Posted by sh1mmer on Mar 31, 2007 in
General A while ago the excellent Simon Willison linked to the No-WWW campaign. It’s been on my to-do list, but no more, it is complete.
The gist is that www.domain is redundant as all Web traffic already uses HTTP already. Since no other protocols (mail, FTP¹) insist on a specific sub-domain the Web shouldn’t either.
Implementation is pretty easy whack these rules in your Apache config or .htaccess file.
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.domain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://domain.com$1 [L,R=301]
</IfModule>
Obviously replace domain.com with your own domain, without forgetting to escape the . in the Rewritecond. Thanks to Big Stu for helping me get the rules tweaked. This one will issue a 301 redirect, which will also help your Google ranking. Any links to www.domain.com and domain.com will get consolidated into one source of true in Google’s eye thereby making your site maximally optimised.
¹ FTP came closest to having a specific sub-domain. A lot of hosting companies still insist on using ftp.domain.com for FTP access.
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simonwillison, nowww, muffinresearch, stuartcolville, rewriterules
Posted by sh1mmer on Mar 30, 2007 in
Personal My baby has been a bit sick recently. So last night I thought I would treat her to a nice long massage. I used to do it all the time, and I still do it sometimes. But, spending an hour taking care of no-one but her gave me back something I’d momentarily forgotten.
Last night, I got to look into the eyes of someone who knows they are really loved, someone who loves like that back. To me that was worth working my fingers to the bone. The paradox is, only selflessness can get you this reward.
I have a new personal goal, make more of my personal goals about what she needs, not just what I need. I guess this is why marriages are about growth.
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reward, selflessness, marrage
Posted by sh1mmer on Mar 29, 2007 in
General There is the old adage Write what you know
. While on a blog it’s easiest and obvious to write about ideas or topics you know intimately, it may not be best for you or your reader.
The problem is Write what you know
is not such a big jump “Read what you know”. I’m pretty liberal, and surprise, surprise the Daily Mail makes me nauseous. However, I shouldn’t be entirely put of by the amount of jingoistic nonsense such sources spout. It’s a mistake to assume that other conclusions than your own are illogical.
I have found that if you break down your decision making process many parts of that process are coloured by emotion. Some very good friends of mine are quite conservative. A major difference in our views often arose from a single point of contention; Should the strong or the capable have a responsibility to support the weak or lesser capable.
I believe that a number of aspects outside of my control (genes, parental influence, schooling, being born in the UK) have given me an advantage over some other people in life. As such I feel I should use some of the benefit I receive to invest in others, and give them chances they may not otherwise have had. This can be through as simple a source as taxation. I am childless, but I am happy in the knowledge my taxes contribute to the education of the nation’s children.¹
On the other hand some of my friends feel that their use of the resource available to them are the reason for their abundance. They would argue that sharing that bounty with people who have not made the same amount of effort (and therefore not reach the same level of abundance) is unfair. They would argue that the world has enough opportunities to allow any man to better themselves and improve his circumstance if he wishes to.²
While I of course often agree with these friends, they are not stupid. I still respect their opinions, I still concede arguments and accept parts of their reasoning. This leads to me blogs, I don’t always wish to write about what I know. I especially don’t wish to read about what I know. That’s one the reasons I write on so many topics.
I started this post attempting to write something exploring how you can find new reading material using Technorati and Google. However I think it turned into something much more fundamental. Blogs make it easy to reenforce the ideas you already have. I blogged this week about a group of people who made harassment their norm. While it’s easy to criticise such a group from the outside, there have been several posts noting what a gradual downslide meankids had.
I can only encourage all my readers to go out and spread their wings, read something different. I’m going to post a follow-up looking at some of the way I find new places to read. If nothing else, do two things:
- Google the antonym of your opinion
- Try stumbleupon for some topics of choice and just see what you find
So, go out there and diversify!
¹ It’s worth noting that I also feel that I have worked hard for what I have. I believe in the theoretical idea of “effortocracy”. Your reward is not based on how much you start with, how much you got from anyone. It’s based on how much you put in.
While I believe that the social benefits system is good, I would advocate the government basic guaranteeing jobs over hand outs. It’s not entirely practical, it’s been argued we can’t invent that many jobs without wiping out the need for minimum wage labour anyway. I would rather have a society which allows everyone to work if they want than one that supports those who are willing to find a way subsist on the minimum the society will give them for doing nothing.
² This argument is the foundation of the American dream.
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blogs, opinions, diversity, meankids, effortocracy, thinking, stumbleupon
Posted by sh1mmer on Mar 28, 2007 in
General The delightful Meri Williams started the Make Me a Speaker project a little while ago. It’s good to see it’s ticking along. There are now several events listed on the Wiki which are looking for speakers. It’s nice to see a number from the North of the UK especially. Although I’d like to see more in the south so I can volunteer.
There is a blog with some great interviews with speakers. It’s well worth checking out.
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Meri Williams, speaker, makemeaspeaker
Posted by sh1mmer on Mar 27, 2007 in
Mac The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) posted about AppFresh today. It helps automate the process of updating apps that don’t have auto-update installed (or updating ones you haven’t run recently).
I have around 300 apps in my apps folder plus 30 something pref panes. While I don’t claim to use all these things constantly I have been trying to play the field. Keep up to date with all those apps is a bit of a pain. MacUpdate or VersionTracker and I Use This help, but it’s too much effort.
Right now it just seems to extract them to your desktop, but I would like to see if progress to be like CaminoKnight. That would rock.
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Mac, Productivity, appfresh, caminoknight
Posted by sh1mmer on Mar 27, 2007 in
General Flame wars get out of hand, sure. I have a slightly twisted sense of humour sometimes, that’s ok. But, making personal attacks on a person, even when you say it’s in the name of humour, is not ok. Kathy explains why.
I hope Kathy calls the police, I hope the ISPs pull the plugs, and I hope the people responsible get the fear when they hear knocking, as the police break down their doors. Most of all I hope every blogger or reader that hears about this sends Kathy some love and shouts from the roof about their outrage.
This is not ok, this never will be ok, this should never happen to again.
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kathysierra, deaththreats, humanrights
Posted by sh1mmer on Mar 26, 2007 in
Personal Now I am back from the North country I am going to proceed to populate last week’s posts. Rather than deluge the feed with a heap all in one go I’m going to try and spread them out a bit. So expect random postings from last week to pop-up as I finish writing up each post onto the computer. No chronology guaranteed.
On a side note I thought I’d mention some of the stuff that has been added to the main blog not so long ago. Those of you using the feed may not have noticed.
On the right hand side navigation bar I have added feature which shows the current, read, and upcoming books on my list. You can click through to a short review of the books that I have read. This is partly because I wanted to manage what I was reading and partly because a few people have asked me what I do read. There will probably be somewhat of a mix between fiction, technical and “self-help” books.
I have also been revamping the categories a little and will continue to migrate old posts out of the “general” category as appropriate.
At some point I may also come up with an improved theme, but we’ll see. I definitely want to do an accessibility review of the blog in near future.
Posted by sh1mmer on Mar 17, 2007 in
Personal So today the wife and I are off to the Lake District on holiday. No laptops are allowed. I still plan to ‘blog’ daily. I don’t know how many posts will get moblogged but there will be material when I get back in around a week.
Ciao.
Posted by sh1mmer on Mar 16, 2007 in
Accessibility Number 10 has issued a response to the petition to make government sites more accessible (or at least comply with WCAG 1.0). In typical political fashion it’s vague, skips the point and talks about stuff that has already failed as if it’s working. It’s a bit like Prime Minister’s question time then.
I’d like to see a more solid answer than this, with a goal of a more transparent process for the commissioning of government web sites. At the very least using PAS 78 needs to become a de-facto part of the process for all government sites.
Technorati Tags:
Accessibility, e-gov, pas78
Posted by sh1mmer on Mar 16, 2007 in
Accessibility One of my daily (or as frequently as Onstad bothers) comics is Achewood. Recently links have been appearing to “Transcribe this comic”.
These are links to a new service called Oh no Robot by Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics¹ fame. It allows web comics to ask their users to transcribe their comics.
The main reasons cited are searchability on your site, and SEO rankings. Chris Onstad has previously said he doesn’t care about accessibility and historically used alt attribute for adding ‘hidden’ messages to each comic. With the advent of IE7 he has switched to a title attribute instead.
I’m going to write to Chris and Ryan and see if this new service can be used to make their highly amusing comics available to everyone. It seems like the transcriptions would be a perfect use of the longdesc attribute. This would not only help their search engine rankings but also open up their work to a whole other section of society.
¹Dinosaur Comics is the comic with the same picture of dinosaurs every time but with different text. It’s pretty funny, and actually lends itself to non-visual readers since it’s basically a conversation anyway. The picture joke is less funny after the 955th time (current comic at time of writing).
Technorati Tags:
Humour, Accessibility, Screen Readers, comics, seo