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Frustrated by MemeStreams? Sick of our bad UI design? Tired of all these stupid people and their insipid political ideas and boring personal interests? Why start a flame war when you can take out your frustrations like a man... with firearms! Send an email to tom@memestreams.net with your mailing address and I'll mail you some MemeStreams sitckers! Stick them to your car. Stick them to your laptop. Stick them to your little sister. Or better yet, take them down to the range...

MemeStreams Stickers!

The answer a web search engine delivers is what it believes is the correct answer for the majority of users – often referred to as "the tyranny of the majority". For example, when you search for 'apple', the first result on most search engines is Apple Computer. But you may have been searching for information about the fruit or Apple Records.

Wow, that sounds like something that I might have said several years ago. In fact, I'm almost certain that I made the exact same statement in my talk at Phreaknic 6, but I used unix people and "cat" as the example rather then talking about apples. Shame I didn't say it online somewhere but I don't think I ever did.

Yahoo made MemeStreams. Sort of. Really, Yahoo made a better del.icio.us with some MemeStreams like features. I'm sure the del.icio.us people are fucking estatic about that given that they just took on some funding. There have been many attempts in the past from various parties to make something which was a lot like what I was trying to make. This is the first one that has significant potential in my opinion.

I wonder if someone from Yahoo has seen MemeStreams. Tim Oreilly recently said that "Hackers are teaching the industry what to do." Of course, he turned down a talk on MemeStreams at the first Emerging Technologies Conference. I'm pretty sure the above "apple" comment was in my proposal.

We don't have the resources that Yahoo has, but we've been at this a hell of a lot longer and I'll bet we get it a hell of a lot better. So, if you've got a million dollars burning a hole in your pocket and chip on your shoulder about Yahoo, I'll bet I can turn it into 10 million while beating the pants off of them in the process. Until such time as someone like that arrives this project will remain a weekend hobby with slow code and design updates.

10 years from now when the entire internet looks like MemeStreams I will still probably be totally unknown and slaving away in a cubicle somewhere, but at least I'll be able to look back and say I told you so.

Yahoo! Search blog: Search, with a little help from your friends

I made a change to the way RSS works for the main page. The immediate effect of this is the next time your RSS client polls the site you'll get a ton of dupes. However, going forward you shouldn't see any more duplicates of posts in the feed.

The Edit Profile form has been updated to be less confusing.

A new Change Password form has been added to the site and is available from the configuration menu.

A problem with column width in certain user's profiles has been fixed.

Some of the new user registration pages have been tweaked for clarity. If you don't have an account here at MemeStreams, make one.

MemeStreams Update: Edit Profile & Change Password pages

terratogen wrote:

Decius wrote:
So what are your thoughts? Pop ups good or bad?

Pop-ups are better. Sometimes I want to cut and paste between the article and the box and a second window makes that easier.

OK, in the editor window there is now a (PopUp) link next to the URL. If you want to pop up a new window with the url in the url edit box, clicking that button will do it.

If you are using IE and you have the new IE bookmarklet, as this popup will be coming from memestreams.net you'll only need to allow pop ups from us in order for this to work.

I also fixed some CSS issues in Firefox.

Another IE Update

Do you think the Recommend and Discuss Bookmarklets should pop up a new window?

IE's pop up blocker can't tell the difference between a pop up ad and a bookmarklet, so I've had to make new bookmarklets for IE that don't pop up a new window. In truth, the IE bookmarklets work in Firefox, and the Firefox bookmarklets work in IE (assuming you disable pop up blocking) so its possible for users of each browser to use the kind of bookmarklets they prefer.

I prefer to have a new window pop up because I like to refer to the original article while I'm editing. However, I'm wondering what the rest of the site thinks. One might reasonably ask why I don't just let users choose which bookmarklets they want to install. The reason is that MemeStreams is intimidating enough to new users without having to ask them to make a decision about that when first joining the site.

So what are your thoughts? Pop ups good or bad?

I've updated the bookmarklets for Internet Explorer. The new IE bookmarklets do not pop up a window, thereby avoiding the annoying problem with IE's pop up blocker. As always, let me know if you have any trouble.

I just updated MemeStreams. There are so many changes, its challenging to come up with a list. There are several major ones, and hundreds of little ones. This is the largest update to the site we have made in a very long time. The bulk of the update has to do with internal workings of the site, but there are a number of things that effect users.

* New Session Handling

All the sections of the site's code that handle cookies and user logins have been changed. This means that everyone will have to login again. There are numerous reasons for this change.

We are not doing much right now to track how you use the site that we have not already been doing, but the current changes are going to allow us to start doing much more. As we continue to improve the site, we will start collecting log information for user pages and make it available for viewing. Examples of this would be how many people read your weblog, view your profile, etc.

We take privacy concerns very seriously, and privacy rights factors heavily into what type of information we log and how we log it. We are not trying to be big brother. We take your right to privacy as seriously as we take our own. The purpose of our cookie tracking is to identify unique users of the site. That information is statistically valuable, and in our implementation it is kept as anonymous as tracking it at all allows. Whatever information we collect is somehow used to empower the users of MemeStreams, not take advantage of you.

User sessions with MemeStreams are now more secure. We have not had a problem with user accounts being hijacked, but its significantly harder to do now. In the future, secure logins will be available, ensuring that you can safely use your account from public and/or "untrusted" networks. (Donations to pay for a SSL certificate are welcome.)

* HTML/CSS Improvements

The use of HTML and CSS in MemeStreams has been on the verge of criminally insane. I can't think of much else to say about it then that. It was really, really bad.

If you evaluated our current HTML/CSS usage, there are still problems even after this update. However, the improvement is massive. Whatever browser you are using, you will see an improvement. IE in particular..

Neither Decius or I use Internet Explorer. We don't catch the subtle problems ourselves. We QA for IE, but not as much as we'd like to. Most of the site's frequent users don't use Internet Explorer either. Well... At least no one who ever complains about problems with the site uses IE. You IE people are damn silent. I personally theorize that users who use Windows are used to getting screwed on a constant basis and just accept a broken website, since they already have a broken computer. We never hear anything out of you. Its possible this has been because the site has barely worked in IE, although I prefer my theory. That aside, if you have problems with the site in Internet Expl... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

MemeStreams Site Update: Summer Solstice

Does anyone who uses this site use it with IE? I've noticed numerous problems. Broken tables, broken bookmarklet, broken pop-up blocking. Some of this is our fault. Some of it is Microsofts fault. But the amazing thing is that no one has complained about any of this to me. I'm trying to get this all sorted out, but I thought I would ask if there are any users out there who use IE with this site and have been struggling with it...