JK everywhere

No, I'm not talking about the author of Harry Potter...  and I'm actually offended that you even considered this.

I'm talking about the keyboard shortcuts "J" and "K" (amongst others) to scroll/jump up and down in lists.
Using J and K to scroll goes back to the vi editor when you used it on old terminals without cursor keys (or maybe probably earlier, but I know them from vi) ... get the history here.

J/K became really popular with Google Reader (RIP), then later Google+ adopted it, Facebook followed as well, then of course feedly as the Google Reader replacement did it, and now I noticed that flickr (with their infamous redesign) at least adopted J/K navigation.

In case you are not familiar with it... J steps/scrolls down to the next post, K goes one step backward to the previous post.
That simple.

Did Facebook Replace Restaurant Homepages?

This stems from a couple of conversations that I had recently, about how restaurant homepages lack content.
Many of them at best have their contact details, but nothing else.

In one case the phone number was an image file, so I could not even copy-paste the phone number :(
(Or they are total flash-crap).

I don't want to single out anyone, just give examples here, that came up.
All of them, however, do have very active Facebook pages.

One reason I can think of is that Facebook has actually replaced those store / restaurant homepages. And there are good reasons for this

• it comes with hosting / homepage / everything
• it does have a simple content management system (if you really stretch the term) and you don't have to mess around with HTML/CSS or any of that
• it comes with statistics
• you can easily enter a conversation with your "visitors" (or friends or followers)

However, you still might consider having one of those half-empty pages (and domain) so that Google will still index you.

And: no, I could not find any of them on Google+ :(

ToS;DR

We all know, that no-one ever - ever!! - reads the terms-of-service of a web service. So in a very laudable effort, the guys around ToS;DR did this for us.

ToS;DR is of course a play on the ever popular tl;dr, which is not a broken HTML tag, but stands for too-long, didn't read:

Said whenever a nerd makes a post that is too long to bother reading.

(source: Urban Dictionary)

ToS;DR - short for Terms of Service; Didn't Read - takes care of that:

They created a dash board of the most important web services out there, and flagged them from class A (green) to class E (sooo red, you don't really want to touch it) with the most important aspects and consequences of using said service, like e.g. that twitpic by the terms of service you agree to (!) takes credit for your content.

This catalog of services and their ToS is just great. Imagine, this were to be represented as XML (or in any other machine readable format); then a browser extension could actually flag web pages you visit according to their service, i.e. really warn you about your "loss of copyright" (exaggerating) if you upload to twitpic...

I want this!

Start 2012 by Taking 2 Minutes to Clean Your Apps Permissions

Wow, the most simple app ever... just links :)  mypermissions.org

Start 2012 by Taking 2 Minutes to Clean Your Apps Permissions

If you have a habit of trying all new services that come around, and use your Facebook, Twitter, Google, ... account to sign in, then you'll have a mess in the apps/services permissions in Facebook et al.

My Permissions.org just has the links to all those plattforms, directly to the permissions pages.

So simple, yet so useful.

Bookmark this!
Visit it every odd month!

WebOS on my Laptop?

I sort of made fun about WebOS on a PC the other day; but after a nice chat with Max, I began to realize that there indeed is a use for WebOS on a PC... on a Laptop to be precise.

• Imagine a regular Laptop (HP in this case here, if it makes it easier for you :-) )
• Imagine also that by some magic means you'd tell it to boot WebOS instead of Windows/Linux when you power it on or de-hibernate it.
• Imagine that you'd have an excellent browser, video player, good-enough email app, good-enough word/excel/powerpoint viewer and editor, ... all that you have on regular iPads or Android-Tablets today.

That'd give you an iPad/Tablet-like instant-on-gadget with a full QWERTY keyboard and excellent battery life.

On the airport, on the train, on your daily commute, ... this sounds a lot easier than Windows for those situations

Some thoughts and pre-reqs on this:

• You'd need something like a "WebOS key" which you hold to "boot" the WebOS mode.
  Windows must not even start to de-hibernate.
• WebOS would need to be already running (hibernated to flash, or something like that), not really booted from scratch
• The laptop would need an extra power-saving mode and maybe clock the CPU down in WebOS mode so save battery life

And if you really need the full enterprisey stuff to create rich corporate boring PowerPoint presentations with pie-charts and everything, you can still boot into Windows, like you used to.

Come to think of it, I might actually want WebOS on my laptopThinkPad.

TinyURL API

Just noticed that TinyURL also has a (more or less) proper API.

http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=yoururl

with yoururl of course being your url...

Try http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=http://it-conservations.blogspot.com for your favorite blog and see what you get.

Import, Export, Up, Down ?

On a web page (in this case a calendar service on the web) would you really use the DOWN-arrow for import (i.e.UPload to the web page) and the UP-arrow for export (i.e. DOWNload from the web page).


Rather confusing, I thought.
Why not use an arrow that goes INTO a box for import and an arrow that goes OUT OF a box for export...

Bad webpages

While trying to get some answers from the electronic timetable for the mass transit in and around Vienna, I had to cope with a site that makes about every web-mistake in the book (at least in my book).

1. They give you those ancient redirect warnings / helps ("If your browser does not support ...") in 2007 !! A web page that is full of frames assumes that frames do work, but redirects don't.
   Very likely ... and annoying.
   


2. They are totally up-to-date with their list of supported browsers:
   
   • MS Internet Explorer 6
   • Netscape 7
   • Opera 7
   Ever heard of Firefox ? Safari, anyone ?


3. In their search form they use bureaucratic terms like "Anfordern" (sorry for the German) etc. I just want to search and not "apply" for an answer...


4. They don't know when to use drop-downs or radio buttons. Take a look at this search form
   
   The radio buttons are supposed to change the meaning of the second entry field. In the first field you enter your city, in the second one either the name of a station/stop (if you know it), or a street address or any point of interest.
   Would you have guessed that from the layout ?
   Why not do it with a drop-down like this:
   
   


5. And please get rid of the "Start" label... this is not a multi-page wizard that guides me through a complex query, it's just one simple page...

Anyway, you can guess that I don't like this page.

eCommerce how NOT to...

I spent the last 30min of my online life ordering to tickets to a Toumani Diabaté concert in Vienna.

Now - I love to be able to do that online... but I think it would have been faster through a booking call center - that usually takes only 5minutes.

Walking through the order application took about 1-2 minutes per page -- but not user time, no. HTTP Response Time.
And the worst part - guess what...

The final message, where the final confirmation should appear was an asp error...
That's bad.

Real bad.

Do get Arrington'd

When I said "Don't ge Arrington'd" I - of course - implied "without being prepared."

So here the perfect example of getting on Techcrunch and have Michael Arrington drop his jaw.

Adobe Hires Co-Inventor of Image Resizer Technology - the technology that amazed me as well.
(Thanks m3 for the pointer)

Content aware image resizing

This is just incredible - when can we see this in webbrowsers...


via go2web2

Thumbalizr

So, here's an update on the Thumbalizr service I could not report on earlier - see IT conservations: Don't get Arringtoned.
Whatever the reason for the failures earlier today (CET) was, the service now runs - and I'm to humble to attribute this to my rant... ;-)

The purpose of Thumbalizr is to enable you to make "screenshots" of web pages of virtually any size. You can choose between 2 modes:

1. screen - you only get that portion of the page/document, that would fit on a screen
2. page - you get the whole page/document

IT conservations would look like this (screen) or this (page).

From the latter you can tell that blogger and my list of tags don't make a great layout...

Don't get Arrington'd

As a new (Web 2.0) service usually the best thing that can happen to you is to get on Mike Arrington's Techcrunch - and get a good review there.

However, you should to be prepared for this.
Yesterday saw a review of a very promising sounding service called Thumbalizr, that make screenshots / thumbnails from web sites; you just provide the URL of the site and pick the resolution you want. That easy.

Alas, it does not seem to be able to cope with the load it gets, since its review. It constantly fails even to bring up the start page within a reasonable response time, let alone give me a thumbnail of yours truly blog site here.

Well I guess the author on Techcrunch chose the title "Thumbalizr: A Really Good Idea, If It Worked" not by chance.

Well, I'll give it another try in a couple of days.

WebCrash2007 - The Entire Internet has Crashed

Great fun...

via m3s online pamphlet

Web 2.0 - we need to rethink ...

Just found a great video (through Charles Beckham's Weblog) by Mike Wesch which - for me - illustrates the essence of Web 2.0

The Human Clock

There are a couple of sites on the web (1.0, 2.0, whatever, I don't really care), where you can really get lost following the links - in a positive way.
E.g. imdb, partly wikipedia, and also flickr.

While "surfing flickr" I stumbled upon this nice web-site:
The Human Clock™ - A Clock Photo for Every Minute of the Day
There is a different picture for each minute of the day showing the current time of day.
Actually for most of the "minutes" there is more than just one picture, which makes it a lot more fun to watch the time go by.

Totally cool idea and well done.