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Privacy Technical The Sky Is Falling

Technical rebuttal of Mark Zuckerberg’s rebuttal to Facebook TOS change

Mark Zuckerberg defended the recent change to Facebook’s TOS in a blog post recently. As much as I appreciate any response from Facebook regarding their lecherous move, his rebuttal has no merit whatsoever. As a co-founder of my own startup in the 90s (unfortunately, never anything close to the scale of the 500-lb gorilla that […]

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Privacy The Sky Is Falling

Facebook’s new TOS: We have rights to everything posted here, forever. Sorry!

Well, as I’ve said in the past, you can’t expect to use free services and have any semblance of privacy. Facebook updated their Terms of Service (TOS) yesterday and slipped in a little “extra” clause which

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Business Email Marketing

Ongoing list of bad email practice providers

There was a short period in the late 90s and early 00s when I would use “disposable” email addresses for everything. I had “catch-all” email addresses such as anything@example.com which I would when signing up for a site where I was unsure of their email practices. If I signed up on “this-domain.com” my email would […]

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Analytics Business Marketing Privacy Technical

Analysis of Google outbound link tracking

I noticed in the past two or so months, after Google upgraded their SERPs to enable users to rearrange and delete results (see thumbnail to right) that the outbound links Google was posting on SERPs were redirects through the google.com site (meaning, they were tracking clicks on outbound links.) Since I often search for something […]

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Analytics Business Marketing Technical

Uh-oh. AJAX-powered search kills keywords in referrers

Well, according to Clicky, Smackdown and a discussion forum on Webmaster World, many webmasters are fearful of AJAX-only search from Google. As I wrote in a recent article on Helium (a low-traffic one, at that), Google is a near-monopoly, and user Shaddows here points out that opting out of Google’s index (say, in protest) is […]

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Business

In-kind donations and tax deductions

Last year, I did some work for a local 501.3c organization who I believed was doing some great things here in Media, PA. It was for the First Fair Trade Town in the USA, and it was for their web site development. I had done a lot of work on the first version of the […]

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HTML Technical The Sky Is Falling

Disappearing content in MSIE7 using AJAX

I write web applications for a living. I enjoy it immensely. Webkit-based browsers (FireFox, Mozilla, Chrome, and Safari) are a pleasure to work with – they render closely to what you design with stylesheets, their JavaScript engines perform quickly and what you’d expect, and the final rendering of sites is generally pleasing. Internet Explorer 6 […]

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HTML Technical

Valid characters in attribute names in HTML/XML

This has been bugging me for a while, because I do a fair bit of HTML and XML custom parsing code, and kind of wondered what would be the valid characters for an attribute name in a HTML tag, e.g. <a href=”…” name=”…”>thing</a> So, what are the valid characters in HTML (or XML) for “href” […]

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Marketing Technical The Sky Is Falling

At first I thought Google was being hacked

Ever seen Google down? Me neither. Sure, I’ve seen the “Gmail not available” message, and “Service unavailable” once or twice, but it was only for a few seconds, really. That said, last month for about 15 minutes, it appeared that Google was down. At first I did what’s called a Domain Name lookup in DNS […]

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Technical

Praise for PHP Arrays

I have to give credit to the PHP team for creating what is one of the most flexible, easy to use, and powerful data structures I have used. That is the array. To be completely accurate, the manual describes it as