onion...

...it's all about layers. A List Apart has put out two great new articles on the use of JavaScript in web design. In 'JavaScript Triggers', Peter-Paul Koch (of Quirksmode fame) makes an interesting point: There are 3 big layers to an HTML page: structure, appearance, and behavior. CSS is great ...

Published: February 1, 2005 Geek Popularity Factor: 837

The Well-Appointed Web Page

Web developers want one thing: control. HTML is such an imprecise language that building Web pages has continually been a struggle between what we want to do and what the language is capable of. As a result, the short history of the Web has been an exercise in perverting HTML ...

Published: August 19, 2002 Geek Popularity Factor: 837

Half-Assed Content Management

I have a client that needs to manage data. Database records. Not really content, per se, but just data. This client has some job postings on their Web site. These postings are one table and about four columns worth of data. There s a title, a posting date, etc. The rest of ...

Published: August 15, 2008 Geek Popularity Factor: 835

Anil Dash is Not Amused

Ken MacGray Design: This guy's site and the TypePad site look really similar.

Published: July 7, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 835

Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang! The Premier James Bond Web Site: This is a small tribute to the end of a site I helped build. Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was -- at one time -- the most amazing James Bond site ever. I was one of the four founding ...

Published: May 18, 2006 Geek Popularity Factor: 834

Why Beautiful Things Work Better

Last year, I wrote a short essay wondering how the look of a site affected its usability. I said: To what extent will the 'look' of the site help or hinder it from achieving reaching its goal, whatever that may be? [...] Can simply re-skinning a site fundamentally change the ...

Published: October 10, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 833

BillyHarvey.com

I remember back when the web was still fairly new, no one really knew how to make a good web site. The down side was that there were a lot of lousy web sites, but the up side was that there were no defined rules, and so people were trying ...

Published: September 14, 2005 Geek Popularity Factor: 830

Glam.com: A Return to Headier Times?

Fashion Site to Try an All-Purpose Portal: I wonder if the success or failure of this site is a barometer for anything in particular. WHEN some of Silicon Valley's best minds pool their collective intelligence and millions of dollars to create a Web site for people who want to read ...

Published: September 18, 2005 Geek Popularity Factor: 830

James Bond and Flash 8

Sony Pictures - Casino Royale: Sony has put up a new site for the upcoming James Bond film , Casino Royale (to coincide, no doubt, with the selection of Daniel Craig as the new James Bond). But here's the thing: it requires Flash 8. This is the first site I ...

Published: October 14, 2005 Geek Popularity Factor: 830

Deep Blue - Kasparov Archive

IBM Research | Deep Blue | Overview: IBM has preserved a Web site devoted to the 1997 match between Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue. In May 1997, IBM's Deep Blue Supercomputer played a fascinating match with the reigning World Chess Champion, Garry Kasparov. The event was captured live only on ...

Published: July 17, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 828

Should "Web" be capitalized?

"Once again, we find ourselves in the middle of a language evolution process. When referring to the 'Web,' do we capitalize or not? Intranet Design Magazine has decreed that the first letter of the word 'Web' is to be capitalized ONLY when reference is made to the World Wide Web. ...

Published: October 1, 2002 Geek Popularity Factor: 828

"Placed" vs "Placeless" Content

Trends: Placed and placeless content in Vignette: Here s a really interesting concept in the latest version of Vignette. You can place content in specific spots, or you can tag it with metadata and let the site decide where it goes. [ ] it allows you to have placed and placeless content ...

Published: November 16, 2007 Geek Popularity Factor: 827

elgooG

It's apparently been around for a while, but I just ran across elgooG today. 1.1. Why is this backwards? [...] It's a Google mirror. A common practice for busy websites is to create a mirror site, which is an exact replica of the original site but on a different server. ...

Published: October 6, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 826

Protecting Content Editors From Themselves

Say you put together a nice, static site for a client. There's a lot of CSS, a fair amount of scripting (in whatever language we'll assume PHP here), a handful of images, and a lot of HTML. The client is going to manage the site with a WYSIWYG editor. ...

Published: September 21, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 825

Web Design Site Comparison

These web sites are identical or are they?: Here's a wonderful page that takes 10 sites all very popular in the blogosphere then examines them for common elements like search boxes, righthand columns, footers, etc. Degrees if incidence and dissonance are calculated and lead to interesting conculsions. ...

Published: August 12, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 825

The Downside of Dummy Text

I m reading Jakob s Nielsen s Prioritizing Web Usability off and on. He has an interesting aside in his chapter on typography. Why do so many Web sites have illegible text? Didn t anybody read the text while designing the site? The unfortunate answer is no. It s quite common for Web sites to ...

Published: March 30, 2008 Geek Popularity Factor: 825

Password Recycling

Why registration-sites suck: Boing Boing links to a story on Wired about registration at news sites. The article is okay, but Boing Boing s comments ring very, very true: The point that everyone seems to miss is that no one can possibly keep track of a thousand passwords for a thousand ...

Published: July 20, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 825

Streamlined Site Options

Streamlined: I was reading about Streamlined, a new plugin for Rails, when I noticed a bunch of buttons at the top of the screen with a handy drop down help file. While I think this is cool, does anyone use it beyond the curiousity stage?

Published: June 25, 2006 Geek Popularity Factor: 824

Firefox Gains on this Site

I was looking over some stats for Gadgetopia this morning, and I stumbled across this: In January, 41% of user agents were from Internet Explorer, and 21% were from Firefox. So far in February, it's 39% and 23%. And both months had 2% for Netscape.

Published: February 7, 2005 Geek Popularity Factor: 822

Thoughts on Posts and Articles

What's the difference between a blog post and an "article" or a "story"? By those terms, I mean content that isn't as ephemeral as posts that hit the site every 15 minutes. Blogs are, by definition, transient they're time-based, and items get essentially dropped into a stampede that tramples ...

Published: September 22, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 821

NetOffice and PHPCollab

NetOffice - Online Project Management: It would appear that the excellent PHPCollab project has forked. NetOffice is a direct lift, from what I can tell. I snooped around for a while on both this site and the official PHPCollab site, but I can't find any reference to the other project ...

Published: August 19, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 821

Changes, they are a comin'...

I hard-posted this to the site, but just in case some of you are accessing via RSS only... This site is going to change a bit in the next few weeks. My partners in The Sling and Rock Design Group are going to join in and start posting technology and ...

Published: June 3, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 821

Google and JewWatch

Google won't dump offensive anti-Semitic site: Google is in a bad spot here. Searching for the word "jew" on Google returns an anti-semitic site in the top spot. "I certainly am very offended by the site, but the objectivity of our rankings is one of our very important principles," ... ...

Published: April 14, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 821

Google Mirror

In honor of Google's 5th birthday, I thought I'd share the Google Mirror site. "A common practice for busy websites is to create a mirror site, which is an exact replica of the original site but on a different server. This way if one server is really busy, you can ...

Published: September 7, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 821

Unresolved 404 Patterns

I changed the URL scheme of this Web site over the weekend. I had been meaning to do it for a while, but some problems with Movable Type 3.2 kind of forced the issue. (I have got to stop rushing into every beta that presents itself...) To make everything backwards ...

Published: July 17, 2005 Geek Popularity Factor: 821

Feed Discovery Markup Language

FDML: At O'Reilly's recent Foo Camp, some bloggers started fleshing out an idea for RSS feed self-discovery. Kind of like WDSL for RSS you can get an XML document that explains all the feeds that a particular site offers. "A working name for this effort is 'FDML.' The stands ...

Published: October 14, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 820

CakePHP Just Might Rule

How I Built a Web 2.0 Dating Site in 66.5 Hours: Someone built this site in 66.5 hours using CakePHP, about which I hear a lot of buzz these days. Let this be a testament to Web 2.0 and the effectiveness of rapid development frameworks: I built a full-featured dating ...

Published: March 30, 2007 Geek Popularity Factor: 818

Reprinting Our Content, Again

Similar to a situation of a couple years ago, I ve found another Web site that s reproducing selected Gadgetopia articles in full, and surrounding them with ads. In no case does this site discuss my posts or write any original posts of their own, they just take some Gadgetopia posts from ...

Published: June 25, 2007 Geek Popularity Factor: 816

The Story of Cryptome

Does Web Information Help Terrorists?: Here's a news story about how the government was interested in the owner of a site called Cryptome (found via Boing Boing) which specializes in shining a spotlight on publicly available information. Officials questioned Young about information he had posted about the 2004 Democratic National ...

Published: August 14, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 816

Movable Type Index Pages

Movable Type is great software, but there's one aspect of it that makes a site get more and more inefficient as more and more entries get added: index pages. Whenever an entry is modified added, edited, or commented MT rebuilds every index page on the site. The longer ...

Published: November 30, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 814

BugMeNot.com

BugMeNot.com: Want to access a site that requires user registration without...well, registering? This site has hundreds of pre-verified usernames and passwords.

Published: April 7, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 814

CSS Vault

CSS Vault » The Web's CSS Site: A great-looking CSS site. Lots of articles and sample designs. Via Tomas Breen.

Published: May 13, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 814

GodTube

GodTube competes with YouTube: I had never heard of this before, despite its apparent success. [ ] the site was identified earlier this year by comScore as the fastest growing on the Web. GodTube.com, a video-sharing site with Christian content, drew more than 4 million unique visitors during October. It maintains ...

Published: November 5, 2007 Geek Popularity Factor: 812

Growing the CSS

MBoffin.com did something really cool while redesigning his blog. They made a 'design timeline' while working on his latest site design. Every time the designer saved the site, he took a screencap, and turned it into an animated GIF. He's imbibed the 'presentation separate from content' Kool-aid, so you can ...

Published: May 2, 2005 Geek Popularity Factor: 811

One Password To Rule Them All

Nic Wolff has come up with an ingenious solution to having different password for every site you log in to. To get the full effect, check out Jon Udell's screencast on the subject, which does a great job of summing things up. Essentially, Nic asks you to come up with ...

Published: May 3, 2005 Geek Popularity Factor: 811

"Who's a Rat" Re-visited

Cops smell rodent at `rat'-outing Web site: Here's a story about "Who's a Rat," the Web site that "outs" government informats. The backstory: "It's something that's been needed for a long time. I'm trying to level the playing field," said Bucci, 31, who is fighting marijuana dealing charges that landed ...

Published: September 16, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 811

Menuing in Content Management: Implicit vs. Explicit

(Audio is also here. Sorry about the quality I was using a different mic this time, and the input levels were all hosed up.) Navigation is often a pain when it comes to content management. Now, don t confuse navigation with information architecture that grand plan of what ...

Published: April 5, 2008 Geek Popularity Factor: 810

Monster App

I love these new "timed team event" shows like Monster Garage, Monster House, and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. In these shows, a team has to build or convert something in a set time limit, usually five days. There's usually a lot of drama, yelling, and screaming, but they invariably end ...

Published: December 14, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 809

RSS Aggregation Models

It struck me last night that there are two models of RSS aggregation: "real-time" and "stored" (yes, I just made those two terms up...). Real-time are aggregators like Mozilla's Sage extension. This model goes and gets the feed real time and displays it on-demand. In a lot of ways, they're ...

Published: September 23, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 808

Reprinting Our Content

I have found a Web site that reprints Gadgetopia entries in their entirety, and surrounds them with their own ads. According to Google, the offending site has 1,180 Gadgetopia posts on it -- fully 25% of the total posts. I don't know how to feel about this. I know that ...

Published: August 1, 2005 Geek Popularity Factor: 808

RentACoder Privacy Breach

Government agency exposes day-care data: RentACoder lands right in the thick of this one. Two separate databases with personal information about children and their families were exposed. In one case, a list of children in the county's low-income day-care program was intentionally posted for download on Jan. 22 to a ...

Published: February 9, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 807

Donna Blue Aircraft

Donna Blue Aircraft: Are you interested in what a CIA front Web site looks like? Look no further than Donna Blue Aircraft. we are in this business over 20 years, attending South, North and Central america, with outstanding service, we are today most trusted company in this market. our customer ...

Published: October 9, 2007 Geek Popularity Factor: 807

SearchTools.com

Search Tools - Information, Guides and News: Avi Rappoport runs this as an extension of his business, Search Tools Consulting. This site is the be-all and end-all of search engine information. Within the site, Avi lists about every search tool ever made, news about search engine technology, and dozens of ...

Published: August 31, 2002 Geek Popularity Factor: 807

Apple Slaps Rumor Site With Lawsuit

Rumor site AppleInsider got hit with a lawsuit Wednesday, in the wake of two articles leaking information on what is to be released in the Macworld Expo next week. The suit, filed Tuesday in the Superior Court of Santa Clara County, Calif., aims to identify who is leaking the information ...

Published: January 6, 2005 Geek Popularity Factor: 807

The FrontPage Experiment Has Failed

Can we finally admit that the FrontPage experiment has failed? You know -- the promise that FrontPage will allow novice Web authors to create and maintain (especially maintain) good, solid Web sites? Can we finally admit that this just isn't going to happen? How many people know someone that is ...

Published: January 12, 2006 Geek Popularity Factor: 807

Weather and Time-Based Site Design

Blog | 1976design.com: This is so cool that it makes my teeth hurt. This guy pulls an XML feed from Weather.com and swaps out his header graphic to reflect the actual weather and time of day at his location. The graphic is based on an actual panoramic image of his ...

Published: December 11, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 806

Great Domain Name

DHTML Code Samples, www.getElementById.com: Great domain name for a site about DHTML. Guess what site came up first when I searched for that method name.

Published: May 19, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 805

Who's a Rat Warning

LEOs Warned: Do Not Visit Whosarat: Cryptome brings us this interesting memo from a government agency about the Web site Who's a Rat, which we're talked about before. Visiting the site could result in the compromise of government IP addresses. Searching the site for a particular name could result in ...

Published: September 29, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 804

CMS Test-Drive

opensourceCMS: This site has several dozen installed CMSs for you to play with: "This site was created with one goal in mind. To give you the opportunity to 'try out' some of the best php/mysql based free and open source software systems in the world. You are welcome to be ...

Published: June 19, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 803

Favicon.ico

What is FAVICON.ICO? And How to Personalise Your Site's Bookmark in Visitor's Browsers: More answers about site icons than I thought there were questions.

Published: November 27, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 802

Navigating Voluminous Blogs

As you get more and more entries in a blog, how to you ensure people can find what they're looking for? Blogs are very front page-centric unless you're watching the front page everyday, browsing the site is terribly inefficient. The category pages are all but worthless on Gadgetopia because ...

Published: September 19, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 802

In Search of a Lightweight WYSIWYG Client

I'm interested in finding a nice, lightweight, WYSIWYG HTML editor for use by non-developers. In this scenario, as I'm sure you know, is not havig too little functionality, but having too much. I haven't found one yet that I'm comfortable unleashing on non-developer content editors. How about FrontPage or Dreamweaver, ...

Published: February 1, 2005 Geek Popularity Factor: 802

Blogs and PageRank

Will the preponderance of blogs these days wreak havoc with Google's PageRank model? It used to be that you couldn't get a link from a big name site without having something they they wanted to link to. And if they linked to it, then they liked it, so others might ...

Published: July 15, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 802

ErrorZilla

ErrorZilla Firefox extension: What a great plugin. Firefox extension ErrorZilla turns Firefox's less-than-useful default "Server not found" page into a much more practical and useful tool. Rather than the lone "Try again" button, ErrorZilla adds buttons to the error page that allow you to do things like view the Google ...

Published: October 16, 2006 Geek Popularity Factor: 802

MultipleMonitors.org

Multiple Monitors.Org : I'm dying to know the business model behind this site and organization. We are dedicated to providing resources, information and reviews for current and new users of multiple monitor multi-screen computing, including: multi-monitor product information, directories, news, applications, trends and technology. The site design is horrific, but ...

Published: February 22, 2006 Geek Popularity Factor: 801

Bot Spamming

Gadgetopia got targeted by a comment spam bot over the weekend. Two entries were targeted, and each got 80 comments apiece one for a site with rape fiction, the other for a porn site apparently specializing in incest. This happen three times over the weekend, for a total of ...

Published: May 31, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 800

Richard can help your comment spam problem...

I found this comment on one of my client s blogs today. hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments , I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post ...

Published: October 22, 2007 Geek Popularity Factor: 799

Without RSS, You Are Invisible

patrickWeb: This looks like a good weblog from a retired big-wig at IBM. I post it because it's an example of a site that, regrettably, I will likely never see again due to the lack of an RSS feed. I looked in every corner of this site, and was quite ...

Published: June 30, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 799

The Fake Detective

There's a guy named Ed Lake that apparently spends all his time proving that pornographic images of celebrities are not real, and were in fact created in Photoshop. He takes an image, examines it pixel by pixel, proves it's a fake, and often finds the "body" in another picture. It's ...

Published: October 23, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 799

Web Site OS By Candidate and Party

Is the next President of the United States running Linux?: This is old but interesting. There s a huge disparity on OS between the two parties. It s way too pronounced to be natural. It’s fascinating to me that the Dems are predominantly Open Source… except for Hillary Clinton and the Republicans ...

Published: February 9, 2008 Geek Popularity Factor: 798

IE Changes May Affect Your Site

Ad Hoc Meeting on US Patent 5,838,906: Microsoft recently lost a patent dispute and is making changes to IE as a result (this, after they announced IE was frozen). The W3C posted this notice, with an ominous warning: "... Microsoft has indicated to W3C that they will very soon be ...

Published: August 29, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 798

Pushing RSS

While I was hanging out at the hospital waiting for the new addition, I got to wondering if RSS has to be "pull" by definition. Could you "push" updates from a site to a client? Say you have a notification client a little app that sits on your desktop. ...

Published: April 28, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 798

Turns Out Looks Do Matter

People Found to be Overwhelmingly Superficial: Here's a summation of a new Web site credibility report. A little depressing. The data showed that the average consumer paid far more attention to the superficial aspects of a site, such as visual cues, than to its content. For example, nearly half of ...

Published: December 26, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 798

The New Jersey Porn Connection

Link to porn site baffles N.J. governor's aides: This is kind of funny, in a perverse kind of way. A state Commerce and Economic Growth Commission Web site link to its "business resource center" took viewers Tuesday afternoon and maybe for much longer to full-color, hard-core teen pornography. ...

Published: June 23, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 798

See More in the Site You Made

I liked this article not because of the obvious (Amazon has launched an e-commerce consulting business) but because of the following observation regarding purchasing off-the-shelf online store software: "In e-commerce, the build formula is far more successful than the buy formula ... E-commerce and online transactions in general are rife ...

Published: June 10, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 797

Steve Friedl

Steve Friedl's Home Page: I've unknowingly linked to Steve Friedl several times, but never explored the rest of his site. He's a freelance IT consultant in Southern California. His site has gems like this primer on SQL injection attacks, a fantastic article on how to be a good consultant, his ...

Published: February 19, 2005 Geek Popularity Factor: 797

Longevity and Search Engine Positioning Revisited

Google's Aging Delay for New Sites: A few days ago, I voiced a suspicion I had about the correlation between the amount of time a site had been on the Net, and how well it does in Google's index. Johnny from Blank of the Day was nice enough to drop ...

Published: July 1, 2005 Geek Popularity Factor: 796

Windows 2003 Visual Tutorial Site

Windows Server 2003 Tutorials, Visual and Step-by-Step: We need more sites like this sometime personally taking the time to lay all this stuff out, step-by-step. Hats off to this guy. Here you will find visual, step-by-step guides that can help you on your Windows Server journey. Everything has been ...

Published: January 21, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 796

Of Cache and...Cash

Google cache raises copyright concerns: The NY Times is raising a fuss over the fact that Google's caching feature allows people to view archived articles that they would have to pay for over at the Times' site. "Through a caching feature on the popular Google search site, people can sometimes ...

Published: July 9, 2003 Geek Popularity Factor: 796

Top 10 Web Site Mistakes of 2002

This is a Jakob Nielsen article which is a good wrap-up of mistakes people make when building Web sites and what to avoid. I got this in the mail (I don't remember from whom) as a poster which I proudly hung on my wall (mainly to antagonize my boss, who ...

Published: December 23, 2002 Geek Popularity Factor: 795

This Old Blog, Part I

I've been looking for a small project to test out the Rails framework, so I've decided to combine that with exploring ways to reduce the time and complexity involved in creating a blog entry. This will be an ongoing series of articles, but this is a low-priority project, so each ...

Published: September 15, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 795

How to Make News Sites Better

101 ways to improve your news site: Some great suggestions here on how to improve news Web sites. I emailed this link to the Webmasters of the big three news stations here in Sioux Falls. Post a form at the end of a breaking news story asking witnesses to send ...

Published: June 6, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 794

Revolution Themes

Revolution WordPress Theme: I have to say that I m really smitten with this guy s WordPress themes. He s selling them, and he s used them to hot-rod WordPress into several different vertical platforms. The Revolution themes are widget-ready, customizable themes that provide ideal solutions for online magazines, online newspapers, and other websites ...

Published: April 17, 2008 Geek Popularity Factor: 793

WebMonkey is Dying

Webmonkey, RIP: 1996 2004: WebMonkey is where I learned everything I told the interviewer I knew in the three weeks between the job interview and my first day. My first relational database design came from a tutorial on this site. Webmonkey, the site that turned humble Web developers into ...

Published: February 17, 2004 Geek Popularity Factor: 793

ISC Trumps Verisign's Plans

ISC to Cut Off Site Finder: Verisign's stunning abuse of its monopoly is about to come to an abrupt end. A patch is coming out for the BIND DNS server that will negate Verisign's SiteFinder service. Here's why: "...VeriSign's Site Finder broke their spam filters. ...a lot of spam spoofs ...