Obviously the need for spaces in tags is an important one. Whether it’s “Semantic Web” or “Ford Interceptor” that you need to tag, it’s rather different from “Windows AND Vista” and “Ford AND Interceptor” - and it gets worse if you have a search engine that places OR in there instead of AND. Much worse. The big question is, why doesn’t such a standard already exist? It’s obvious that Web 2.0 is all about connecting ideas and bringing articles, content, and readers together. But anyone looking at the tagging process would immediately assume it’s about the exact opposite: splitting up content, making things difficult to find, and purposely making bloggers’ lives miserable.
With Habari, so far we’ve gone through all the forms, and at the moment we’re at number 3 for compatability and familiarity’s sake. But that may change - hence the need for a visible, tangible tagging standard. The only problem is, tagging isn’t some new concept. A tagging standard isn’t something that we can just whip up and serve on a platter.
What about the noun/verb argument? Look at the tags for this post: “Blogs, Blogging … Tags, Tagging” We just don’t know what people will search for - and we try to cover all the bases. But then you have so many possibilities! Code, Coding; Design, Designing; Research, Researching. For every pair there is one word more likely than the other. But people like to have all the bases covered, hence all the clutter. Tagging is fun, but only if done the right way.
This article touches on a few of the more obvious issues with implementing a tagging system properly. Tom, Rattle and I have already scoped all the places in Memestreams that use the topic system and are discussing ways to replace it with a tagging system. Believe me, it is not an easy problem!
Tagging by its very nature is more chaotic than a hierarchical topic system. Having a a good implementation is only half the battle: people must tag items well. A item that contains odd or tags that don't best describe the article is in danger of fading away. No one knows exactly what terms it could be filed under. This is where topics do very well. By imposing a controlled vocabulary, a searcher can presumably read the entire vocabulary to see all possible topic words they might be interested in.
In a nutshell, here are some big problems with tags:
-How to handle multiple words -If/how to allow tag delimiter inside a tag -Does letter case matter -Punctuation and symbols -Handling plural or singular words -Date formating -Multiple language support -Colloquialisms/slang
Remote Database management... now with a backdoor!
Topic: Technology
2:45 pm EST, Jan 11, 2007
This article started up quite nicely about about how to run SQL commands against a database in a shared hosting environment where you don't have a SQL console access.
It quickly spiraled into creating a webpage that will run arbitrary .SQL commands against a database.
Once uploaded, hit the remote RunSQL.aspx page via your browser. This will cause the page on your remote server to parse the .SQL file, and execute all of its statements.
Granted the article says to use obscure filenames and to delete it when you are done, but we all know most people won't. That like giving a kid a gun and reminding them to put on ear protection ahead of time and to clean it properly once they have finish shooting themselves in the foot!
Scott Guthrie may be smart but this deserves a "WTF were you thinking!"
The first peak in Apple's stock price (approx 1:45 EST, or 10:45 PST) was at the tail end of Steve Job's demoing the phone. He then goes on to talk about the busniess side (the price, exclusive with Cingular, etc) as well as the target 1% market share goal and the share price drops a little.
It's like watching a sing-a-song, only with lots of money!
Fab@Home is a website dedicated to making and using fabbers - machines that can make almost anything, right on your desktop. This website provides an open source kit that lets you make your own simple fabber, and use it to print three dimensional objects. You can download and print various items, try out new materials, or upload and share your own projects. Advanced users can modify and improve the fabber itself.
Fabbers (a.k.a 3D Printers or rapid prototyping machines) are a relatively new form of manufacturing that builds 3D objects by carefuly depositing materials drop by drop, layer by layer. Slowly but surely, with the right set of materials and a geometric blueprint, you can fabricate complex objects that would normally take special resources, tools and skills if produced using conventional manufacturing techniques. A fabber can allow you explore new designs, email physical objects to other fabber owners, and most importantly - set your ideas free. Just like MP3s, iPods and the Internet have freed musical talent, we hope that blueprints and fabbers will democratize innovation.
Holy Crap! Ok, I'm canceling the flower budget for the wedding and redirecting it to buiding one of these!
There are many way to specify a URL in a hyperlink. For all these examples, assume the user is currently looking at the page http://www.memestreams.net/topics/
In this can, the URL is relative to where the user currently is. The browser already knows it is using the HTTP protocol (HOW), it already knows the hostname (WHERE). The link simply tells the browser the resource to grab (WHAT).
Most people, including me, think that there is no way to create a hyperlink pointing to a different WHERE than you are currently on without specifying the HOW. For example, the following hyperlink does not take you to msblabs.org
This URL construction is perfectly valid, and the // lets the browser know that it should fetch this resource using the current HOW, but that the text after the // but before the / specifies a new WHERE. Yes this is messed up. Yes its in the RFC spec. Yes there are sites in the wild like SlashDot that use this form.
You want me to accept that the users should now become their own UI designers? Doesn't sound good to me. I may not know much about UI, but I know that my generic, fixed width, locked down site design is at least capable of conveying the relevant content to a large percentage of the public.
I don't want a different customized UI's for every user or user agent. I want adaptive UIs.
My mom is not going to design her own style style for a website. But when my mom bumbs the font size of http://www.cnn.com up 2 levels and suddenly the menu bar is going off the screen and text doesn't fit in boxes anymore, that's is a problem.
When a user enters in a bunch of text into a comment block and it appears as one long line going right over the pretty floating table of content, thats a problem.
When I have a 1400x900 screen and a blog renders as a thin vertical strip maybe 700 pixels across thats just silly.
This can be fixed, and it doesn't require you hacking around IE6 lacks of PNG transparency or Safari's crazy JavaScript. It's making smart decisions about how you define the layout of a page.
-- Disclosure Timeline: 2006.02.27 - Pre-existing digital Vaccine released to TippingPoint customers 2006.08.31 - Vulnerability reported to vendor 2006.12.12 - Coordinated public release of advisory
I noticed this in a vuln report for a remote code execution in JavaScript for IE. Maybe this is a mistake, but it appears that TippingPoint aka 3Com took steps to protect/secure their customers 6 months before even reporting the issue.
Surely this cannot be a standard security practice. Is this what corporate 0-day purchasing has forced?
Publishing on the Web is very different from older methods of publication. A Web publication is inherently a general, device-independent and program-independent document with structural markup. The presentation of a document may vary greatly, and it must vary, to allow viewing (or hearing) the same document on a wide variety of devices, ranging from wristwatch monitors to full-size movie screens.
Why the fuck don't we get this yet? We've been doing this for 17 years now, and for all the trendy lip service arty web geeks pay to upholding "web standards" we still end up with shit like this. Got a large screen? Too bad. Fixed margins. Pixel offsets. You *will* look at this webpage this way and no other way (unless you want to write your own style sheet to use my horribly named DOM classes that is).
Just try to increase the font size on any "modern" webpage and watch it utterly break.
We have jumped from enforcing design through diarrhea of the <TABLE> tag in the 90s, to enforcing design through obscenely complex CSS styles. It's the same damn thing.
Dive Into Accessibility: Making truely readable websites
Topic: Technology
2:07 am EST, Jan 7, 2007
Tips about how to make websites more readable for web crawlers as well as human's with disabilities who may be using different user-agents.
Advice includes:
*proper ways to construct alt text *using title attributes in hyperlinks *using link tags to denote forward, back, and up leveling *proper tabel headers
