I might have mentioned this before but I just love this design.

I dislike services that let me check the "remember me" box and then forget me after 2 weeks. Two weeks does not a relationship make, my friends! And don't tell me it's about security.

Is there a reliable way to block anonymous proxy servers? I especially want to stop people from signing up anonymously - can I disable javascript and then require it for the signup or something. (Browsing the site anonymously isn't so much a problem).

Twitter's fine, Facebook is very well designed and popular, but I personally still like my blog to write down my thoughts. Granted, it's not as great at conversations, but it's alright. And it's mine, not owned by whoever will buy Twitter or Facebook.

Why it's also important to talk to people who are not your customers.

I like this: how to boil milk (and why).

A strangely evil photo gets photoshopped into an internet meme. What can I say, it's funny.

Simon seems to think Javascript might be the next language supported by Google appengine..

I don't know, if I was a long term investor I'd think it's a good time to start buying about now...

Democrats, please vote. Trust in Allah, but tie your camel.

Interesting. If you hve content behind a paywall, Google has a first click free program. Users get to see the first page for free, and you get your page indexed in the search results. Pretty cool.

PHP on Google appengine?

Google published the roadmap for app engine, and in the next few months, they will add "support for a new runtime language". Could it be PHP? There have been rumors about conversations with Zend...

Node is looking for an Arabic speaking interaction designer in Barcelona.

The tiny red line

I like the tiny red line in Google's calendar that indicates where in the day you are right now.

Todo lists are the new blogging platforms: everyone with some ambition but (apparently) little imagination wants to build one.

Vlogeurope, the European meetup of videobloggers, ended yesterday.

Hey, I totally forgot I had a Google profile!

Hey I noticed something, Google Chrome seems to add resize handles to formfields by itself. Interesting, but I'm not sure if it should do that?

How to install ELGG on dreamhost

ELGG is a pretty nice open source social networking package. But it's relatively new, and installing on Dreamhost causes problems, I got an error message saying that it doesn't support PHP4, even though Dreamhost runs PHP5.

It seems that the check for php5 is done in the .htaccess file, and somehow it doesn't recognize that Dreamhost runs PHP5.

To fix the problem, comment out these lines in the .htaccess.



# php 4, apache 1.x

#<IfModule mod_php4.c>

#    ErrorDocument 500 "Elgg error: Elgg does not support PHP 4."

#    RedirectMatch 302 .* index.php

#</IfModule>



# php 4, apache 2

#<IfModule sapi_apache2.c>

#    ErrorDocument 500 "Elgg error: Elgg does not support PHP 4."

#    RedirectMatch 302 .* index.php

#</IfModule>

An oldie but goodie.

A pretty good overview page of SEO tools (and yes, linkbait in itself).

Great post on group activities around usability and design.

The Vimeo plus package looks pretty sweet.

This is too funny.

Fliggo is like Ning for video. They're in private beta, but I can get you an invite if you want.

John Cleese on Sarah Palin: "She's like a trained parrot."

"Observing these tests was more than a bit frustrating for the Yahoo!
OpenID team, and the test subjects may have been distracted by the
sounds of the groans and head-pounding coming from the other side of
the one-way mirror."

"In South Korea, where Park is building a new kind of music-business
model, 80 percent of households have a broadband connection; downloads
via both PCs and cell phones make up an overwhelming share of the
nation's music market. Download revenue there has soared 422 percent
since 2000, to $366 million, while CD sales have declined 83 percent
over the same period to just $70 million in 2007. And because almost
all digital music is purchased on a song-by-song basis, to the general
South Korean consumer, albums have become an irrelevant—even
alien—concept."

Fascinating article on Obama's organization.

The technology sector seems a lot more ready for hard times this time round. Presentations, blogposts and stuff all around. It seems we really learnt. Here's a video as an example.

The big Drupal.org redesign: "If we're going to do it, let's do it right the first time."

I don't have to point out the fallacy in that, do I? Apart from that, I can't wait to see what they come up with.

Scapetoad looks like a friendly way to generate these maps.

Got some good answers on my question about making size-adjusted worldmaps. http://people.cas.sc.edu/hardistf/cartograms/ has a java tool (that I couldn't get to work for some reason), http://www.santafe.edu/~mgastner/ has the really nice visualisations that I want, with a link to this guy http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/ who made the book "The Atlas of the real world". And then, software!

I'll post a post later if I get this stuff to work.

Finally a competitor for Google analytics: Yahoo web analytics. Slowly rolling out, no idea if it'll be any good. They seem to want to be more customizable than Google analytics (you can drag and drop to create data filters), plus real time (Google analytics isn't real time). Good, competition!

I want to be able to make reshaped worldmaps like this! Any tips?

Good article on Chinese censorship from the ground.

Using Adsense to get beta testers: "You can pay peanuts to have people come to your website. In a mature company with a mature product, the goal is to pay for lots of people to come to your website. But I think the genius of Google's innovation is that it allows you to pay for just a few people. Think of it as micropayments for beta testers."

Lou Rosenfeld: "An unfinished book is one huge, pointy Damocles' Sword to have hanging over one's head. In fact, I'm sure if he was around today, Damocles would be an author."

Lou was writing the book together with Rich Wiggins, who has now left and Marko Hurst took his place. Writing a book together with someone else is hard!

So this is good news: we can hope to see Lou's book on search analytics next year!

I'm still proud we did the Colombia migration video project :)

Victor has the best writeup I've seen of the EuroIA conference. I only saw 1 talk, John Ferrara's on game design, and I agree with Victor: it rocked.

1-page websites. Yea. Although I just added 3 pages to my personal website, it now has 4, because I wanted a dedicated consulting page.

A bit of Livejournal history. Classic stuff for anyone who runs a community site.

The Great Schlep from The Great Schlep on Vimeo.

How Flickr does community management.

Does anyone know of any software or something that would let me make worldmaps with adjusted country sizes like this?

I've been using the empty Inbox system for a few days now. LOVE. The "archive" button in Gmail is now my favourite button. It means: "I don't have to worry about this email anymore."

That *is* a cheap way to print a book, from about 2.50$ per boo (order 250, shipping not included).

Good presentation on bias and social design:

Good post by Raymond about evolving the workshop model.