On Links That Open in New Windows
Often when a website links to an off-site page, the link is set to open in a new browser window. I don’t like this! I can choose to open any link in a new tab or window if I want to, but I cannot choose to open a link that is set to open in a new window in the same window. Please, leave the choice in the hands of the user.
I have been as guilty of this as anybody, but henceforth I will no longer engage in this practice.
Stuff White People Do on Facebook
So, there’s a blog called Stuff White People Like. It’s very funny, and dead on in so many ways. I like it. (Does that make me white?)
I think someone should make a Facebook application that compares a user’s profile to the list of stuff from the blog, then determines how white that person is.
I haven’t given a ton of thought to how that comparison would work (n things in profile that white people like / m items in profile x 100 = % white?), but I think it’d be amusing.
A Subversion Gripe & .htaccess mod_rewrite Issue
EDIT: It turns out the fix below for the mod_rewrite issue does not work. I’d love to know why. If anybody knows, please either comment on this post or reply to this thread. Thank you.
In starting this blog, I had to move my old website into a new branch of my homepage repository. I wanted to be able to do a server-side move from the root of the repository to a new subdirectory, like this:
svn mv http://noahlieban.com/svn/homepage/* \ http://noahliebman.com/svn/homepage/old-site/
Sadly, this didn’t work. What did I have to do? Make the new directory (in the working directory or on the server; doesn’t matter), then svn mv each file in one by one. Stupid. The reason is that it can’t copy onto itself, which I guess is fair enough. The moral of the story is that a repository should always have a /trunk (or other root-level directory) just in case it needs to be branched. Otherwise, it’s a pain.
My second issue is not really a Subversion issue, but with the .htaccess file that Wordpress makes for its permalinks:
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress
Now, I’m no expert in server configuration stuff, but this seems straightforward enough: If the requested file is neither a real file or real directory, do the rewrite rule. I don’t actually care what the rewrite rule does, because my problem is that Dreamhost sets up Subversion by making it accessible via http request at http://domain.com/svn/repo/, although /svn/ is not a real directory in the root web directory on the server, so it gets caught by the second rewrite condition. This breaks Subversion over http.
I wanted to be able to add another condition that told it to only do the rule if the request URI does not start with /svn/, so I added
RewriteCod %{REQUEST_URI}!^/svn/.*$
to the other two conditions. For some reason, this didn’t work, though. I instead needed to add a new rule in the affirmative above the Wordpress one:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/svn/.*$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [L]
i.e. if it starts with /svn/, don’t change anything. Why doesn’t it work with an exception? I have no idea.
Homepage updates!
Whoa, OK. My old homepage is gone. (Well, not gone, really; I just branched it off in Subversion—which took me a long time, by the way. More on that later.) This is now a blog.
There are a few posts below that I did not wrote specifically for this blog, but with which I decided to seed this blog. So there ya go.
Simplify, simplify, simplify
The following is an excerpt from my School of Information application essay:
Our society is inundated with information. We crave it. We’re addicted to it, and we know it. Blackberrys are called CrackBerrys, some states have found it necessary to make it illegal to check email while driving, and I was personally disappointed to find out that my preferred RSS feed reader can update no more frequently than twice an hour. Too many of us live in a state of “continuous partial attention,” never fully applying ourselves to a given task because one eye is always on the inbox or browser window. The societal issues this causes — car accidents, reduced productivity, inferior workmanship, loss of true interpersonal connection — dictate that information professionals must play a role in addressing this epidemic of information addiction. Technology alone cannot solve these problems; indeed, while the problems I describe have been exacerbated by technology, they predate electronic information technology, as related by Henry David Thoreau in his 1854 classic Walden: “Hardly a man takes a half hour’s nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, ‘What’s the news?’ as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels. Some give directions to be waked every half hour, doubtless for no other purpose. After a night’s sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast.” Just as technology helps feed this craving for information, so, too, can technology help reduce the craving.
The problem with hyperlinks
I was thinking today about why I never get anything done at the computer. I’ll sit down with the intention of accomplishing X after researching Y. Before I sit down I know it should only take me an hour or so, but three hours later it still isn’t done.
The reason, I realized, is quite simple: hyperlinks. Today I intended to email a particular company about a possible internship. This company sits at the intersection of Web 2.0 social networking and the “green revolution”, and my plan was to research the company, then send them an email.
So what happened? In reading posts on the company blog, I found other interesting developments in both the Web 2.0 world and the alternative energy world. Next thing I know I’m reading about all sorts of new alternative energy companies, which leads me to the topic of venture funding, so I start looking for publicly traded alternative energy companies to invest in, and all of a sudden instead of researching a particular company so I can send them an email, I’m checking my stocks.
As wonderful as the internet is, it is absolutely horrible for someone who is easily sidetracked. Individuals use several different methods to sort and keep track of all their different browser windows and tabs. For example, I try to use a different window for each subject I’m researching, and generally have multiple tabs open within each one of those windows. The problem stems from the fact that one site’s hyperlinks, while relevant in some way to that site, and probably interesting to me in general, may not be relevant to the subject at hand. Add to that the stream-of-consciousness factor, that even if one site does not explicitly link to another (tangential) site it may inspire me to check something else entirely, and it’s no wonder I never get anything done.
Contrast that with research conducted using books. First, there are no hyperlinks, and second, if you think of something else to look up or check, there is a much higher effort barrier: you have to actually get up off your butt, find another book on the shelf, shlep it back to your desk, then look it up. Not exactly the relatively passive act of clicking on a link or typing a term into Google.
So the problem as I see it is that too much information is too readily availible, both through hyperlinks and search engines, and that too little effort is required to obtain this information. This leads to a loss of focus, as one can easily be led from one topic to the next without even noticing the transition.
I propose using a keyword cloud to represent each tab, and one to represent each browser window as a whole. The clouds could be presented visually for the user, but they don’t need to be. I believe that by using threshold levels on the clouds and weighting them based on other factors such as whether a site was arrived at by clicking, directly entering a URL, or searching, and whether a link leads to a page on the same domain or not, it should be possible to detect when a user has drifted sufficiently far from the initial topic that alerting them might be warranted.
Now we’ll have to see if I have the attention span to actually take this concept anywhere….
