Have I mentioned, by the way, http://ameliavandijck.com?
Een leuk Belgisch blog, maar ik vind maar geen contact info? Als je dit leest: jij wou toch een informatie architect in je linkedin? :)
links for 2007-08-04
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Pretty detailed backpacker guide to Colombia to print out
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Starting India backpacker wiki travel guide.. not loads of places yet but good info on Mumbai etc
Mediatemple's gridserver *is* much faster than Dreamhost
Mediatemple offer this buzzwordy "gridserver" hosting for 20$/month, and Dreamhost offer a great regular hosting service for 7$/month and up. I have an account at Dreamhost, and I am keeping it, it's great, and they have a great control panel and good support. Cheap!
However, I moved poorbuthappy.com (my travel project) to Mediatemple a few days ago, and the difference in speed is incredible. Pingdom has some really nice tools to measure speed. Before the move (on Dreamhost), pages would load in 2 seconds (2000 milliseconds), 4 seconds and more. Sometimes up to 10 seconds.
After the move, the core html of the page loads consistently in about 400 to 600 ms. That's professionally fast. That's about how fast Flickr loads. That's almost as fast as Google's pages (they tend to be around the 300ms). I am very impressed.
Below are some screenshots from pingdom.
Google maps shows India in English, Thailand in (?) Thai. Curious, for some reason I wouldn't have expected it to be localized like that.
My Google Analytics tracking stopped working (went down to 0) yesterday. I can't for the life of me figure out what's wrong with my tracking code on this page - any thoughts?
Documenting locales
I've been playing around with different diagrams that attempt to explain the various locales on a website. Here is an example:
Does this make sense as a diagram? Does it help you understand?
via Simon: a damn cool javascript widget to crop pieces in a photo (like on Flickr): http://www.julienlecomte.net/blog/?p=6
Language codes: "Some of the most heated discussions on the request for new projects
are about the status of a language; is it a language a dialect and
often the arguments are of a political nature. The inclusion of
languages in the ISO-639 has been political in the past. With ISO-639-3
many of these arguments have an answer with the many new language codes
that have been created."
2 observations today: Gmails' antispam seems pretty good, and why hasn't OPML taken off more as a way to share feed lists?
I have to very much agree with this: walled garden sucks, Facebook is just making us build stuff for another propietary platform.
However, they do have a good idea there: I can add my app to your app. There's no open way to do that yet that works.
Actually, pingdom.com does provide mostly free response time stats. 2000 ms (2 seconds), is that acceptable or not?
Apart from actually measuring page generation time within the website's scripts and storing that in a database, I still haven't found a good way to track the speed of a website over time. I would have thought an outside service coudl do that, but I haven't found one. Any ideas anyone?
There seems to be a theory that the busyness or clean-ness of websites is related to the personal distance (the "bubble") of the culture that the website is for.
A great, tiny step by tiny step, example of editing a screencast (or any interview) by Mr. Udell.
Rashmi's slideshare just launched slidecasts: PPT slides + audio. It's the logical next step in sharing slides, but it's hard to do right, so they took some time to do it. It rocks, they're way ahead of any of the competition now.
Wow http://todoist.com/ really rocks for making to-do lists.
Europeans can be sooo ridiculous. I do truly admire the US entrepreneurial spirit. It's incredible, especially compared to what people (don't) do in Europe.
So Bin Laden has most likely been dead for a while and the white house doesn't want to talk about it. When your Most Evil Opponent dies a peaceful death, you'd better keep that quiet to keep your Wars going.
Names in the world: Icelanders prefer to be called by their given name (Björk), or by their
full name (Björk Guðmundsdóttir). Björk wouldn’t normally expect to be
called Ms. Guðmundsdóttir. Telephone directories in Iceland are sorted
by given name.
amazon s3 vs flickr for photo backup
I started backing up about 30 gigs of pictures to Amazon S3 using Jungledisk is taking about 20 days (on low priority). And that's ok. The jungledisk software is free, the Amazon bill for storing this should be about 5 US$/month, ie 60 US$/year. That's worth paying to safeguard my photos.
But then I started comparing: Flickr is 25 US$/year, and you get "unlimited" storage. If it's really "unlimited", that's a much better deal. Should I try Flickr instead to backup my 30 Gigs of photos?
Winer: "the reason we're occupying Iraq is that it makes money for the people who run the country."
I added a talk with lots of details on Youtube scaling to my scaling page.
Fact: Cuba has a lower infant mortality rate and a longer average lifespan than the United States.
Eric Rice: "I think we might be afraid to say that yeah, we might actually like some walled gardens."
Walled gardens have a LOT of advantages. It's just that they're so, well, damned walled. Nobody likes a wall around them with no windows and no exit doors. That's called a prison. A walled garden with gates in the wall (and a low wall you can jump over) isn't so bad. But, enough with this metaphor!
OK the Beasty boys rock (via them)
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR0oQwrlZD8]
And in that spirit, let me post a Youtube video, whose appeal I somehow also just got.
OK I finally understood the appeal of the "uglyness" of Myspace, of exactly why those pages are so damn nasty. It hit me when checking out the Beasty Boys blog. Took me long enough.
The overlay in Google analytics rocks, but I can't turn it off. Buggy?
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml"
It's really true: when you think you're 80% done, you've got 80% to go. The little details do take most of the work, in everything.
The social life of IA
A database developer talking about public health. (Udell) It's really incredible how little we know, and how numbers are misused.
"But of course, you have to come up with an estimate of how many people
are dead. So somebody picks a number, and then you hear it on CNN that
night. Fifty thousand, a hundred thousand, a hundred and twenty-five
thousand, none of those estimates were based on any attempt to really
find out."
I noticed this when journalists used to call me asking "how big the vlogosphere was". (This was pre-Youtube). Of course, there was no way to know (we didn't even know how to define "videoblogging"), so I made up a number that I thought was ballpark. And they *always* ran with it, leaving out my qualifiers.
"Imagine if you were the CEO of Toyota, and your CFO said, well, sales are pretty good, we think, but we’re not sure."
And about standardization: "If you went to a UN organization and said, we want to standardize how
we collect data about child nutrition, the response would be, let’s
have a conference. We’ll have experts get together in Rome, and then in
Paris, and decide what are the key questions for any standard child
nutrition survey. But it’s hard to achieve unanimity, and there’s a
built-in incentive not to because every time you get together it’s a
trip to Rome."
This working with the social life of information is something that seems mainly ignored in current IA texts and practices.
A w3c paid linkfarm: what a mess!
Baby sign language: it seems babies can learn to sign before they can speak, which can help communication. Cool.
I've never used Gmail for anything crazy but now it doesn't want to send messages coz "I've exceeded my storage quota". So this whole "Never delete email" is BULLSHIT? Arg! And what's worse, there's no easy way to get rid of some old big messages..
Good interview with Rasmus Lerdorf about PHP. (mp3)
In Korea, Google features animations on it's famously understated homepage! http://www.google.co.kr
(via)
http://www.w3.org/International/planet/ aggregator for i18n posts.
How to get funding: set up 5 to 10 meetings within a few weeks, tell everyone you intend to get funding, and if not, you'll build it on sweat equity. Treat is as an auction. Either it gets done in a month, or it doesn't. Scarcity and social proof.
A global strategy starts at home: "When attempting to reconfigure their Web sites with foreigners in mind, companies often overlook domestic minority groups"
The new blogger is (finally) videoblogging ready, with rss with enclosures and everything.
http://politicalvideo.org has 600 hours of Bush video (to start) of the past 6 years. Download, and use in your own videos. A great project, give them some linky love!