Tuesday, Feb 20, 2007
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Monday, Feb 19, 2007
Ars Technica has a nice price comparison of HDMI cables that all produce the same image quality but have wildly different prices.
The Inquirer discusses the latest release of AnyDVD, whick will remove DRM from standard and HD-DVDs. Huzzah for fair use!
Just what the title says, a very thourough comparison of several Ruby implementations. Looks like the next major release (1.9) will be much faster. This is great news for Rails sites.
Really not surprising, but the world’s largest tropical ice mass, in Peru, is shrinking by 60 meters per year. Sell your oceanfront property…
This is a pleasant surprise to me. I hope OpenID becomes a standard — I hate creating new accounts at every website I join.
Hint: it’s all about the stink…
Bob’s theory is that Apple will use them for p2p-enabled pre-seeding of downloads so that people can get HD iTunes content lickety-split. An interesting idea, but it would require a big installed base.
A math student figured out how to do this seemingly impossible task.
A nice article from Damn Interesting on the tragic tale of Howard Bull, an artillery engineer obsessed with building a gun that could shoot satellites into orbit.
An interesting look at brain diseases that affect people in surprising ways.
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Monday, Feb 19, 2007
As you may know if you have your own blog, one way that spammers try to get more traffic to their sites is by bombarding blogs with bogus comments filled with links to their own sites. Since search engines such as Google look at how many incoming links a site has when determining rankings, this comment spam can increase a spammer’s Google rankings and therefore his traffic.
There are many ways to cut down on comment spam, such as comment moderation, captchas, and spam-filtering plugins such as akismet. Another way is to add rel=”nofollow” attributes to links in comments and trackbacks. Google and other search engines will ignore such links, rendering them useless to comment spammers trying to raise their search engine rankings. WordPress and many other blogging engines add these nofollow attributes by default.
But what about honest commenters? Shouldn’t they be able to get some traffic and “Google juice” from participating in your blog? Well, there are many WordPress plugins that will take out the nofollow attributes from your comment links.
My favorite solution is a plugin by Kimmo Suominen called DoFollow that will take out the nofollow attribute if a comment is on your site for a set period of time (you choose how long). This way, you don’t have to lock down all comments for moderation before they can be approved — as long as you remove any spam comments that get onto your site within the time window, the spammers still can’t get any Google juice.
Kimmo’s site was down for a bit, but it’s now back up, and I’ve got his DoFollow plugin installed here. So link away in your comments — as long as your comment’s not spam, the nofollow attribute will be removed 24 hours after you post the comment.
Finally, Andy Beard has posted a nice comprehensive list of nofollow-removing plugins for WordPress and other blogging engines. Check it out here.
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Sunday, Feb 18, 2007
This post is the first of what I plan to be a daily, annotated list of the most scrumptious geek giblets I find during my morning web gorging. Enjoy the regurgitation!
An engineer’s explanation of why those $100 Monster Cables Best Buy pushes you to buy are a complete ripoff.
Ars Technica has a nice review today of Microsoft’s YouTube competitor, discussing UI, video availability, and browser support.
This site brings the Digg model to local events, allowing users to add venues and events. Nice looking & nice concept, but the UI could be improved.
Another Digg-style site, focused on environmental news.
A site that lets individuals pay to plant trees in Niger, thereby counteracting desertification and poverty. The site is very rough, but it’s a great concept.
A commercial service that sells .name domains (firstname.lastname.name) domains which can then be used as OpenID credentials and email addresses.
A new visual shopping engine that should be familiar to anyone who’s used Google Maps. (See my mini review of the site).
A Windows screensaver showing a nice interactive global visualization of blog activity.
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Sunday, Feb 18, 2007
BrowseGoods (currently in beta) is a new visual search engine for shopping. It aims to help shoppers quickly visually scan through large numbers of items rather than by paging through endless text-heavy lists of search results.
The UI will be immediately familiar to anyone who’s used Google Maps, with the familiar pan & zoom functionality (and UI widgets), and also to anyone who’s read Jef Raskin’s The Humane Interface. After a quick intro screen, you start by selecting a department (currently they have shoes, toys, watches, and sports), after which you’re shown a high-level overview of all the products in that department. From there, you can click on a product category to zoom closer.
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