Usable and Secure

Registration has always been a controversial topic for newspapers.
They need to know who their users are because they are ad-supported and the news doesn't really lend itself to product tie-ins. No one wants to see ads for dog food on the same page that has an expose` on dogfood parasites, know what I mean? So that means content targeted ads are always going to be risky.

The answer is not to target content, but to target users, and the more they can identify about the user the more ...

posted: 2007-02-17 07:11:04 Read More

The power of Zero

So I've been on this minimalism kick for a couple weeks. Basically applying a "less is more" philospophy to software. This time I'm building a site that has no content of its own, no network configuration of its own, no database, etc. I'm trying to build it completely out of reusable components that themselves use sensible defaults allowing for zero-configuration deployments with the flexibility to allow them to be controlled in cases requiring advanced control.

You can see it at homes.knoxzilla.com. In fact you can ...

posted: 2007-02-14 22:43:24 146 comments Read More

Yahoo Pipes

Yahoo has created a mashup engine in the for of Yahoo Pipes.

It's like a visual editor for our classifieds feed manager which is pipe driven -- you define data sources, transforms and outputs -- but this is based on rss and various search apis. You get to plug them together like unix pipes, but visually. Genius! The yahoo guys are clearly having fun...

posted: 2007-02-09 06:30:32 57 comments Read More

Toast

Am I the only one wondering why no one has made an external storage device that looks like a toaster? You know, one that backs itself up to dvd-rw's that load via slots in the top when you depress the lever? Or maybe one of the slots works as an actual toaster, so when it's done you get a back up and a hot pastry. Mmmm....

posted: 2007-02-06 03:28:12 380 comments Read More

Yahoo Tag Maps

These days I've been following the developer api's from Yahoo and Google more closely than usual. A recent release from Yahoo is for Tag Maps. Basically, they use the geo-coded tags from flicker images to gather up a set of tags that have been applied to those images and overlay the tags on they Maps.

This disappointing part is that only two tags show up for Knoxville -- 'UT' ( predictably ) and 'cat.' And the UT tag goes away if you zoom in any closer to UT. Zooming out will ...

posted: 2007-01-20 08:58:26 14 comments Read More

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