web – Page 11

Pay To Post

I see that Facebook is experimenting with allowing you to pay a nominal fee to make sure that your posts end up “highlighted” over those of your friends’ other friends. That’s a whole new level of crazy… or is it?

I’m not on Facebook, but I think that this is a really interesting piece of news. The biggest thing that makes Facebook unusable (and which also affects Twitter) is that people will post every little banal thing that comes to their mind. I don’t care what you’re eating for your lunch. I don’t want to read the lyrics of some song that must have been written for you. I really can’t stand your chain messages (for a while there, after I hadn’t received any by email for a few years, I hoped that they’d died out… but it turns out that they just moved to Facebook instead). If you’re among my friends, I know that you have some pretty smart and interesting things to say… but unless I’m willing to spend hours sifting through the detritus it’s buried in, I’ll never find it.

Social Media Citation. The littering fine tickets of the digital generation.

But this might work. If the price sweet spot can be found, and it’s marketed right, then this kind of feature might make services like Facebook more tolerable. When you’re writing about a cute picture of the cat you’ve seen, that’s fine. And when you write something I might care about, you can tick the “this is actually relevant” box. You’ll have to pay a few pence, but at least you know I’ll see it. And if I want to churn through reams of “X likes Chocolate” (who doesn’t?) and “Y is… in a queue for the bus” then I can turn off the “only relevant things” mode and waste some time.

The problem is that the sweet spot will vary from person to person, and there’s no way to work around that. Big Bucks Bob can probably afford to pay a couple of pounds every time he wants to push some meme photo to the top of your feed, but Poor Penniless Penny can’t even justify ten pence to make sure that all of her friends hear about her birthday party.

It’s a pity that it won’t work, because a part of me is drawn to the idea that economic theory can help to improve the signal-to-noise ratio in our information-saturated lives. Turning my attention to email: of all the cost-based anti-spam systems, I was always quite impressed with Hashcash (which Microsoft seem to be reinventing with their Penny Black project). The idea is that your computer does some hard-to-do (but easy-to-verify) computational work for each and every email that it sends. But in its own way, Hashcash has a similar problem to Facebook’s new system: the ability to pay of a sender is not directly proportional to their relevance to the recipient. If my mother wants to send me an email from her aging smartphone, should she have to wait for several minutes while it processes and generates an “e-stamp”, just because – if it were made any faster – spammers with zombie networks of computers could do so too easily?

Yes, I just equated your social network status, about what you ate for your lunch, with spam. If you don’t like it, don’t share this blog post with your friends.

hashcash token: 1:20:120511:https://danq.me/2012/05/11/pay-to-post/::UVHo081pj6bSDWkI:00000000000001sxI

On This Day In 2004

Looking Back

On this day in 2004 I handed in my dissertation, contributing towards my BEng in Software Engineering. The topic of my dissertation was the Three Rings project, then in its first incarnation, a web application originally designed to help university Nightlines to run their services.

An early Three Rings Directory page. If you remember when Three Rings used to look like this, then you're very old.

I’d originally started developing the project early in the previous academic year, before I’d re-arranged how I was going to finish my course: Three Rings celebrates its tenth birthday this year. This might be considered to have given me a head start over my peers, but in actual fact it just meant that I had even more to write-up at the end. Alongside my work at SmartData a few days a week (and sometimes at weekends), that meant that I’d been pretty damn busy.

A page from my dissertation, covering browser detection and HTTPS support (then, amazingly, still not-quite-universal in contemporary browsers).

I’d celebrated hitting 10,000 words – half of the amount that I estimated that I’d need – but little did I know that my work would eventually weigh in at over 30,000 words, and well over the word limit! In the final days, I scrambled to cut back on text and shunt entire chapters into the appendices (A through J), where they’d be exempt, while a team of volunteers helped to proofread everything I’d done so far.

Finally, I was done, and I could relax. Well: right up until I discovered that I was supposed to have printed and bound two copies, and I had to run around a busy and crowded campus to get another copy run off at short notice.

Looking Forward

Three Rings went from strength to strength, as I discussed in an earlier “on this day”. When Bryn came on board and offered to write programs to convert Three Rings 1 data into Three Rings 2 data, in 2006, he borrowed my dissertation as a reference. After he forgot that he still had it, he finally returned it last month.

The inside front cover of my dissertation, along with a note from Bryn.

Later still in 2009, Ruth expanded Three Rings as part of her Masters dissertation, in a monumental effort to add much-needed features at the same time as getting herself a degree. After handing it in and undergoing her defense (which went better than she expected), she got a first.

My dissertation (left) back on my bookshelf, where it belongs.

Today, Three Rings continues to eat a lot of my time, and now supports tens of thousands of volunteers at hundreds of different helplines and other charities, including virtually every Nightline and the majority of all Samaritans branches.

It’s grown even larger than I ever imagined, back in those early days. I often tell people that it started as a dissertation project, because it’s simpler than the truth: that it started a year or two before that, and provided a lot of benefit to a few Nightlines, and it was just convenient that I was able to use it as a part of my degree because otherwise I probably wouldn’t have had time to make it into what it became. Just like I’m fortunate now to have the input of such talented people as I have, over the last few years, because I couldn’t alone make it into the world-class service that it’s becoming.

This blog post is part of the On This Day series, in which Dan periodically looks back on years gone by.

Visitor Tracking Without Cookies (or How To Abuse HTTP 301s)

Last week I was talking to Alexander Dutton about an idea that we had to implement cookie-like behaviour using browser caching. As I first mentioned last year, new laws are coming into force across Europe that will require websites to ask for your consent before they store cookies on your computer. Regardless of their necessity, these laws are badly-defined and ill thought-out, and there’s been a significant lack of information to support web managers in understanding and implementing the required changes.

British Telecom's implementation of the new cookie laws. Curiously, if you visit their site using the Opera web browser, it assumes that you've given consent, even if you click the button to not do so. — British Telecom’s implementation of the new cookie laws. Curiously, if you visit their site using the Opera web browser, it assumes that you’ve given consent, even if you click the button to not do so.

To illustrate one of the ambiguities in the law, I’ve implemented a tool which tracks site visitors almost as effectively as cookies (or similar technologies such as Flash Objects or Local Storage), but which must necessarily fall into one of the larger grey areas. My tool abuses the way that “permanent” (301) HTTP redirects are cached by web browsers.

[callout][button link=”http://c301.scatmania.org/” align=”right” size=”medium” color=”green”]See Demo Site[/button]You can try out my implementation for yourself. Click on the button to see the sample site, then close down all of your browser windows (or even restart your computer) and come back and try again: the site will recognise you and show you the same random number as it did the first time around, as well as identifying when your first visit was.[/callout]

Here’s how it works, in brief:

A user visits the website.
The website contains a <script> tag, pointing at a URL where the user’s browser will find some Javascript.
The user’s browser requests the Javascript file.
The server generates a random unique identifier for this user.
The server uses a HTTP 301 response to tell the browser “this Javascript can be found at a different web address,” and provides an address that contains the new unique identifier.
The user’s browser requests the new document (e.g. /javascripts/tracking/123456789.js, if the user’s unique ID was 123456789).
The resulting Javascript is generated dynamically to automatically contain the ID in a variable, which can then be used for tracking purposes.
Subsequent requests to the server, even after closing the browser, skip steps 3 through 5, because the user’s browser will cache the 301 and re-use the unique web address associated with that individual user.

How my "301-powered 'cookies'" work. — How my “301-powered ‘cookies'” work.

Compared to conventional cookie-based tracking (e.g. Google Analytics), this approach:

Is more-fragile (clearing the cache is a more-common user operation than clearing cookies, and a “force refresh” may, in some browsers, result in a new tracking ID being issued).
Is less-blockable using contemporary privacy tools, including the W3C’s proposed one: it won’t be spotted by any cookie-cleaners or privacy filters that I’m aware of: it won’t penetrate incognito mode or other browser “privacy modes”, though.

Moreover, this technique falls into a slight legal grey area. It would certainly be against the spirit of the law to use this technique for tracking purposes (although it would be trivial to implement even an advanced solution which “proxied” requests, using a database to associate conventional cookies with unique IDs, through to Google Analytics or a similar solution). However, it’s hard to legislate against the use of HTTP 301s, which are an even more-fundamental and required part of the web than cookies are. Also, and for the same reasons, it’s significantly harder to detect and block this technique than it is conventional tracking cookies. However, the technique is somewhat brittle and it would be necessary to put up with a reduced “cookie lifespan” if you used it for real.

[callout][button link=”http://c301.scatmania.org/” align=”right” size=”medium” color=”green”]See Demo Site[/button] [button link=”https://gist.github.com/avapoet/5318224″ align=”right” size=”medium” color=”orange”]Download Code[/button] Please try out the demo, or download the source code (Ruby/Sinatra) and see for yourself how this technique works.[/callout]

Note that I am not a lawyer, so I can’t make a statement about the legality (or not) of this approach to tracking. I would suspect that if you were somehow caught doing it without the consent of your users, you’d be just as guilty as if you used a conventional approach. However, it’s certainly a technically-interesting approach that might have applications in areas of legitimate tracking, too.

Update: The demo site is down, but I’ve update the download code link so that it still works.

Moving Things Around With CSS Transitions

As I indicated in my last blog post, my new blog theme has a “pop up” Dan in the upper-left corner. Assuming that you’re not using Internet Explorer, then when you move your mouse cursor over it, my head will “duck” back behind the bar below it.

This is all done without any Javascript whatsoever: it’s pure CSS. Here’s how it’s done:

<div class="sixteen columns"> <div id="dans-creepy-head"></div> <h1 id="site-title" class="graphic"> <a href="/" title="Scatmania">Scatmania</a> </h1> <span class="site-desc graphic"> The adventures and thoughts of "Scatman" Dan Q </span> </div>

The HTML for the header itself is pretty simple: there’s a container (the big blue bar) which contains, among other things, a <div> with the id "dans-creepy-head". That’s what we’ll be working with. Here’s the main CSS:

#dans-creepy-head { position: absolute; top: -24px; left: 15px; width: 123px; height: 133px; background: url(/dans-creepy-head.png) top left no-repeat; transition: all 800ms; -o-transition: all 800ms; -webkit-transition: all 800ms; -moz-transition: all 800ms; } #dans-creepy-head:hover { top: 100px; height: 60px; }

The CSS sets a size, position, and background image to the <div>, in what is probably a familiar way. A :hover selector changes the style to increase the distance from the top of the container (from -24px to 100px) and to decrease the height, cropping the image (from 133px to 60px – this was necessary in this case to prevent the bottom of the image from escaping out from underneath the masking bar that it’s supposed to be “hiding behind”). With just that code, you’d have a perfectly workable “duck”, but with a jerky, one-step animation.

The transition directive (and browser-specific prefix versions -o-transition, -webkit-transition, and -moz-transition, for compatability) are what makes the magic happen. This element specifies that any ("all") style is changed on this element (whether via CSS directives, as in this case, or by a change of class or properties by a Javascript function), that a transition effect will be applied to those changes. My use of "all" is a lazy catch-all – I could have specified the individual properties ( top and height) that I was interested in changing, and even put different periods on each, but I’ll leave it to you to learn about CSS3 transition options for yourself. The 800ms is the duration of the transition: in my case, 0.8 seconds.

html.ie #dans-creepy-head:hover { top: -24px; height: 133px; } @media (max-width: 780px) { #dans-creepy-head { display: none; } }

I apply some CSS to prevent the :hover effect from taking place in Internet Explorer, which doesn’t support transitions. The "ie" class is applied to the <html> tag using Paul Irish’s technique, so it’s easy to detect and handle IE users without loading separate stylesheet files for them. And finally, in order to fit with my newly-responsive design, I make the pop-up head disappear when the window is under 780px wide (at which point there’d be a risk of it colliding with the title).

That’s all there is to it! A few lines of CSS, and you’ve got an animation that degrades gracefully. You could equally-well apply transformations to links (how about making them fade in or out, or change the position of their background image?) or, with a little Javascript, to your tabstrips and drop-down menus.

A New Look

Well, it’s been over a year since I last updated the look-and-feel of my blog, so it felt like it was time for a redesign. The last theme was made during a period that I was just recovering from a gloomy patch, and that was reflected the design: full of heavy, dark reds, blacks, and greys, and it’s well-overdue a new look!

I was also keen to update the site to in line with the ideas and technologies that are becoming more commonplace in web design, nowadays… as well as using it as a playground for some of the more-interesting CSS3 features!

Key features of the new look include:

A theme that uses strong colours in the footer and header, to “frame” the rest of the page content.
A responsive design that rescales dynamically all the way from a mobile phone screen through tablets, small 4:3 monitors, and widescreen ratios (try resizing your browser window!).
CSS transitions to produce Javascript-less dynamic effects: hover your cursor over the picture of me in the header to make me “hide”.
CSS “spriting” to reduce the number of concurrent downloads your browser has to make in order to see the content. All of the social media icons, for example, are one file, split back up again using background positioning. They’re like image maps, but a million times less 1990s.
Front page “feature” blocks to direct people to particular (tagged) areas of the site, dynamically-generated (from pre-made templates) based on what’s popular at any given time.
A re-arrangement of the controls and sections based on the most-popular use-cases of the site, according to visitor usage trends. For example, search has been made more-prominent, especially on the front page, the “next post”/”previous post” controls have been removed, and the “AddToAny” sharing tool has been tucked away at the very bottom.

[spb_message color=”alert-warning” width=”1/1″ el_position=”first last”]Note that some of these features will only work in modern browsers, so Internet Explorer users might be out of luck![/spb_message]

As always, I’m keen to hear your feedback (yes, even from those of you who subscribe by RSS). So let me know what you think!

8-Bit Google Maps

It’s like stepping back in time through videogaming history. And also sideways, into a parallel universe of knights and dragons.

It’s like Google Maps, but in the style of retro top-down, turn-based RPGs. It’s really quite impressive: it’s presumably being generated at least semi-dynamically (as it covers the whole world), but it’s more than a little impressive. It sometimes makes mistakes with rivers – perhaps where their visibility from the air is low – but nonetheless an interesting feat from a technical perspective.

There’s “8-bit Street View”, too.

Nice one, Google. Go take a look.

On This Day In 2011

Looking Back

On this day in 2011 I launched FreeDeedPoll.org.uk, a site that tries to make it as easy as possible for British citizens to change their names (and have those new names accepted as being legally-recognised).

The thing that people often don’t realise is that, as a British citizen, you have the right to be known by pretty-much any name you like. You don’t need a solicitor to change your name. You don’t even need any money. You can just start using it. A deed poll, which you can make all by yourself for free, is just a piece of paper on which you write a promise that you consider your “new” name to be your primary moniker, and not your “old” one.

Over the last year, almost 3,000 deed polls have been generated using the site, including ones for my partner Ruth (who opted to keep her maiden name as a middle name after she got married) and my friend Jen (who now has among the coolest – and most hippyish – collection of names I’ve ever seen). As to how many of the other thousands of deed polls have actually been used, I simply don’t know: as a commitment to privacy, no logs are kept of the names people enter onto the form, so for all I know there are 2,000 all the same and 998 “blank” submissions.

Looking Forward

I’ve become a minor Internet guru on the topic of name changes, it turns out. The other week, a transgendered stranger contacted me via the “chat to Dan” link, to ask about the legal aspects of their (slightly more-complex than most) case for changing their name. And because I’m a fan of helping people, I did a little research with them in order to find the answers. I felt the need to keep stressing that IANAL, but I’m pretty sure I managed to help, anyway.

And over the New Year, when there were a few days of downtime for the site (I was part of an exodus of domains from my SOPA-supporing previous registrar, and they made the process difficult), I received messages from people asking when it would be back up again, so it’s obviously getting some use.

Most recently, a few days ago, a stranger emailed me asking for advice on the legal issues in changing the names of his children. After doing the necessary research, I’m now thinking of expanding the site to make this easier, too.

A strange feeling for me has been that this project is, and has been for the last year, “finished”. I’m not very good at finishing technical projects: one of the biggest and most important things that I’ve worked on – Three Rings – is now in its tenth year and shows no sign of being “finished”. So it feels odd to have developed a website that’s complete, done and dusted, and probably won’t require more than a modicum of maintenance over the coming decades to keep it running.

It’s good, though, that I’ve been able to help people with something about which far too many are underinformed. It gives me a warm fuzzy feeling, and I like it.

To mark the ocassion, I’ve updated the open-source version of the tool so that it works “out of the box”: it now includes all of the (free) fonts you need to get started, and can be used without setting up reCAPTCHA if you like. For more information about the history of the project, see my project page about it.

This blog post is part of the On This Day series, in which Dan periodically looks back on years gone by.

Goodbye Reader

Goodbye, Google Reader. It was fun while it lasted.

Long ago, I used desktop RSS readers. I was only subscribed to my friends’ blogs back then anyway, so it didn’t matter that I could only read them from my home computer. But then RSS feeds started appearing on news sites, and tech blogs started appearing about things related to my work. And smartphones took over the world, and I wanted to be able to synchronise my reading list everywhere. There were a few different services that competed for my attention, but Google Reader was the best. It was simple, and fast, and easy, and it Just Worked in that way that Google products often do.

I put up with the occasional changes to the user interface. Hey, it’s a beta, and it’s still the best thing out there. Hey, it’s free, what can you say? I put up with the fact that from time to time, they changed the site in ways that were sometimes quite hostile to Opera, my web browser of choice. I put up with the fact that it had difficulty with unsigned HTTPS certificates (it’s fine now) and that it didn’t provide a mechanism to authenticate against services like LiveJournal (it still doesn’t). I even worked around the latter, releasing my own tool and updating it a few times until LiveJournal blocked it (twice) and I had to instead recommend that people switched to rival service FreeMyFeed.

But the final straw came this week when Google “updated” Reader once again, with two awful new changes:

I know that they’re ever-so-proud of the Google+ user interface, but rebranding all of the other services to look like it just isn’t working. It’s great for Google+, not-bad for Search, bad for GMail (but at least you can turn it off!), and fucking awful for Reader. I like distinct borders between my items. I don’t like big white spaces and buttons that eat up half the screen.
The sharing interface is completely broken. After a little while, I worked out that I still can share things with other people, but I can’t any longer see what other people are sharing without clicking over to Google+. This sucks a lot. No longer can I keep track of which shared items I have and haven’t read, and no longer can I read the interesting RSS feeds my friends have shared in the same place as I read (and share) my own.

So that’s the last straw. Today, I switched everything over to Tiny Tiny RSS.

Originally I felt that I was being pushed “away” from Google Reader, but the more I’ve played with it, the more I’ve realised that I’m being drawn “towards” Tiny Tiny, and wishing that I’d made the switch further. The things that have really appealed are:

It’s self-hosted. Tiny Tiny RSS is a free, open-source solution that you host for yourself (or I suppose you can use a shared host; there are a few around). I know that this is a downside to most people, but to me, it’s a serious selling point: now, I’m in control of what updates are applied, when, and if I don’t like the functionality of a part of the system, I can change it – I’m in control.
It’s simple and clean. It’s got a great user interface, in an understated and simplistic way. It’s somewhat reminiscent of desktop email clients, replacing the “stream of feeds” idea with a two- or three-pane view (your choice). That sounds like it’d be a downside, until you realise…
…with great keyboard controls. Tiny Tiny RSS is great for keyboard lovers like me. The default key-commands (which are of course customisable) are based on Emacs, so if that’s your background then it’s easy to be right at home in minutes and browsing feeds faster than ever.
Plus: it’s got a stack of nice features. I’m loving the “fresh” filter, that helps me differentiate between the stuff I’ve “saved for later” reading and the stuff that’s actually new and interesting. I’m also impressed by the integrated authentication, which removes my dependency on FreeMyFeed-like services and (because it’s self-hosted) lets me keep my credentials securely under my own control. It supports authentication using SSL certificates, a beautiful and underused technology. It allows you to customise the update frequency of your feeds, so I can stalk by friends’ blogs at lightning-quick rates and stall my weekly update subscriptions so they don’t get checked so frequently. And unlike Google Reader, it actually tells me when feeds break, so I don’t just “get no updates” for a while before I think to check the site (and it’ll even let me change the URLs when this happens, rather than unsubscribing and resubscribing).

Put simply: all of my major gripes with Google Reader over the last few years have been answered all at once in this wonderful little program. If people are interested in how I set up Tiny Tiny RSS and and made the switchover as simple and painless as possible, I’ll write a blog post to talk you through it.

I’ve had just one problem: it’s not quite so tolerant of badly-formed XML as Google Reader. There’s one feed in my list which, it turns out, has (very) invalid XML in it’s feed, that Google Reader managed to ignore and breeze over, but Tiny Tiny RSS chokes on. I’ve contacted the site owner to try to get it fixed, but if they don’t, I might have to hack some code to try to make a workaround. Not ideal, and not something that everybody would necessarily want to deal with, so be aware!

If, like me, you’ve become dissatisfied by Google Reader this week, you might also like to look at rssLounge, the other worthy candidate I considered as a replacement. I had a quick play but didn’t find it quite as suitable for my needs, but it might be to your taste: take a look.

Oh, and one more thing: if you used to “follow” me on Google Reader (or even if you didn’t) and you want to continue to subscribe to the stuff I “share”, then you’ll want to subscribe to this new RSS feed of “my shared stuff”, instead: it can also be found syndicated in the right-hand column of my blog.

Update: this guy’s made a bookmarklet that makes the new Google Reader theme slightly less hideous. Doesn’t fix the other problems, though, but if you’re not quite pissed-off enough to jump ship, it might make your experience more-bearable.

Update 2: others in the blogosphere are saying good things about Reader rival NewsBlur, which recently turned one year old. If you’re looking for a hosted service, rather than something “roll-your-own” like Tiny Tiny RSS, perhaps it’s the tool for you?

The Back Button

How did I get here?

While lying in bed, unwell and off work, last month, I found myself surfing (on my new phone) to the Wikipedia page on torsion springs. And that’s when I found myself wondering – how did I get here?

Thankfully, there’s always the back button: famously the second most-used bit of your web browser’s user interface. So… how did I come to be reading about torsion springs?

An anniversary clock, using a torsion pendulum, so-named because it only needs winding once a year.

I got there from reading about torsion pendulum clocks. My grandmother used to have one of these (an “anniversary clock”, like the one above, and I remember that I used to always enjoy watching the balls spin when I was a child).
I’d followed a link from the article about the Atmos clock, a type of torsion pendulum clock that uses minute variations in atmospheric temperature and pressure to power the winder and which, in ideal circumstances, will never need winding.
Before that, I’d been reading about the Beverly Clock, a classic timepiece that’s another example of an atmospheric-pressure-clock. It’s been running for almost 150 years despite having never been wound.
This was an example of another long-running experiment given on the page about the Oxford Electric Bell, which is perhaps the world’s longest-running scientific experiment. Built in 1840, it uses a pair of electrostatic batteries to continuously ring a bell.

The Oxford Electric Bell experiment. It's batteries have lasted for over 160 years, but I have to charge my mobile most nights: what gives, science? — The Oxford Electric Bell experiment. It’s batteries have lasted for over 160 years, but I have to charge my mobile most nights: what gives, science?

I got to the Oxford Electric Bell from another long-running experiment – the one acknowledged as the world’s longest-running by the Guinness Book of Records – the University of Queensland Pitch Drop Experiment. Running since 1927, this experiment demonstrates that pitch is not solid but a high-viscosity fluid. A sample of room-temperature pitch in a funnel forms a droplet about once a decade.
Earlier, I was learning about the difference between the different substances we call tar. Traditionally, tar is derived by baking pine wood and roots into charcoal, and collecting the runoff, but we also use the word “tar” to describe coal tar (a byproduct of coke production) and bitumen (viscous, sticky crude oil).
I took the initiative to learn about those differences after reading about the name “Jack Tar“, an Empire-era slang term for a sailor in the Merchant Navy or Royal Navy…
…which in turn was linked from the similar article about “Tommy Atkins“, a term for a British infantryman (particularly in the First World War), which has an interesting history…
…to which I got from the “Doughboy” article. The Doughboys were members of the American Expeditionary Force during the First World War.

R.U.R. - "Private Robot" - loads an artillery piece. — R.U.R. – “Private Robot” – loads an artillery piece.

Finally, I got to that first Wikipedia article while, when reading an article on The Paleofuture Blog, I wondered about the etymology of the term “doughboy”, and began this whole link-clicking adventure.

It’s fascinating to work out “how you got here” after an extended exploration of a site like Wikipedia (or TV Tropes, or Changing Minds, or Uncyclopedia – and there goes your weekend…). Thank you, Back Button.

I just wish I had a Back Button in my head so that I could “wind back” my wandering thought processes. How did I end up thinking about the salt content of airline food, exactly?

On This Day In 2003

Looking Back

On this day in 2003, I first launched this weblog! That means it’s eight years old today! I’d bought the scatmania.org domain name some time earlier with the intention of setting up a vanity site separately from my sub-site on the avangel.com domain, during a rush on cheap domain names perpetrated by some of the friends I’d lived with in Penbryn, but never found a significant use for it until this day. It was at about the same time that I first set up (the long-defunct) penbryn-hall.co.uk, a parody of Penbryn’s website launched as an April Fools joke against the hall, which eventually got me into some trouble with the management committee of the halls. Some friends and I had made it a tradition of ours to play pranks around the residence: our most famous one was probably 2003’s joke, in which we made a legitimate room inspection out to be an April Fools joke, with significant success.

In my initial blog post, I took care to point out that this wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination my first foray into blogging. In actual fact, I’d run a weblog, The Åvatar Diary, for a few years back in college: a few fragments of this still exist and are archived here, too. I suppose that this means that, ignoring the occasional gap, I’ve been blogging for almost thirteen years. The Åvatar Diary died after an incident with a rather creepy stalker: remember that this was in 1999, back in the day when Creepy Internet Stalkers were still new and exciting, and I panicked slightly and shut the Diary down after my stalker turned up in person somewhere that I’d hinted that I might be in a post.

I didn’t mention the new site launch, to begin with, hoping that folks might just “pick up on it” having re-appeared (I’d been promising to launch something at that domain for ages). Later, I launched Abnib, in an attempt to unite the LiveJournal users with whom I associated with those of us who hosted our own blogs. Abnib still runs, after a fashion, although I’m likely to let it die a natural death as soon as it wants to.

Looking Forward

So here I am, eight years later, still blogging on the same domain. The frequency with which I write has waxed and waned over the years, but I still find that it’s just about the best way for me to keep in touch with my friends and to keep them posted about what’s going on in my life: it’s unintrusive and can be dipped in and out of, it’s accessible to everybody, and – because I host it on my own domain – it’s under my control. That’s a million points in its favour over, say, Facebook, and it’s nice to know that it’ll exist for exactly as long as I want it to.

It also provides a great “starting point” by which people find me. Google for me by name or by many of the aliases I go by and you’ll find this site, which I think is just great: if people are trying to find me online I’m happiest knowing that the first pages they’ll get to are pages that I control, and on which I write what I want to: I’ll bet U.S. Senator Rick Santorum wishes that he had that.

I enjoy blogging about geeky stuff that interests me, things that are going on in my life, and my occasional and random thoughts about life, the universe, and everything (with a particular focus on technology and relationships). It’s put me in contact with some strange people – from pizza delivery guys who used to bring me food on Troma Nights back in Aber to crazy Internet stalkers and confused Indian programmers – and it’s helped me keep in touch with the people closest to me. And because I’m a nostalgic beast, as this and similar posts show, it’s a great excuse to back-link my way down memory lane from time to time, too.

This blog post is part of the On This Day series, in which Dan periodically looks back on years gone by.

Abnib Lives On

Okay, okay, I get it!

After my blog post a few days ago about the imminent death of the oft-neglected Abnib, I received a surge of complaints by IM, email, and comments. It turns out that a higher-than-expected number of you are actually using the site on a daily basis.

So I’ve extended its life by a further two years, at least. I’ve also done some quick hacking to put together a new, more-maintainable framework for it. I give to you all: Abnib 7.0!

Abnib 7.0. It's survived being shot in the head twice now, so we can be sure that it's not a zombie.

Features not in 6.0 but now present include:

Easier to maintain; so when new blogs appear or old ones disappear, there’s a chance that it’ll be kept up-to-date.
Really ugly new skin thrown together in a few minutes.
Combined RSS and OPML feeds, to make it easy for you to switch to a better aggregator, as I assumed you all already had.
It’s a little faster to update itself and a lot faster to use.
Abnib Tweets, for those of you who are of the twittering persuasion. I’m not, so if there’s anybody I’ve missed you’ll have to let me know.
Abnib Rockmonkey – a random daily snippet from the long-dead Rockmonkey wiki.
Abnib Chat, the return of the abandoned chat room. Hey; if people still want Abnib, maybe they still want this, too… but I shan’t hold my breath! And no, the old Rockmokney bot, Iggy, isn’t there, so there’ll be no random cries of “Surfboard!” unless you bring them yourself.

Update: Wow. So far the chat room’s seen Matt R, Ruth, Bryn, Claire and me. Just not at the same time. It’s just like old times (although Iggy, who I just reinstated, is yet to say “surfboard” even once…)

The Death of Abnib

Next month, Abnib will die.

It’s been unmaintained for several years now, just ticking along under its own steam and miraculously not falling over. Nowadays, everybody seems to understand (or ought to understand) RSS and can operate their own aggregator, so there doesn’t really seem to be any point in carrying on running the service. So when the domain name comes up for renewal next month, I shan’t be renewing it. If somebody else wants to do so, I’ll happily tell them the settings that they need, but it’ll be them that’s paying for it, not me.

“But I still use Abnib!” I hear you cry. Well, here’s what you can do about it:

Option 1 (the simple-but-good option): switch to something better, easily

RSS aggregators nowadays are (usually) free and (generally) easy to use. If you don’t have a clue, here’s the Really Simple Guide to getting started:

Download the Abnib OPML file (https://danq.me/abnib.opml) and save it to your computer. This file describes in a computer-readable format who all the Abnibbers are.
Go to Google Reader and log in with your Google Account, if you haven’t already.
Click Settings, then Reader Settings.
Click Import/Export.
Click Browse… and select the file you downloaded in step #1.
Click Upload

Ta-da! You can now continue to read your favourite Abnib blogs through Google Reader. You’ve also got more features, like being able to not-subscribe to particular blogs, or (on some blogs) to subscribe to comments or other resources.

You don’t have to use Google Reader, of course: there are plenty of good RSS readers out there. And most of the good ones are capable of importing that OPML file, so you can quickly get up-and-running with all of your favourite Abnib blogs, right off the bat.

Option 2: switch to something better, manually

As above, but instead of downloading and uploading an OPML file, manually re-subscribe to each blog. This takes a lot longer, but makes it easy to choose not to subscribe to particular blogs. It also gives you the option to use a third-party service like FreeMyFeed to allow you to subscribe to LiveJournal “friends only” posts (which you were never able to do with Abnib), for example.

Option 3: continue to use Abnib (wait, what?)

Okay, so the domain name is expiring, but technically you’ll still be able to use Abnib for a while, at least, so long as you use the address http://abnib.appspot.com/. That won’t last forever, and it will be completely unmaintained, so when it breaks, it’s broken for good. It also won’t be updated with new blog addresses, so if somebody changes where their blog is hosted, you’ll never get the new one.

Goodbye, Abnib…

It’s been fun, Abnib, but you’ve served your purpose. Now it’s time for you to go the way of the Troma Night website and the RockMonkey wiki, and die a peaceful little death.

Content Freeze

Isn’t memory strange?

Last week, we updated to the latest version of the CMS that powers the Bodleian‘s web site. During the process of installing and testing the new version, we initiated a “content freeze”, disallowing the 100+ regular content editors access to the administration sections: any changes they’d have made wouldn’t have been replicated in the new version, and we didn’t want a discrepancy in content while we were testing that the change had taken! We still had back-end access, of course, and a few minor “emergency” changes were made (on both the old and the new version), but in general, the site was in a read-only mode for several days.

A similar thing happened to my head during this weekend’s house move.

While running a van-load of stuff from Old Earth to New Earth, Ruth, JTA and I stopped off at Argos to buy a few bits and pieces for our new home. We parked in one of the few remaining parking spaces capable of accommodating our extended wheel-base van. Unfortunately this brushed us up very close to an unfortunately-placed tree, whose branches reached in through the door as I clambered out. I spent a while trying to reposition them so as not to slam them in the door while Ruth and JTA walked ahead, towards Argos, and so when I was done they were quite a way ahead. I turned and ran to catch up with them…

BAM! Something struck me on the top of my head. We’re still not all in agreement as to whether it was a branch or the wing mirror of the van, but it hurt like hell. My knees buckled up and I collapsed into a heap.

Before long I was on my feet, but as I began to feel dizzy and nauseous, we started to worry that I might be concussed, and Ruth took me to the hospital. By then, I was unable to keep my eyes open without feeling like the world was spinning and I was going to throw up, and I kept feeling like I was moments away from falling asleep.

By the time I’d seen a doctor, about three hours later, I was starting to feel a little better. We took a leaflet of “things to watch out for after a concussion”, which advised that I shouldn’t lift any heavy things (“But I’m moving house today!”) nor use a computer or drink alcohol (“This is my life you’re talking about!”), all of which I ignored to some degree or another.

I napped on and off for a lot of Sunday and some of Monday, but it was on Monday that the amount of damage I’d done became most apparent. I got out of bed and staggered downstairs to find that Ruth and JTA had at some point bought a shoe rack. They weren’t around, but neither was the van, and I reasoned that they must have been out collecting more boxes, but I thought I might as well make myself useful by assembling this shoe rack they’d gotten. It was of the variety that hangs on the back of a door, so I spent some time deciphering the instructions and putting it together… only to find that it wouldn’t actually fit onto any of the (quite thick) doors in our new house.

That’s when Ruth & JTA arrived. “I saw you’d bought a shoe rack,” I said.

“Yes,” they replied, “We bought it yesterday. We told you about it.”

“Oh. I don’t remember that. Anyway, I built it, but it turns out that it won’t fit any of our doors.”

“Yes, we know: we told you that too. We were about to take it back to the shop.”

I have no recollection whatsoever of that conversation. Or several other conversations, it seems. In the hospital, I remember that Ruth talked to me for an hour or more (I wasn’t capable of conversation myself, some of the time, but it was nice to hear a familiar voice), and I still can’t remember any of it except for snippets (something about her father’s new house?).

For much of Sunday, my brain went into “content freeze”, too. A read-only mode where my memories worked fine, except that I couldn’t construct any new ones: everything just went in one ear and out the other. Maybe this is to be expected: a quick look at some maps of brains and an examination of the bump on my head indicates that the blow came to a point squarely in the centre of the middle frontal gyrus (the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) of the right hemisphere of my brain: an area associated with emotional self-control, social judgement, lateral thinking, and the transfer of working memory.

Still: it was certainly a strange experience to be told about events from only a day earlier that I simply can’t remember. It also made Tuesday interesting: long weekends are confusing at the best of times, but parts of my memory made it feel like I’d had only a two-day weekend (as parts of Sunday are simply missing from my memory), and so it was even harder than usual to shake the feeling that it was Monday when I arrived at work on Tuesday. That’ll be a pleasant surprise on Friday, anyway, when the weekend “comes early”: maybe I should bang my head every time there’s a long weekend.

Leading By Example

This week, I was reading the new EU legislation [PDF] which relates to, among other things, the way that websites are allowed to use HTTP cookies (and similar technologies) to track their users. The Information Commissioner’s Office has released a statement to ask website owners to review their processes in advance of the legislation coming into effect later this month, but for those of you who like the big-print edition with pictures, here’s the short of it:

From 26th May, a website must not give you a cookie unless it’s either (a) an essential (and implied) part of the functionality of the site, or (b) you have opted-in to it. This is a stark change from the previous “so long as you allow opt-outs, it’s okay” thinking of earlier legislation, and large organisations (you know, like the one I now work for) in particular are having to sit up and pay attention: after all, they’re the ones that people are going to try to sue.

The legislation is surprisingly woolly on some quite important questions. Like… who has liability for ensuring that a user has opted-in to third-party cookies (e.g. Google Analytics)? Is this up to the web site owner or to the third party? What about when a site represents companies both in and outside the EU? And so on.

Seeking guidance, I decided to browse the website of the Information Commissioner’s Office. And guess what I found…

…not what I was looking for: just more circular and woolly thinking. But I did find that the ICO themselves does not comply with the guidance that they themselves give. Upon arriving at their site – and having never been asked for my consent – I quickly found myself issued with five different cookies (with lifespans of up to two years!). I checked their privacy policy, and found a mention of the Google Analytics cookie they use, but no indication about the others (presumably they’re not only “opt-out”, but also “secret”). What gives, guys?

Honestly: I’m tempted to assume that only this guy has the right approach. I’m all in favour of better cookie law, but can’t we wait until after the technological side (in web browsers) is implemented before we have to fix all of our websites? Personally, I thought that P3P policies (remember when those were all the rage?) had a lot of potential, properly-implemented, because they genuinely put the power into the hands of the users. The specification wasn’t perfect, but if it had have been, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are now. Perhaps it’s time to dig it up, fix it, and then somehow explain it to the politicians.

Deliciously Silly Password Restrictions

After hearing about the recent purchase of social bookmarking service del.icio.us by Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, I remembered that once, long ago, I had a del.icio.us account. I decided to check if my account was still alive, so I trekked over to del.icio.us and took a look.

The site’s changed quite a bit since I last used it. It took a while for me to remember what my password was (it was an old, old one, since before I started using passwords the right way). It also appeared that the site still knew me by my former name (it really had been a while since I last logged in!), so I updated it with my new name.

The next step was to change the password. I generated a random password:

#AOOZ*Qs9xsj6^bT@MtN4rq1!0FK&2

But when I went to change my password, it was rejected. Apparently it didn’t meet their security rules. What? That 30-character, randomly-generated password, containing uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, punctuation, and special characters… isn’t secure enough?

A little investigation (and some experimentation) later, it turns out there’s a reason: my password must be insecure, because it contains my surname!

I have a single-character surname. That means that a 30-character password will (assuming a dictionary of 26 letters, 10 digits, and let’s say 20 special characters) have about a 40% chance of being rejected on the grounds that it contains my surname. The longer my password is, the more likely it is to be rejected as insecure. My experiments show that “abcdefghijklmnop” is considered by delicious to be more secure for my account password than, say, “@Ubj#JeqPACrgmSQKn9qRYMBM9nPOj”, on account of the fact that the latter contains my surname.

Silly, silly, silly.

After delicious finally died a death, I retroactively imported all my delicious bookmarks into this blog.