Recently in Geeky Stuff Category

It is still very much in the alpha version, but take a peek at the sidebar of any page of my blog under the heading of My Plurkmates. You will see the early version of my PlurkBuds widget for Movable Type 4.

At the moment, a cron-driven process, written in perl, creates the included module once every 30 minutes. I still have to manually rebuild the pages. The next version will pull the data on the fly. I am still fussing with format and other stuff. Click the picture and be transported to that person's timeline on Plurk.

More about it and future plans soon!

Earlier today, there was a thread on Plurk earlier today, discussing web pages that featured lists of Web 2.0 applications. There are a number of them, some on Web 2.0 apps in general, some on specific areas, like Social 2.0. One of the pages that was noted in the thread was Go2Web20.net, self-termed as the complete Web 2.0 sites directory. It has the standard Flash(y) display of acres of scrollable logos that can be clicked for a further description of the Web 2.0 application.

I digress for a moment (read: rant). I looked at the first several entries (in alpha sort order) and found at least one typographical or spelling error in all but one of the entries. If you want your web site to really rock, take a few extra seconds and re-read what you type (or cut/paste) and correct it. We now return to our regularly scheduled entry.

The first thing I noticed about this web site was that there was no other way to review the list of hundreds of web sites that the creators have collected other than through the Flash interface. You could narrow the list by keyword and search it, but you were still left to poking your way with your mouse. What happens if you don't use a mouse and prefer keyboard shortcuts? More importantly, what if you cannot use a mouse or ever see the Flash application? Let me explain...

Editor's note: apologies in advance if I do not use the currently politically correct terminology for the ability differences described from here forward. In our ever-changing use of language, I may have missed a bulletin.

During my career in IT, I had the great fortune of working with a number of programmers and designers who had problems with vision, hearing, and motor functions. I was always amazed at how they adapted to a wide range of barriers that the world has placed into their path. Back in the early days of computing, programming required the three P's: pencil, paper (coding forms), and punchcard. Quite a challenge for a blind or quadriplegic programmer.

When we moved to more modern technology with terminals and, eventually, PC-based workstations, the challenge was still there, but the solutions were at least possible. One of the first was from Maryland Computer Systems (see some old articles via Google) that could read the screen and use a voice synthesizer to communicate to the blind user. The voice had a very monotone male characteristic, too, as if it came from a Class Z robot movie. The user could, however, adjust the rate at which the words were spoken. An adept user could get to a level of listening at several times the normal rate. Remember, in most cases, it was a string of characters, not words. Say the programmer was working in 360 Assembler - the load address instruction with a label, P100X001 LA    R1,=A(JG00012), would come out as P ONE ZERO ZERO ZERO X ZERO ZERO ONE SPACE L A SPACE SPACE SPACE SPACE etc. Additionally, keystrokes were read back, as well as positioning using cursor keys. This hardware attachment (yes, hardware) which cost in the thousands of dollars worked quite well on standard 80 x 24 (characters by lines) screens. Then came Windows...

With Windows, came such devices as the mouse, trackball, and expanded keyboards. The Maryland Talker could not handle much more that text and keyboards. The first product that I came in contact with was from a firm called Henter-Joyce, now Freedom Scientific. One of the founders, Ted Henter, learned to program after he lost his own vision in an auto accident. The company developed a product that eventually became known as Jaws for Windows. Our blind programmers found it to be a wonderful product embodying the company's slogan, empowering independence. It truly brought them to the technology level of their sighted peers. To experience what a screen reader sounds like, try this demonstration at WebAIM. Ironically, it uses Flash.

There are also adaptive technologies for those with limited or no motor function. We have all seen and heard Stephen Hawking. The most common product that we used was Dragon Dictate (now called Dragon Speaking Naturally) which can be used to not only type, but control a mouse using only your voice.

So, now that I have digressed through a bit of my history of assisting my programmers, what does this have to do with Web 2.0? It all has to do with accessibility. Web 2.0, actually most of the glitz in our world today, connected or not, is designed for the fastest, the slickest, the sexiest effect, something that will catch your eye or please your ears or fit in your palm. What if you can't see or hear or hold something?

According to the American Federation for the Blind, there are approximately 10 million in the US who are considered visually impaired (people who cannot see at all as well as those who have difficulty seeing with eyeglasses or contact lenses), 1.3 million who are legally blind. According to Gallaudet University, 9 to 22 persons out of every thousand have a severe hearing impairment or are deaf. Persons with motor impairments can be due to physical injury to or diseases that affect the muscular or nervous systems.

Although I am not different-abled in these areas (I do wear glasses and my hearing stinks), I could be tomorrow or in the future. That is why we have the guidance of laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act for not only things like handicapped parking spaces, but also for web site design. We have aids like the ATRC Web Accessibility Checker to see where our web pages fail and how we can improve them.

Funny, I often wonder why provide a full text RSS feed. Simple, it is pretty much 100% readable by a screen reader. I also think I will be taking some time over the coming weeks adding accessibility features through the web site. Stay tuned for details.

I hacked a bit of perl code yesterday to draw off the current Atom feed from the US Geological Survey to post to Plurk the latest earthquakes recorded worldwide greater than Magnitude 2.5. It uses the unofficial API to Plurk using Andy Armstrong's WWW::Plurk module.




You can view it at plurkquakes' public timeline - feel free to add it as a friend or just watch!

I really should add my blogroll back to the sidebar (some day), but until I do, I will share some of the items that I read somewhere on the sidebar some time soon. For now, here is the snippet of my most recent reads, courtesy of Google Reader.



I was also playing with reBlog from Eyebeam. While the UI is nice, the problem is that all the publishing code is in PHP (not my forte) and the plugin to integrate the output into MT was for 3.x (meaning I would need to hack it to 4.1). It does not appear to be in active development either - probably no reason to since it seems to work quite well as is. I had previously used Bloglines, but I never cared for it. Since I spend what seems like half my life in Google-land, I figured giving the Reader a good move. We'll see.

For real! I am still constantly amazed at the width and breadth of the new frontiers that are being explored (and exploited) in Internet-aided social networking. Being the übergeek, I tend to get totally lost in what I term as link digression, the downward spiral of looking at references to other neat stuff found while looking for neat stuff. Strange way to express it, I know, but totally fits the activity.

You may have noticed a stub page here on the web site to try and connect the dots in my personal social network. It is hardly started because I find myself going deeper and deeper in the available tools. One site I made the mistake of going to is Mashable, self-termed as the #1 Social Networking and Social Media News Blog. I call it a place to get lost for hours, especially the get-an-invite section, to get an invitation to a newly released beta platform.

While it does provide for hours of entertainment, I do find that some of the social whatevers are simply repeats or wannabees or sad imitations. Also, I am leery at some of their intent in the area of th protection of your personal data. I make it a point to check the domain registration as well. Found one that looked very interesting, a just in time RSS aggregation tool that provides alerts via IM (yes, yet another one of those). The name sounded strange, foreign... did a quick whois and found that the owner and the hosting is located in China. Crossed that one off the list.

So as the adventure continues, I will get around to adding some notes and links and general impressions of these wide-ranging tools, both on the blog and in the Social section of the web site. Oh, and of note, I happened across the Webware 100 awards... like I needed another list of applications to look through...

Trying out SmugMug as an alternative to Flickr. Flickr has just plain got me mad at them, courtesy of Yahoo IDs and trying to combine accounts and frustrating me on both when they don't work. Trying to merge puts me in an endless loop of is this what you want to do and then not doing it. Since I was considering going pro, I might as well pay the money to a place that appears to have their collective act together and not be tied to one particular ID/email address system. Off to investigate their API's and such as well as upload a few pictures while I grab a shower (cleaning the pool is nasty smelling business).

Thinking about it, maybe I will post the SmugMug album covers on Flickr to get it noticed on all the feeds. Not a bad idea!

Always forget to change my Technorati Profile when I move things around. So, here is the verification entry.

I was reading through some saved links and found, by mistake, an entry about a tool I used to use quite frequently called Zempt. So, I reinstalled it and am giving it a swing! Will have to drop a note to Toby Simmons who appears to have picked up the support and development of this fine tool, as well as mention the need to add tags in addition to keywords. Also, find it humorous - the preview tab is preset to use his WordPress layout.

I know that sounds harsh, but it is true. There is even a Wikipedia entry on the subject (doesn't surprise me). For the uninitiated, let me give an example. Let's say I have a nice picture on my web site. You come surfing through and think Geez, that would look nice on my web site! Since I do plainly post both copyright and Creative Commons licenses, I have no problems with others using my published works, provided they give me credit for it. And the term using implies that they serve it from their host, not mine.

Trivial, you say. What are a few extra bytes down the stream? Those few extra bytes add up very quickly if you decide to hot link to my graphic on MySpace or Facebook or some random message board. Last year, I was working on a client's web site. The traffic levels were very consistent from day to day until one day, the site's bandwidth went up 3000%, a trend that only grew. I found out that someone had hotlinked a 125 KB graphic on a page that was featured on Digg, Wired, Slashdot, and a number of other high traffic drawing sites. Bottom line is that my client, not the offender, suddenly had overage charges for bandwidth. Simple equation: bandwidth = money. It also degrades the victim's own web site.

My usual tactic is to change the name of the graphic and modify my site to the new name. Pain in the butt and yes, costs me time to do it. Then the offender gets a broken image and, yes, I get an additional 404 (file not found) line in my log files.

If you are serving your web site with Apache and have mod_rewrite enabled, another method is available. Simply add the following lines to the .htaccess file in your web root directory:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?yourdomain/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|js|css|swf|png)$ - [F]

substituting your domain name in it. The drawback of this is that you cannot use your own images on other web sites outside the domain unless you modify the rules for each reference (PITA).

And, of course, retribution can be fun too. This can be done with method 1, replacing the hotllinked file with it, or with some server side tricks, like mod_rewrite or scripting. The "it" is a graphic that will give a subtle hint to the offender that you are really displeased with what they are doing...




Sad to say, this either draws flames or, worse yet, more folks hotlinking to it.

What's the best way to deal with it? Most times, I leave them a comment or send them an email and ask them to conform to the rules of common courtesy. If that doesn't work, I just remove/rename the graphic. It all takes time, time that I could be doing more resourceful things.

As a part of getting things back in alignment for this and other web sites that I own or manage, I have been reviewing all sorts of tools that I have used to get into the search engines and various aggregation tools.

Unifying the entry ping via FeedBurner solved one major issue. Now every time I make an entry, not only does my FeedBurner feed get updated, but all the major players get notified as well. Not that the world-wide blogosphere community gives a hoot about my writings, but it makes sure that just in case someone is looking for something, they can find it.

Vanity is a driving force in anyone who builds a web site (admit it, I do). You want to be in Google and Yahoo and other search engines and, of course, near or at the top of the list.

One major place to find out about what to do is Google Webmaster Tools. You can find out whether or not Google is indexing your web site and to what extent they are. The best way to let Google know what is on your web site is to build a sitemap.

They provide you will an easy to configure and run tool (written in Python) to do just that. It basically walks through your  web directory structure and builds the appropriate XML file for submission. Using the configuration file, you can include as well as exclude any directories or file types. That way you can hide directories or files that you do not want available through search. I have mine configured to run via cron every hour, recreating the complete sitemap. If you do not have shell access, they are a variety of other tools that you can install or run from the web to create sitemaps. Some blogging software also have plugins that can be used to generate sitemaps.

From the webmaster's dashboard (all driven as a part of your Google account), you can let Google know where your sitemap is as well as check to insure that it is being properly digested by Google's crawling mechanism.

A quick check to see your site's current status within Google can be gotten on the Site Status Wizard page. Just enter your web site address and you will be notified if any (not which) of your pages are in Google and the last time Googlebot crawled around your site.

Now that you have Google crawling about, you should want to make sure that you have visitors crawling about too. Enter Google Analytics. You may already use log file analysis programs (awstats, for example), but Google Analytics provides not only additional information, tied to search engine entry, but also ways that you can set goals and see if they are being met for particular portions of your web site.

So, get all this stuff in place and watch the readers flock to you? While it helps you get in the mix of search engines, you still have to provide content. Provide good content and they will come!