Category: Random thoughts

“Neither a borrower nor a lender of bandwidth be; And this above all, to thine own site be true…”
William Shakespeertopeer – The Renaissance Man’s Guide to the Internet. – Chapter 1 verse 12

Yet here, readers! aboard, aboard, for shame!
Google sits in the shoulder of your site, And you are stay’d for.
There; my blessing with thee! And these few precepts in thy memory

See thou character set. Give thy tongue a name,
and no unproportioned content to his act.
For search engines shall look for UTF-8 and EN or DE
And provide translations thereof.

Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
For so shalt search engines stop, after discovering
Repetition of the evil seven.

Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy site with links, trackbacks and pings;
For it is by the number of links to your site, that you are judged.
And it is through external links that you will grow.

But do not dull thy blog with trolls and spammers
Of each new-commenter, unfledged comrade. Beware
Links to their sites, are being in their name,
Bear them to Akismet that others may not burden thee.

Give every man thy ear, and seek their voice;
Take each man’s censure, by reserving your words.
Make thy habit to leave ideas for the voice of readers,
For participation, will buy their loyalty;

Choose a theme optimized for SEO as well as appearance,
For the apparel of a site oft proclaims the man,
And they in Google, of the best rank and station,
Are of a most select and generous chief in that.

Neither a borrower nor a lender of bandwidth be;
For loan of text oft weakens site rank,
And borrowed images dull load time,
Cease and desist will be their cry,
And DMCAs will be sent to thee.

This above all: to thine own site be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell: my blessing season this in thee!

—————————

Adhering to the GPL, here, you find the original:

LORD POLONIUS Yet here, Laertes! aboard, aboard, for shame!
The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail,
And you are stay’d for. There; my blessing with thee!
And these few precepts in thy memory
See thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportioned thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch’d, unfledged comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,
Bear’t that the opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express’d in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous chief in that.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell: my blessing season this in thee!

I thought I would share some pics from 3 hour hike the other day. I hope you enjoy

I’ll post some videos tomorrow when I return to civilization and have the bandwidth to upload them…

Yes, this applies to you.  I’ve even changed the title of this series because if I named it “7 simple HTML rules beginners & pros all break” some readers would say “HTML” that’s coding stuff. That doesn’t apply to me. But almost everybody who surfs the web writes HTML.  They may not know it, but they do.  If you have a blog, I can almost guarantee you written HTML AND you’ve broken one or more of these rules. If you are a professional blogger or coder, I’d wager that you still break one or more of these rules on a regular basis.  So… enough build up…

Here we go:

Rule 1: Everything has a beginning and an ending

So, if you want to add a blank line to a post or comment, the code is pretty simple right?  You add <BR> and you have a new line. Right? WRONG! You’ve just broken rule number one.  ALL HTML TAGS MUST HAVE AN OPEN AND CLOSE.  So to write this correctly you would say either <BR></BR> or use the short cut <BR />.  That shortcut with a trailing / is the correctest way to add a break. It opens and closes the tag within itself.  Another example of a common place this rule is broken is within the IMG tag.  You will often see code like

<IMG SRC=”me.bmp” alt=”A picture of me”>

when it is more properly written as:

<IMG SRC=”me.bmp” alt=”A picture of me”/>

Why does this rule matter?

Perhaps the most visible side effect of this is seen on blogs that don’t have a sidebar or have all the text after a certain point bolded or centered. This is most frequently caused by an unclosed <DIV> tag. Each <DIV> is a division or an invisible box that is in a specific area of a web page. The center column of a website is a common example of a <DIV>. If you don’t have the write number of <DIV> and </DIV> your web page will tell the browser, “The center column starts here” and it is never told “Now it has ended”.  So your sidebar can become part of your center column.  The most common cause of this is copying and pasting text from another website into your post. You will catch all of the open <DIV>with your copy but often miss a close div or two and that confuses the heck out of the browser.  This happens so often that I’ve made a short video about how to manage these things for the bloggers on the b5media network.

The other reason this matters is that most browsers have a “Site didn’t follow the rules” or “Compatiblity” mode which is turned on when there are errors on the page.  When this mode is activated, the browser starts loading the page in the simplest way it can in order to guess at what you really meant.  I’ve over simplified this and you can find out more by searching “Web Standards” in Google.  Put briefly, if you want your page to appear as you intended, close all your tags.

Or Everthing that begins must eventually come to an

I still think I may have met the challenge…
But I can’t prove it yet.

I’ve collected 36 of the books I read in the last year, but I am drawing a blank on there rest… I THINK I’ve read more than this this year and I probably met the goal but I am sure drawing a blank on them. Part of the problem is that reading The Song of Ice and Fire took a loooong time. They are good books but DANG the are complex. I’ve never read any other books that did so many point of views for so many different characters. But they were enjoyable. Also I tried to read a non-fiction history of the ivory coast twice, but I never made it through to the very end of that one.

Anyway… here’s the first 36. When I get access to my desktop computer again (I’m travelling atm), I will see if I can find more to ad to my list when I get back home.

Have YOU read any of these:

Armageddon’s children
Artemis Fowl (novel) (2001) Eoin Colfer
Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident (2002) Eoin Colfer
Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code (2003) Eoin Colfer
Artemis Fowl: The Lost Colony (2006) Eoin Colfer
Artemis Fowl: The Opal Deception (2005) Eoin Colfer
Artemis Fowl: The Time Paradox (2008) Eoin Colfer
Dragon Harper Todd McCaffrey
Dragons of the Highlord Skies Margaret Weis
Ender in Exile Orson Scott Card
How to eat fried worms
I robot
Linkspell Cornelia Funke
Island of the Blue Dolphin
Magic Street Orson Scott Card
Mars Ben Bova
Metal Swarm
Phantom Terry Goodkind
S is for Silence Sue Grafton
Shadow of the Giant Orson Scott Card
Starwars Revenge of the Sith Stover, Matthew
The Elves of Cintra
The Friday night Knitting – Jacobs, Kate
The Gypsy Morph
A Game of Thrones (1996)
A Clash of Kings (1998)
A Storm of Swords (2000)
A Feast for Crows (2005)
I Am Legend and Other Stories
Dune Frank Herbert
Foundation Isaac Asimov
Second Foundation Isaac Asimov
Foundation and Empire Isaac Asimov
Foundation and Earth Isaac Asimov
Foundation’s Edge Isaac Asimov
The Light of Other Days Arthur C. Clarke

I thought I would share this section of code I found in the Zend Framework.  It truncates PHP_SELF at the first embedded new line in order to prevent unwanted code being inserted into the headers.

// Carefully construct this value to avoid application security problems.
$php_self = htmlentities(substr($_SERVER[‘PHP_SELF’], 0,  strcspn($_SERVER[‘PHP_SELF’], "\n\r")), ENT_QUOTES);

header(‘Location: ‘ . $php_self);

The long and short of it is that if you include ANY unfiltered, unclean variables when you construct your header, you’ve opened a security hole.

Cleaning user supplied variables part of the basics.  I just haven’t been all that careful with the use of PHP_SELF before now.

To quote the Zend Documentation "The treatment of the $php_self variable in the example above is a general security guideline [..] You should always filter content you output to http headers."

Just thought I would share…

I see why all the previous Yahoo employees I know where not happy about their time working for Yahoo.

Here is an on going email I conversation I am having with them:

I don’t want to discuss anything. Nor do I wish to obtain any information. I have informed you of an error made by your purchasing system, I simply wish for you to correct it and provide the service I’ve already proven paid for a week ago.

I’ve supplied the information requested for verification, with my first email. The information exactly matched what was in my account at that time. That information included my zip code and the email account used in this correspondence as well as a second email account which is in addition to my yahoo email.

Continue reading Angry letter to Flickr/Yahoo

It went something like this:

Be sure to join me live tonight at 9pm Eastern at http://www.RhettAndLink.com/live

This is one of the must usful features when using skype for business. Especially with an organization the size of b5media. I use shared groups to deploy blogger skype contacts to all of the b5media bloggers, the b5media Toronto Office and b5media Tech Team amoungst others. The blogger group is great becase when a new blogger comes on they instantly have access to dozens of other b5bloggers through skype.

I have personal Skype groups for b5 Third Party Contacts, for Rhett and Link, and others. The third party group is great because it contains both normal phone numbers and skype contacts. Since I have skype out, my laptop is my work phone.

This screencast demonstrates some of the features and asks some questions I don’t have the answers to:
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.thecodecave.com/mov/Brian_Layman_shared_skype_contact_groups.swf" width="800" height="630"/]