If you, like me, have developed strong feelings towards the geeky hotness that is Git sometime in the last 12 or so months, then you’ve probably also got pretty excited about the convivial oldskool swap meet for Git repos known as Github. If not, please do try to keep up. The first day of the rest of your life begins here.

For a long list of dumb reasons beginning with the fact I’ve not yet written my own roughly passable blogging engine to replace this shopworn and shabby edifice constructed with Simplelog 2, I am unable to write server-side shenanigans for my homepage and so have taken to Frankensteining it experimentally with concoctions made of HTML5 and jQuery. One of these little monsters shows glimmers of potential and thus is being released into the world to find its destiny.

You want to brag about your Github commits?

Skitchshot: Lachlan Hardy

Wouldn’t you love a JavaScript badge that looks just like this?! Me too! Boy, have you come to the right place!

I assumed such a badge would already exist. I knew, of course, of Dr Nic’s project-based badge and I quickly discovered the commit badge by Johannes Gilger. The former doesn’t show commits and the latter is targeted at the latest commit of a specific project. Neither of these met my needs in terms of function or code, thus my own Github commit badge project was born!

How does it work?

One of the current limitations of the Github API is that it doesn’t provide any methods to gain details about other people’s projects you might be committing to. Given a project, you can check that. But given a user, you can’t see what projects belonging to other users they’ve contributed to. Which is at least two thirds of the fun of Github! Luckily, they publish that kind of data in your public activity feed.

So, given a username, the script calls a specially crafted Yahoo! Pipe that converts Github’s Atom into delicious usable JSONP for processing into a badass little badge for your blog.

How do I set it up?

Here’s the juicy bit. Be sure to follow along at home for maximum enjoyment. You can download the files from Github.

Dependencies

jQuery 1.2.6 - as you’ll see in the example file, I just point to those nice folks at Google who are hosting jQuery for me.

JavaScript Pretty Date - I also grabbed a copy of John Resig’s Pretty Date to save myself long hours in front of the mirror getting ready.

The Action

github-activity.js is where the main action goes down. You’ll need that one.

Then you need to add a div with an id of ‘github’, containing a p, somewhere on your page. There’s a nice sample in the example file.

After that, you just need to call the function githubActivity(); onDOMready. I have a Go file for that, but you can do it directly in your document if you like.

I’ve included some sample CSS to get you started on prettifying the whole shebang. It includes blank selectors for every element created, just in case you want to go buck wild in Style Town.

All things being equal, you should end up with something that looks pretty much like this one I prepared earlier.

What next?

You’ll have noticed that I keep calling my commit badge an ‘activity badge’. That’s because it feels like such a waste to pull down all that other data and not use it. There’s no reason we can’t publish Follow, Gist, Wiki and Member events too. And any others Github may have up their sleeves. I plan on setting it up with defaults and options to make it easily customisable.

The glaringly ugly bit of code (to my eyes, but please point out any you see) is the parseDate() function. It’s ugly, dumb, badly written, and inaccurate. Kindly suggest replacements or write them yourselves and let me know.

I’m going to keep working on functionality, but in the interest of Just Fucking Shipping, here it is, a Github Commit Badge that’s still got some room to grow. Feel free to use it, change it, fix it, share it and abuse it.

Let me know what you think!

Back in June, a whole lot of folks in the Ruby world were getting excited about Gitjour and it’s *jour brethren. Read Dr Nic for the lowdown. He was particularly excited about the potential of using all these automated DNSSD-powered advertising services at the forthcoming Railscamp #3. And so was I.

I installed every one of those suckers, and fired them up, and had a play. They were awesome ideas but I thought they were a bit limited in their execution. Don’t get me wrong, as a quick conference hack, they’re brilliant. And for quickly sharing some cool shiz with your friends in the back of a session - perfect. Not so good for 4 days of intense hackery with 60-something coders on the one network. Not so good as a day-to-day tool in a work environment.

Railscamp #3

I spent the first portion of Friday night at Railscamp catching up with folks, as you do. Having a few beers, seeing what they’ve been doing and talking about what we’re going to build over the weekend. I think I might have pointed out the potential for new features in Gitjour just a few times. Just once or twice, you know?

Finally, Mike Bailey calls me on it and we get coding. And everybody I’d whinged to about the potential of Gitjour joins in.

By the end of last Railscamp, we’d refactored significantly, squished many bugs, added proxies for cloning and remotes as well as a search. Not to mention spawned a couple of side-projects: Gitman and Gitnotify.

All our code ended up in the Railscamp repo where, except for an excellent summary post from Lachie Cox, we all forgot about it.

Fedex IX

Atlassian has a quarterly hacking event called Fedex (“deliver overnight”). Basically, everybody gets from 2pm Thursday (in Sydney) to 4pm Friday to hack up whatever they like as long as it is somewhat associated with the company. Then they present, and everybody votes for awesomeness. You’ll have heard of similar events at other companies etc.

Fedex IX was a week ago, and Don Brown hit me up, asking for a method to allow easy local sharing of git repositories. He has a grand master plan I’m sure he will reveal in time.

That’s when I realised we never told anybody about our revamp of Gitjour. We never pimped all the badass improvements we made. That’s dumb for so many reasons, but the biggest is easily that there are hackers out there who need a sweet tool for sharing git repos with colleagues and friends and we didn’t tell them. This makes me sad.

So, my Fedex project quickly became shaping our Gitjour into something nice and stable for everybody else to enjoy. I forked Chad Fowler’s original and I worked out how to mash it together with ours. There are probably faster and neater methods, but I found one that worked. Boy, did I learn a few things about Git that day!

Then I made a couple of bug fixes, tidied things up, battled multiple methods of gem building until I got them to work and made my first ever pull request on Github. Hopefully, Chad will be happy to merge all our work in, but meanwhile you can get all that railscamping goodness on my Github account, or just install the gem:

sudo gem install lachlanhardy-gitjour

Railscamp #4

Very soon, a bunch of hackers are going to be stuck in the middle of nowhere on one network and need to share their work. And I’m going to be there, pointing out what’s wrong with Gitjour and why we should merge in Gitnotify and Gitman so that we have one seriously badass tool that’ll make working with Git the easiest thing you’ve ever done. Sharing those repos can be easier than it is now. And it should be.

And when we’ve built more crazy awesomeness, I’m going to remember to scream it from the rooftops because I want everybody to know that the tools are already here - they just need a little more work. Do you want to help?

Photo: Local Government Web Network

The Video

The moment I’ve been dreading for the last few weeks has arrived. The footage of my closing keynote at the LGwebnetwork conference is up on their website. Diana Mounter has posted a very nice introduction to it, you can watch the full video in a few different formats and I have a post with more details and the slides.

I’ve been feeling masochistic this week, so I’ve watched it myself and cringed at the appropriate moments, like when my mic fell off. Diana promised to have that edited out, but I knew at the time they wouldn’t… and they didn’t.

I want to apologise for neglecting to repeat the questions from the audience and for the few gross generalisations I dropped in to keep things moving along. Hopefully, you can pick up the context of the questions from my responses.

In other related news, I am loving the very cool thank you gift from the conference organisers.

It was an honour to deliver this presentation. I’m really excited about the Open Web I see developing and I want to share that with everybody. Thanks to all of you who’ve contacted me with your own comments, opinions and passion. I really do believe we’re building a beautiful, free, and open web!

Photo: Ben Buchanan

The Presentation

The awesome team of Diana Mounter and Reem Abdelaty from the LGwebnetwork asked if I would deliver the closing keynote for their first ever web conference, WE Believe in Community. I was honoured to accept.

I wanted to show people what I see in the web. What I see happening. Where I think everything is going. But I’m a firm believer in showing people techniques and technologies they can use right now. All of which made it very easy for me to talk about the Open Web. There’s an entire blog post I’ve been meaning to write for a long time about that, so we won’t get into it here. This is just to post my slides and to say that video and a podcast will be forthcoming at some point in the future. (I hear end of the week.) Update: Video is now available.

The conference

Put together in only a few months to meet a pressing need for stronger networking and more formal professional development for local government web workers, the entire experience was amazing. Both Reem and Diana radiate energy and passion and they communicated this to every attendee. There was a huge buzz of engagement and involvement. It was a real privilege to be a part of it!

The other big win of the two days was the outstanding quality of the content. John Allsopp delivered a stirring opening keynote of what constitutes the web and how you can expect to access it going forward. He delivered some concepts I’m going to be thinking about for a long time. I particularly enjoyed these quotes too:

• “the web just connects stuff together, do you really think you need a screen?”; and
• “local government should be be building the networks, they’re the sewers of the 21st century”.

Another presentation that I really enjoyed was Matthew Hodgson on the death and rebirth of intranets. He had a clever premise and great solid content that intertwined really well. He also managed to record himself, so he has audio up already! Unfortunately, I missed Ruth Ellison’s as she was just before me (and I was in the tea room doing the obsessive compulsive slide check), but she has her (and Adrian’s) slides up already along with a great summation of each presentation she saw. There were lots of other great speakers, so hopefully they’ll be putting their slides up soon too.

Photo: Ruth Ellison

All up, a fantastic couple of days. Thanks to all the great new people I met for arguing with me over drinks about the open web and why it’s important. And thanks again to Diana and Reem for creating such a charged event! Not to mention the incredibly generous gift thanking speakers &emdash; a customised iPod Shuffle.

See more photos and tweets on the Open Web.

Questions

A couple of weeks ago, I got an email from Nick Galvin, a Features Writer with the Sydney Morning Herald, asking if I’d be interested in answering some quick questions about what’s hot on the web for a feature in their weekly technology supplement for the “interested home user”, Icon. I jumped at the chance and thanks must go to John Allsopp recommending me.

The piece was published today and I finally got see who the other people were. I put a scan on my Flickrstream so you can read the full text at either Large or Original (bloody large). Huge thanks must go to the legendary Seng Mah for yet again allowing me to use his photo of me from last August as my publicly respectable face.

Update: Turns out the article did get published online, so it’s much easier to read there.

Answers

What I found most interesting is comparing my answers with those of Cheryl, Virginia, Tim and John. The differences are more telling than the similarities, I think. Cheryl’s answers are consumer-focused, John talks about the big picture and Tim can’t help but dish on what’s important to developers. Of the four, Virginia’s are probably closest to mine in ideas, although hers are expressed far more beautifully. (And she led me to a gorgeous new theme for my tumblelog!)

I copped a bit of a ribbing at work about the reference in the standfirst to ‘internet gurus’. Fair enough. I find it amusing too. Thing is, though, that I know some other internet gurus.

Anybody willing to spend any time at all reading my infrequent posts is automatically qualified as pretty damn interested in the internet (or related to me. Hi, Mum!). So I want to know what you would have answered. What are your responses to the three questions? You don’t have to stick to 180 words like we did!

1. What are the three things online that are exciting you most?
2. What gadget do you never leave home without? And given most everybody will say their phone or their laptop, why?
3. What will be the Next Big Thing?

Add answers or links to answers below.

Talking to some friends recently about the signal-to-noise ratio on Twitter, I realised they hadn’t seen the Twitterific readme file. It contains some “Power User” settings that you can run in your terminal. Some you may find useful; others not so much.

I only use two. The first is straightforward. The discontinuity of real names in Twitterific jars me. I prefer the consistency of usernames everywhere, so I use a simple switch to displayScreenName instead. The real value, however, lies in the tweetTextFilter command.

This command allows you to define an ICU regular expression to filter pretty much anything under the sun. My example below isn’t very complicated. It simply blocks all tweets that mention either Techcrunch, or ‘griefer’, or refer to a user by name of ‘fanboi’. The difference between the last two being that I see no references to ‘griefer’ at all, whereas I can still see when ‘fanboi’ replies to me but not when others reply to, or reference, her or him. The first file is just my .gitignore file to exclude the actual filter I use.

Update: I’ve added the ‘Olympics’ and ‘080808’ because I’m a grouch. (Well, partly because I’m stupidly busy, but mostly because I’m a grouch.)

I decided to post this after seeing Tantek's work towards a Troll Filter for Twitter searches. There are people and sites I prefer to exclude from my life where possible. Mostly because they continually take time and energy for little return.

This is a simple method for cutting those sites/people from at least one part of your life. I still follow the occasional link to Techcrunch and similar sites that’s been encoded by TinyURL et al because I’m not quite ready for a scorched earth policy, but every other mention slips me by. And guess what? I don’t miss it at all.

As for the infrequent and occasional griefer or fanboi-inspiring micro-celebrity in my life, I carry on blissfully ignorant of whatever negative emotions they typically cause in me that earned them the brand.

I've posted the commands on Github’s Gist for anybody who wants to fork it and add their own parameters (and because I wanted to try out Gist). I’d love to see anybody expand on this, or any of the other power options. If you want to confirm your regular expressions do what you planned, there is a live testing page available.

Over the last few months, people have begun asking me: “How do you do so much? How do you keep up with it all?”

Now, I don’t think I do as much as some of you think I do. I don’t feel like I’ve achieved anywhere near the things I should have lately, so I began thinking about those questions.

I do a lot of thinking. I like it. It’s one of my favourite things and I like to think that I’m good at it.

But where do thoughts come from?

Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a blathering of random metaphysical esoterica. What I mean is: ‘Why do I have these thoughts?

On thoughts

The answer is that thoughts stem from various external stimuli. From the conversations I have with the smart and talented people I’m honoured to call my friends and colleagues; from the blogs I read (also written by smart and talented folks, as far as I can tell); from the emails I receive: personal, business and mailing lists. From all these places and more, my thoughts spring. They tumble together in little parcels of disjointed meaning, scattered threads of random thought that bounce against each other constantly and gradually weave into cogency or are discarded.

On distractions

I’ve written before that I don’t enjoy the quiet stillness inside my mind, but that’s untrue. I have plenty of other reasons to dislike being alone with my thoughts, which are neither quiet nor still.

I don’t own a portable music-player of any description, because I tell myself that would be a distraction, that my brain needs a rest from incessant stimulation. The result is, of course, that I check Twitter from my N95 approximately forty times on my forty-five minute trip to work.

It’s odd that music, which aids me in so many facets of my life, can distract me so thoroughly from the rush and scurry in my brain. Or perhaps that is precisely the point. Music abstracts me from the current flow, insulates me, and allows me to achieve particular tasks with a stronger focus than if it were absent. Without those tasks, it just distracts me.

On escapism

None of this is likely to come as a surprise to you. We all need to get away, to take a time out, a little pause to regain our breath and our focus. Therein lies the problem for me.

Why do I need to watch yet another episode of the West Wing today? Or check my email, my feeds, Twitter, Flickr, again? Why do I need to take a book on RESTful Web Services to bed at night? For that matter, why do I stay up beyond all sensible hours until I’m so exhausted that my right eye starts literally twitching? Even now I’m listening to Ten (only the best album ever) and pausing periodically in my progress with this article to lose myself in the songs.

Where is the focus in that?

In which our intrepid hero takes action

The problem here does not lie with things like checking my email or my feeds. It doesn’t come from the external stimuli. It comes from when they are applied.

What’s the first thing you do every morning? Me, I open 4 tabs in my browser: Gmail, Google Reader, Twitter replies, and Flickr recent activity. While I wait for those to load, I switch to Mail to confirm I haven’t received any work-related email overnight.

Next, I “process” all the information on those pages and that sets me up for a good long day of reacting.

Fuck reacting. Act!

Over lunch one day, one of the founders of Atlassian, Scott Farquhar, said that he had recently been trialling not opening his email until midday each day. I tried it. I think I lasted about three days.

Now I’m going to do it again. And the same goes for my feeds, Flickr et al.

But wait, there’s more!

I’m also unsubscribing from all those feeds that I’m only following because I feel I should ‘keep in the loop’, and from all the mailing lists whose communities I don’t actively participate in.

I already vigorously prune my feeds and my contacts on social networking sites I use regularly.

A challenge

I have a challenge for you. It’s also for myself. Let’s see if we can’t do it together.

I have cut all these distractions from my life. I will cut more. I will carve away every input that does not lead to action. I will push the reactive part of my day back until after lunchtime.

I’m going to start putting my thoughts to work. All those bundles of meaning have been assembled into functional parts that need structure. They need a coherent whole and I can only provide it by taking action.

I’d like to see you do it too. Maybe some of you were already on the ball with this one, but I think we probably all need a little push and a lot of pruning on occasion.

Get to it. Drop the distractions. Take actions instead.

I want people to ask you: “how do you do so much?”

I was very pleased to be speaking at Remix Australia this week. Thanks must go to Michael Kordahi, Shane Morris, and Nick Hodge for trusting that a guy who hadn’t done a public presentation in nearly a year could deliver the goods.

Talking ‘bout a revolution

Damian Edwards and I were asked to do the IE8 session together. The point of the session was to give an overview of the new features and capabilities, in particular the brand-spanking new standards-compliant rendering engine. We also decided to make the most of the opportunity to pimp standards-based design methodologies and concepts to the .NET and Silverlight focused crowd.

Damian took responsibility for developing solid demos to illustrate standards-based design techniques and the innovations in IE8 such as WebSlices and Activities. I delivered the historical context, the philosophy and the concepts we wanted to impart.

I think we ended up with a solidly crafted presentation that wove the themes of Internet Explorer 8’s development principles, standards-based design philosophies and best practice web innovation together. We’ve had some great feedback so far and one member of the Melbourne audience even said: That was the most concise succinct explanation of those concepts I’ve ever heard. This was the most productive session of the day for me. Obviously Damian and I are rapt that somebody felt so strongly about our work. That really made the day for me.

Huge thanks to Damian for all the work he put in to make sure we nailed it!

I’ve added the presentation to Slideshare, although it won’t be anywhere near as cool without all the demos and we used the slides for points of reference rather than as detailed content:

| View | Upload your own

Turns out Damo posted the code from the demos on his blog.

Rolling with my homies

As ever, the absolute best part of the conference was all the amazing incredible talented people I got to meet, talk with and hang with.

Mark Pesce delivered a stirring call to action for all developers in the keynote. We hold the key to the future. We’re the ones who can empower both the public and our own organisations by building the right tools. You can read his speech in its entirety on his blog and the video has just been posted. Go get some!

I met the incredibly friendly folks from Soul Solutions at the first speaker rehearsals. Bronwen Zande and John O’Brien are two of the nicest, most genuine people I’ve met in a long time and they build awesome stuff too as I discovered when I watched their demos in the Windows Live Platform sessions. I’ve been expecting to see presence indication in more and more sites and it was cool to see how they’d integrated IM into their applications seamlessly.

My favourite presentation of the conference was easily the one covering the new possibilities in Silverlight 2. Jonas Follesø built an awesome Twitter/Flickr mashup in front of us in about 35 minutes, while explaining in precise detail every step and the reasoning for it. The source and slides are available at that link. If that wasn’t incredible enough (and it was), José Fajardo demonstrated some really astonishing DeepZoom prototypes he’d built.

José decided that people haven’t recognised the true potential in DeepZoom and so he asked himself 3 questions, then tried to answer them each in code within 30 minutes. He showed us the results and convinced me, at least, that we need to be looking much further ahead than we have been with interactions on the web.

His questions went something like this:

1. What if every image on the web were DeepZoomable?
2. What if we had full control over every document on the web?
3. What if people could share DeepZoom images easily?

I don’t have the precise questions and I don’t want to steal his thunder for when he blogs it (you are blogging this, right, José?), but his examples were simply phenomenal. I’m going to be asking myself a lot of questions like this in future – to help myself stretch my knowledge and use of the technologies I know. And to stretch how they’re used by everyone. 30 minute prototyping exercises are the way of the future!

In combination, the presentation by Jonas and José convinced me that I need to learn Silverlight. There is much potential for awesomeness there, if used properly.

I also met the very talented, very cool Hege Rokenes. She’s a Norwegian graphic designer who’s freelancing in Melbourne for the next year or so. She won the Silverlight video clip contest with her Step Back video (Silverlight required – of course). She’s looking for more freelance or a position with a Melbourne company. If you want a talented designer with an interest in web standards and Silverlight, you’d be crazy not to look her up.

I finally got to meet Tatham Oddie, who I really should have met by now as he’s into all the same things I am, but comes at them from a Microsoft technologies angle. He was even at Web Directions South last year! Go read his post on Location Awareness to see why I’m very keen to see what he gets up to next!

And lastly, there were so many other amazing people that I ran into in hallways, stairwells and bars. I have a bunch of business cards, contact details and new Twitter followers, so I’ll be keeping in touch with them too.

Whole lotta love

Many people asked me why I was going to a Microsoft conference. The previous section of this article is why. There are brilliant talented friendly people in every community. Cross-pollination of ideas, philosophies and experiences can only help to push the web forward. Exposure to different ideas and techniques that are new to me can only help me.

I talked to people about my work, both at Atlassian and outside. I shared concepts about integrating with large-scale CMSes, modernising legacy codebases, and promoting the open web. I compared notes on Ruby, Rails, .NET and Java. I learned about new technologies and techniques. I saw cool prototypes and interactions. I think I even convinced a few RIA developers to go learn HTML!

Next time you have the opportunity to go to a conference, do it. Seize the experiences and make them your own. What you get out of a conference comes from what you put in. It’s not just about sitting in sessions and heckling via the backchannel. It’s about participating in every way you can.

I appreciated every second of this week. Remix sums it up nicely.

I’ve uncovered a deep dark secret individually guarded by many of the geeks in our local community. It’s only natural that children want to play, to explore, to… experiment. Sometimes as adults, we want the same things. Especially if we can bring our adult skills to bear on our childhood joys. Brothers and sisters, don’t hide your love away. Physical computing is not a sin. Although it can be a delight. Let me explain.

This morning, Dr Nic started tweeting about his urge for a ‘carputer’ of some description. After he started posting links to tiny hardware bits, I pointed him to the Ruby Arduino Development project:

RAD is a framework for programming the Arduino physcial computing platform using Ruby. RAD converts Ruby scripts written using a set of Rails-like conventions and helpers into C source code which can be compiled and run on the Arduino microcontroller. It also provides a set of Rake tasks for automating the compilation and upload process.

WTF is an ‘Arduino’

Arduino is an open-source physical computing platform. You can buy them, build them, and modify them. You can hack on the code or the hardware designs and share your changes with the community.

I’ve not played with them, but after reading articles and mentions of them and other forms of physical computing (such as Sunspots, Phidgets and the like) for the last 12-18 months, I’m incredibly interested.

Not knowing a lot about it, I can’t tell you why Arduino has captured the imagination of the community than I see more than the other similar products, but all I hear is Arduino. And the story was same this morning. After my next tweet mentioned Arduino, the local fans came out of the woodwork in a flurry of tweets.

It turns out that heaps of folks I know, particularly in the local Ruby community have already paid, played and procrastinated with their Arduino bits and pieces - but everyone wants to do more.

Do you need an excuse to play?

Firstly, if you’re interested in Ruby, Rails, Merb and the like, then it looks like peeps will now be bringing their Arduino gear along to Railscamp in June. I’ve added an Arduino section to the Equipment page so that you can list what you’ve got and we can collaboratively ensure we can make the most of it!

For the world outside the rosy bubble, the Australian importers of Arduino gear, Little Bird Electronics, are holding their first Australian Arduino workshop at UTS on the 31st of May.

Update! Little Bird Electronics are now offering a $20 discount to folks using the code ‘LACHSTOCK’ when buying workshop tickets. Thanks, Little Bird!

So if you’ve got a little electronic skeleton in your geek closet, unpack it and come play. It looks like you’ll be in some fantastic company!

This morning, Flickr released a new feature. One that let’s you find your friends from your existing address books on Yahoo! Mail, Gmail and Hotmail. All without providing usernames or passwords. Aren’t APIs wonderful?

I twittered about the new black and got a reply from Amanda asking isn’t that encouraging people to get phished?.

In a nutshell, the answer is yes.

Super green

Folks who think about such things are rejoicing that there are now so many site-specific APIs and authentication protocols such as OAuth that avoid what Jeremy Keith called the Password Anti-pattern. And I’m one of them. The Password Anti-pattern is a Bad Thing™. I don’t think anyone would disagree with that.

Removing the Anti-pattern means that the authenticating site doesn’t get full unlimited access to the account in question. In Flickr’s new feature, they get access to only the details of who is in my Gmail address book - not my emails and certainly not access to any other Google products I may have enabled on that account. Google’s authentication page confirms for me that Flickr is requesting access to only my contacts and only for a one-time use:

Flickr.com is requesting access to your Google Contacts account so that it can access Google Accounts on your behalf. You can revoke access at any time under ‘My Account’. Flickr.com will not have access to your password or any personal information. Learn more.

Flickr.com is only requesting one-time access. If it needs to access Google on your behalf in the future, you will be prompted again for permission.

All of this is hot, hot, hot! As long as you’re actually on Google’s authentication page.

Phishes away!

A major argument Jeremy stated against the Password Anti-pattern is that it teaches people how to be phished, but these new authentication methods don’t fix that. They still teach users that allowing your existing site to authenticate to a third party site is a Good Thing™. It’s a simple matter to produce the appearance of following that authentication process while actually harvesting details.

The solution to this is the same it has always been. The user needs to check the URL of the page they’re on and make the call. The problem with that is also the same as it has always been. Some users, possibly most users, don’t do it.

Are we making things worse?

The new authentication methods may actually train users to phished even more readily than before because there is less of a cognitive cost to the process. Ever since computers came into use, users have been hammered with warnings about the importance of passwords. The web has damaged that somewhat with our profligate password ways, but I reckon there are still plenty of mental alarms to ring when somebody asks for your password.

Using sexy protocols and APIs don’t cause that hesitation. The process has been designed to create a neatly streamlined user experience. Just click a few buttons and it’s over.

A phishing site is unlikely to do that, of course. These days API access requires registering for a key, allowing the API providers to track usage. Providers have varying levels of diligence, but it seems unlikely that an application could do phishing on a significant scale without being caught.

The most likely alternative is that they simply pretend you’re not currently authenticated with the third party site and request your username and password. Hopefully, that’s enough to give pause. Particularly if the app is telling you you’re not authenticated with Hotmail when you have Hotmail open in the next tab over.

What’s my scene?

In the Password Anti-pattern article, Jeremy took a moral stand: even if it costs me a contract in the short-term, I will refuse to implement any kind of interface that involves asking the user for a password from a third-party site. I urge you to do the same. That was admirable and eminently reasonable. Many agreed. He provided what he thought was a viable alternative by pointing to the same authentication methods I’m discussing here.

I thought it was the right choice at the time, too. I stood with him. I don’t know if his stance has changed now, but I know mine has.

What is the alternative?

Authentication APIs and protocols have their benefits and they have their costs. Do these cancel each other out? Should we refuse to implement this functionality?

If you agree with my points here, maybe you think that. But what do you implement instead? There will be a lot of demand for this functionality as it becomes easier and easier (no more screen-scraping!).

Personally, I’m for it. I have reservations now, but the practical benefits of isolating and securing access to my data wins over the hypothetically higher risk of phishing. And on that day when I’m so tired, hungover or ill that I absentmindedly just click through the process and hand over the keys to my kingdom, I hope some small flicker of self-preservation will alert me so that I can correct it in time.

I was recently incommunicado for roughly a month. I was traveling, and living life mostly offline but for occasional travel arrangements etc. This resulted in the kind of online buildup you hear about from such circumstances: a couple of dozen direct emails (gradually being responded to this week); several hundred mailing list emails (deleted); thousands of RSS items (all marked as read); 14,000 unread in Gmail’s spam folder and a relatively small selection of bacn, including 74 adds from Twitter users. 74 in 4 weeks? WTF, Twitter?

Break it down

I wanted to use this sample to give myself some idea of who these people are so, as I processed the requests, I started listing how many I blocked, how many were bots and how many I thought of as Real People™ (possibly not the same thing as actual real people). And being the anal-retentive pedant I am, this lead to creation of more categories for those who didn’t fit the above three. In turn leading to some people meeting multiple categories and this loosely-premised article looking even less scientific - if that’s possible.

Obviously, this is likely to reveal far more about how I use Twitter than any data about Twitter itself. I found it interesting. You’ve been warned.

The numbers

By major grouping

I counted:

• 41 Real People™,
• 8 of those odd link-freaks,
• 16 purely promotional vehicles,
• 2 fake personalities, and
• 17 bots.

I added 14 of these and blocked 26 - which included all 17 bots.

Let’s work our way through in reverse order before we get into the Real People.

Bots (17)

You’ve all been added by them. In permanent use by spammers and unethical promoters, I block them immediately upon identification. I direly wish Twitter had a “Mark as a Spamming Sod” option like Pownce does. It’s about time the application stopped treating every account as if it were a person. That’s blatantly no longer the case.

That’s not to say that Twitter bots aren’t useful. They’re fantastic, actually. But only when they’re opt-in. The ones that come to find you are the type of loathsome evil that I associate with marketers who call your house or cheerfully knock on your door on a Saturday morning while normal people are still hungover.

Fake personalities (2)

Some I like, some I don’t. Most fade away within the kind of period that makes me not bother adding them. Especially since they’re unsolicited.

Purely promotional vehicles (16)

In this sample, they varied from sites and companies to bands or American political propagandists. They’re kind of like bots, I only find them valuable if I’ve sought them out for a purpose.

Link-freaks (8)

There is an obvious visual pattern created on a Twitter profile when somebody adds a link at the end of every single tweet. It’s readily detectable within milliseconds. Somehow it is even more obvious when there is the occasional comment or reply thrown in.

These folks confuse me. They’re not bots. Most of them don’t seem to be using automated submission of links and yet they post more than 90% lame link action.

Nobody knows that much interesting stuff. Nobody has that much original information at their fingertips. These folks are just re-posting stuff they find on aggregation sites. If I cared about the generic links that get posted repeatedly in every link graveyard on the net I’d subscribe to feeds from Digg, SlashDot, Techmeme or any one of 15,000 others. I don’t need it on Twitter.

Quit grumping and talk about the Real People™

I broke down these folks even further based on what I thought were interesting differentiators:

• 6 total newbies with virtually no posts but following 40-odd people;
• 13 people following 3,000+ people and seemingly attempting conversation with all of them;
• 2 people who used to follow me re-adding me (now that I was completely quiet?);
• 4 colleagues;
• 4 people who seem to use Twitter prolifically but don’t have a bio or a link off-site;
• 7 people who had recently replied to Jeremiah Owyang; and
• 21 self-identified Social Media Enthusiasts/Evangelists.

What the fuck is a Social Media Enthusiast? I know what a social media enthusiast is. Some people would probably classify me as one. But as something that warrants title case? Is it a job title? Who pays people just to be enthusiastic about stuff?

One answer to the last question would be: no one. Every single one of the SM Enthusiasts appeared to be a self-employed consultant. I would love some of those folks to let us in on how well that’s working out for them.

Evangelists, on the other hand, is a familiar (if conflicted) term. The big consultancies all have Social Media consultants now. I can easily see them called ‘Evangelist’ to ride the wave of familiarity with that particular term in technology circles.

Some folks even provided the slash themselves. They are both ‘Enthusiasts’ and ‘Evangelists’. Either that or they find themselves torn in that reputedly tricky limbo in between?

So what?

It’s a valid point. I don’t know that any of this means anything (except that @jowyang is an exceptionally popular Twitterer amongst a certain subset of users). I do find the numbers interesting in an abstract kind of way. They’re indicative of a broad range of Twitter uses that hopefully illustrates out the pointlessness of all those Twitter Etiquette posts that spring up every time some blogger cracks it with those he is following on Twitter. Pruning according to need vs satisfacton is the answer to that issue, not complaining that nobody does it the way you want them too.

I’m curious to see if others break their requests down in similar fashion (even on a one-by-one basis) or if I’m a little too obsessive. What do you do?

Fight the Power!

Standardistas the world over are burning their bras and thinking of the children. Folks are raising hell over a single line of HTML and I can see why. Becoming a standardista gave me my passion for the web and led into an entirely new world that has offered me more opportunities for every aspect of my life. So I get it. I know why folks are upset. There’s a little part of my brain that wants to scream: “It’s just wrong!”

But it’s only a small part, and the rest of it is thinking: no matter what you think of that single line of code, it’s coming. It will be implemented. Chris Wilson’s post linked above, in combination with Aaron’s excellent article outlining some of the reasoning behind X-UA-Compatible and Eric’s considered piece on his changing perceptions of the switch, aren’t exactly media releases but do represent a considerable amount of forethought and planning. They represent a decision.

Know Your Enemies

Microsoft doesn’t tell you it’s going to do something of this scale unless it means it. So, regardless of where you come down on the pavement of good intentions, I want to talk about what X-UA-Compatible means to developers, businesses, users and clients. If you want flame wars, there are plenty of other folks packing ‘throwers in the comments of any of those posts (and countless others). Let’s leave thoughts of poor broken pages aside and keep this to asking interesting questions

What’s a battle?

Questions like:

1. What does the capability to lock your site to a single version of IE mean for your development cycle?
2. What do the IE7 users checking out my shiny locked-to IE8 site see?
3. How does this affect my business decisions?
4. How does this affect my boss/client/manager’s business decisions?
5. Does this encourage innovation or stifle it?
6. Will this practically mean less time debugging IE?
7. What place has X-UA-Compatible in best practice methodologies?
8. What is the significance that each of the men linked to in this post have gingery facial hair?*

Talk to me, Goose

I have a few answers to some of these questions, but not all and this isn’t a lecture. It’s a discussion. What are your answers? Even more importantly, what are your questions?

* I have photos to prove this allegation somewhere…

I hear lots of paranoid mutterings about OpenID from geeky folks. I get that. They’re still hurting from the fiasco formerly known as Passport. It’s understandble, but it’s time to let it go.

People have valid concerns about any scheme purporting to represent their identity (or identities, given we’re talking about the web). It’s hard to get to the bottom of those with OpenID, because, as has been raised on the mailing lists, it’s very obscure niche topic with bugger all in the way of plain language explanations. It takes too long to get into it and understand it, and not everybody has that time. This is for those who are willing to trust that I took the time.

The next five points are for all my geeky friends who can’t be stuffed delving into esoterica:

OpenID is good for you.

You can stop using usernames and passwords for every site that supports it.

OpenID saves you stress

You don’t have remember which of the 3 different passwords you’ve used since high school is the right one for this site. You don’t have remember which of your 47 different usernames you gave it.

OpenID saves you time

You don’t have to trawl your browser password storage to find the right one when you haven’t visited the site since you last cleared your cookies.

OpenID is safe

Hardcore security freaks can go read the specs, get involved in the community and determine this for themselves, but for the rest of us, it’s enough to know that a bunch of very smart hardcore security freaks have already done this.

The defence rests

There you have it, folks, the completely non-scientific (and non-scary) explanation of OpenID. No grand justifications. No confusing diagrams.

What now?

Just 3 simple things to do:

1. Go get one today;

   I recommend ClaimID because those guys are fucking smart, but lots of people like myOpenId too;

2. Make sure you delegate your OpenID to your own site using Tim Lucas’s handy instructions so you have control of your identity; and

3. Tell your all friends - if you want the revolution, you’d better start lighting fires.

Party on, people. The fight isn’t over yet.

Back in May, I read an article describing a Sun Microsystem project to replace Ajax. What caught my attention was the attitude towards existing web technologies.

Turns out the author had the focus of the article all backwards (at least I’m sure the Sun engineers would think so). The Ajax example was simply that. Sun’s Project Flair was implementing something far far more complex.

Earlier this month, the project announced the open sourcing of the Sun Labs Lively Kernel, an implementation of the Morphic user interface framework in JavaScript.

This is the point at which all the hardcore CompSci programming freaks start salivating. Squeak on the client side? Imagine using Seaside for server development and Lively Kernel for the client!

For those unfamiliar, and I can thank Myles Byrne for introducing me to these concepts at the first RailsCamp, this means that the Lively Kernel environment can be extended and developed while programming inside the that same environment - no reboots or compiling needed. If that sounds esoteric, it is, extremely so; but it’s also as powerful as it is difficult. Which is why those CompSci geeks are drooling.

Meanwhile, my inner standardista is screaming.

Our goal is to build a platform using a minimum number of underlying technologies. This is in contrast with many current web technologies that utilize a diverse array of technologies such as HTML, CSS, DOM, JavaScript, PHP, XML, and so on.

That quote resides in the Motivation section of the Lively Kernel description. It evens sounds quite reasonable. Who wouldn’t want to cut down on the number of things you have to learn in order to be good at this thing we do? Being a skillful generalist is hard.

Not everybody can do what we do, and I’m not dissing these guys because I know they can program rings around me, but being hot programmers doesn’t make them web developers. The reason the web works is because of that layered approach. Because of those disparate technologies that can be drawn together to make something strong, elegant and stable.

Building an entire website or “web application environment” in JavaScript strikes me as an interesting experiment and I know people who’ve done similar things (wave Myles again, everybody), but it is not where the web should be progressing towards.

Simplification is good. I’d love some more simplicity in my day-to-day work! But bringing everything down to a single uniform level is pushing that too far. It’s called putting all your eggs in one basket. Or even worse, it’s called a monoculture. If you want some intense thought cud for the next weeks or months, go and read Anil Dash on Monoculture and Web 2.0.

On that note, I’ll leave with a quote that sums up how at least some people at Sun are thinking about the web and web technologies right now:

AJAX sort of deals with all of the old way of doing things. It makes it simpler, which is great, but underneath it’s still all this junky HTML, Document Object Model, CSS, all that stuff, where 30 years ago, we knew how to do that stuff cleanly with a dynamic programming language and a simple graphics model

It seems that my last post has stirred the pot a little.

I’m now taking orders for folks who want to get this hardware to Sydney and Melbourne and split the shipping costs. Myles Eftos is doing the same for anybody who wants them sent to Perth. I’ll happily split out the Melbourne orders if we get enough. At the moment Melbournites have ordered around 8 and I have orders for over 20 in Sydney.

This is kind of response is incredibly cool. It’s also been cool to get all the questions. Here’s some answers:

No. You cannot automatically specify a download limit on users on your free public tier.

You can specify a speed limitation on the free public tier and you can ban any user you like. So you can remove the hogs after the fact, but you can’t prevent them.

Let me follow that by saying that we have offered freely available wifi to anybody within range for the last 6 months. In that time we’ve had 32 users. Around 20 are regular users. We never even came close to hitting our old limit of 10Gb, let alone our new one of 20Gb (except when I left Azureus open too long…)

A few further points need to be made. Yes, the Standard Edition has a little toolbar at the top of the free public tier that can’t be turned off. Yes, I also think that sucks, but I use my private tier at home, which has no toolbar. Standard edition offers you both tiers, so while you’re on your own network you won’t have it.

Lastly, I’ve made a big deal out of this. I’ve recommended it to all of you, and you’re buying these little bits of kit on the basis of that recommendation. That’s a little scary and I don’t want to fuck up.

But I might. I don’t work for Meraki. I have no affiliate relationship with them. I’m getting no cash out of placing these orders. I’m doing this because I believe it represents an opportunity for people to claim some space. For us to wrest a little more control from the powers-that-be.

Meraki may not be the answer. They may turn out to be money-grubbing opportunists who try to squeeze us for more cash or make changes we don’t like (no offense to the folks there if they’re reading this, I’m sure you’re lovely - this is hypothetical). If Meraki isn’t it, the network will route around it. We’ll all use FON or Whisher or Terranet or who knows what else is around the corner.

Don’t tell me you’re the only person in your neighbourhood who’ll use this. Unless you are the only person within miles, there is somebody else nearby who will use and appreciate free wifi.

The important part is that we’re all here pushing to make this change. And the more people we convince, the more powerful we will be. Buy the gear. Use it. Tell your friends about it. Post it somewhere. Email your user groups. Flickr them when you set them up. Blog it. Twitter it. Sell it.

We’re talking about cultural change. Culture is big and hard to steer. It takes effort. So if you like these ideas, if you want this to happen, you have to make it happen.

Imagine if every member of the Web Standards Group bought some of these. Or every member of RORO. Or every member of the PHP user groups, the UPA, the Python krewe, the Beer 2.0 posse, the .NET folks, AWIA, WIPA, and all the Webjammers.

I’m stupidly excited about this because I can see so much potential, but that’s only going to be achieved if we all drive it. So let’s do it. Let’s free the net!

Given all the excitement caused by mentions in Mark Pesce’s phenomenal closing keynote for Web Directions, it’s about time I wrote something about my favourite bit of hardware, the Meraki Mini.

Lisa and I have been using three Minis for our home network for the last 6 months. They’re easy to install, fun to play around with and kinda cute.

Our previous access point (a Dynalink RTA1025W, an excellent bit of kit that still serves as our ADSL 2 modem, firewall etc) didn’t have the range to reach the front room of our house from the very back wall where our phone point is located. I’d been reading about some cool new wifi tech from a couple of startups: Fon, Whisher and Meraki. The latter sounded like it had less complications and dependencies, so I signed up for beta testing.

I bought three Minis because it was the default purchase bundle and I wanted to have some flexibility, but it turns out that two cover the length of our house quite nicely. The third typically ensures strong signal throughout our network, but it gets unplugged and moved around as necessary if we want that powerpoint.

Enough history, let’s set these babies up!

Installing a Meraki Network

Preliminaries

Firstly, go buy your beauties. Choose Standard Edition if you just want to do your house or office. Pro is for those whose plans require either more control or billing. Note that Pro Minis cost $100 US more each. There’s no difference in hardware, but they’re charging you for the use to which you could put it (billing…)

Make sure to select the appropriate country type of power adapter when ordering. I spent a whole Sunday afternoon trawling Paddy’s Markets looking for cheap US/AU converters after my Minis arrived. They now offer Australian ones, as well as US, UK and EU, but they didn’t then.

Next, wait impatiently for them to arrive, refreshing the UPS tracking notifications every 1-2 minutes.

Once they arrive, leave work early, rush home, ignore your loved ones and tear the boxes open.

Put the little suckers together, making sure you’ve got all the bits. Record the IP, serial number and MAC address on the bottom/back of each one.

The Hookup

Configuration is easiest if you plug them all into one powerboard next to your computer. You can move them afterwards without a flutter - the joys of mesh networks!

Grab the Mini of your choice. It doesn’t matter which one, they’re all the same. Connect it to the net. This will be your gateway.

Mine’s connected in through the aforementioned Dynalink, but you can plug it straight into any kind of modem, firewall, router, patch-board or whatever.

Jump on your nearest computer, pull up your browser of choice, open a new tab/window and head to the IP address you recorded from your gateway Mini. Should be something like: http://6.1.24.190. This hosts the admin console for that specific Mini. The username is ‘admin’ and the password will be your serial number.

Here’s where you check your signal strength etc. You’ll need it later, when you spread them out. You can also register them to your network here, but it’s probably easiest to do them all in bulk on the main admin console.

Head to http://dashboard.meraki.com/ and log in to your account. Once you get over the fact that you just bought hardware that has a serious well-developed and reasonably designed site interface, go to the Configure tab and choose Add Nodes. From there, it’s just a matter of plugging in your order details and some MAC addresses (from the back of the repeaters).

You now have a mesh network!

(Okay, you already did, from the second you connected the first Mini to the internet. But now you can see it!)

Playing with Meraki Mesh

Spread your repeaters through the house, making sure you get them in good positions by checking signal strength in the console. Place them as close to windows as you can. Try to face them out into the world. Your place will be covered by proximity, anyway, so you want to make sure that your free public tier is available to as many others as possible.

Check out all the options in the console. Depending on which edition you bought, there are quite a few! You can place your repeaters on a Google map, make private networks, set bandwidth throttles, ban hoggish users, set up personalised messages and branding, analyse your usage data or device use and heaps more. There’s even an API that lets your publish your data (here’s mine).

Free The Net

If I know my geeks, and I’m damn sure I do, you’re now champing at the bit to get yourself some hot Meraki-on-Meraki action. That’s awesome. Do it!

But consider this, the true benefits of a mesh network don’t lie in making a sexy little hardware system for your personal use. The benefits come when you convince your neighbours to do it too. And then you and they convince their neighbours. And before you know it, you have free wifi network access at that cafe on the corner or that park around the block with the cool bench. That’s just the start of the vision Mark Pesce was talking about at Web Directions. That’s just the start of everything that’s coming.

Convince your friends. Convince your families. Buy them for friends’ birthdays. Talk to the folks in the local cafes, restaurants and community stores. Give one to your grandma. Tell the user groups you belong to.

Imagine if every web standards geek you know buys these. If every programmer you know does, or all the flash nerds, designers, producers, information architects, producers and usability consultants.

Wifi will be ubiquitous. The network will be everywhere, but who’ll own it? The corporates? The telcos? The government? What about the rest of us?

I’m calling on the people who give a fuck. Let’s make our own network!

Buy your Merakis. Keep the free public tier and leave it called “freethenet”. Make it available to as many people as you can. Place your Minis where they’ll do most benefit and tell everybody you know.

Make this happen. The people are the network. The network is our future. Free the net!

I often read about people risking all to achieve something monumental. People who gambled every speck of life, self and reputation on one last crack at some goal everybody else thought was impossible. Naturally, in such stories, the gamble pays off.

It has to. Otherwise, the protagonist is hardly likely to be as famous, are they?

I wonder about these people

I wonder what they are/were like. I wonder what they think, now that they’ve achieved the impossible. I wonder if they still strive. I think about what’s left for them. Most of all, I wonder what made them think they could do it.

I have a theory that they probably didn’t really think about it like that. Only in movies does the hero say: “everybody else thinks it’s impossible, but I know I can do it.” In real life, people just chip away at things and, sometimes, take a running leap and risk it. I wonder if those people just keep taking those leaps.

Taking a leap

13 months ago, I quit my job. I emailed everybody I knew in Sydney and said, “Help! Find me a job, please”, and I quit. I had a mortgage, a sizeable car loan and a crazy passion for my girlfriend who lived too far away.

My boss tried to offer me work in the Sydney office, but we both knew that didn’t fit their plans for the business. So I was jumping without a net.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to suggest I’ve done anything monumental (on anything but a personal scale), but yesterday was the anniversary of my move to Sydney. One year and one day ago, we were heading north from Melbourne in a car crammed with everything that I hadn’t packed before the removalists got there.

That move was the best thing I have ever done for myself.

12 months of growth

Since that time, I’ve made so many great new friends in Sydney. I’ve met so many brilliant and talented people in our industry. With one of them, the outrageously multi-skilled Anson Parker, I started Webjam.

Then there’s the friendly supportive and amazing community that finally settled on the name of Rails Oceania. These guys and gals (yes, there are female Rails hackers in Sydney) have been an inspiration. Some I already knew, like Tim Lucas and Lindsay Evans. Others, like Jason Crane, Lachie Cox, Max Muermann and Ben Askins have been an absolute revelation to meet. All have taught me so much.

I’m lucky enough to work in the best creative team in Australian media at News Digital Media. If you doubt me, just watch what we pull out in the next few months.

Let’s not forget Web Standards Group, who’ve been a staple of my professional life since my first meeting in June 2004. Wow, that feels like a long time ago! Or the local startup scene, as ably led by the Tangler crew. Or all the incredible peeps I met at SXSW this year, or Web Directions last year.

Through it all, I’ve been surrounded by a crazy cool group of friends, every one whom is an inspiration almost daily. I can’t go through them all. I’m already starting to feel this post is dropping into self-indulgent waffle, so I’ll name only two more peeople. The first is Andrew Krespanis who gave me this website and the appropriate (and necessary) kick-in-the-arse to start writing. The second is Lisa Herrod.

She’s been an inspiration from day one. She’s the reason I came to Sydney and she’s the one who gave me the courage to take the plunge. She’s always supported me and encouraged me. She drives me to achieve. To push myself and those around me. If I’ve done anything worth doing in the last 12 months, it is because of her.

Jump!

What I haven’t listed here are the bad times. No mention of the failures or the moments of crushing despair. None of the negative people I met who brought me down. Those are all irrelevant to the point. We all have those, no matter what we do.

No matter where you do or what you do, you’re going to have bad times. You’re going to face pain and heartbreak. So don’t worry about it. No point stressing over things you can’t change

Surround yourself with love and support, then risk all. Push yourself. Stare into that abyss in front of you, then look past it and take that leap. Again and again.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I spend ridiculously large portions of my life online. Not just on a computer, but actually online. In fact, these days I doubt I’d know what to do with myself at a keyboard for more than 5 minutes if I didn’t have the internet.

Given that I’m a webby geek of giant proportions, I think that’s reasonable. I even think it’s a good thing. But there is something missing from all that time. Something seemingly so inconsequential that it took me a long time to work out what it was. It wasn’t until I started to feel it again that I realised its absence.

What you talkin’ about, Willis?

Call it politeness. Call it manners. It’s social grease and it makes everything run smoother and makes everybody happier. I’m talking about saying thank you. I’m talking about feeling that somebody else appreciates your effort. That your contribution has been noted and valued.

These are important features of society - acknowledgment, an indication of appreciation. These things matter. A lot.

Getting your groove back

Social software works because it replicates society in some fashion, right? It offers online, from the comfort of your own home/office/car/zeppelin, what you can otherwise only get by gathering en masse. And, in some ways, it’s better than that too, because it allows you to interact socially with people you would never otherwise meet.

Offering appreciation in social apps

It’s so easy to add this. This is not a technical issue! It’s one of priorities, focus and intent. Most applications don’t have any development time focused specifically on being nice to people, but doesn’t that sound like a great way to build your community?

Flickr

Flickr has testimonials. I quite like those. Mine exist for my friends and loved ones to make fun of me, but you only have to look at Daniel Boud’s profile to see how they were intended to be used.

Ma.gnolia

Ma.gnolia makes no bones about it - they literally have a ‘thanks’ option. You can thank anybody for a bookmark. It’s prominent, it’s easy, it makes people feel good and I love it. It requires no input or effort other than a click. Todd Sieling posted an explanation of their reasoning when announcing the feature.

Take the time

We spend a lot of time on the web. We’re building software that makes people spend even more time on the web. Let’s make it a nicer place to be. Add some social grease to your next app and make your users feel appreciated.

Twitter is a strange beast. Adored and loathed in probably equal parts, the debate of Twitter’s usefulness will continue unabated. Just as the debate about MySpace’s attractiveness or the virtue of OSX over Windows, it seems destined to become one of the tech world’s ‘holy wars’.

It is once you make the decision to have a Twitter account, though, that the real issues begin. Public or private? Friend or follower? Site name, real name or a fresh pseudonym? And how much i