Scripting News archive for May 2012

Sound a bit like blorkmarks. Heh. Well not quite as cool. Anyway, it looks like they're creeping up on Twitter. Sharing bookmarks with your friends is a lot like what people use Twitter for, wouldn't you say? Maybe Twitter is finally getting some competition.

Posted: 5/29/12; 3:02:30 PM.

Blogging tools have had posting APIs since the beginning of the art, starting back in the mid--late-90s. Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr, they all have them. As does Twitter. It doesn't seem to have hurt them. Yet Google-Plus doesn't have a posting API. If it did, I would publish my stream there, and they would have some good sticky content that they don't now have. I think they should do it.

Posted: 5/27/12; 8:09:25 PM.

There was the beginning of a lively debate at my talk at Mesh earlier this week in Toronto. I say if Twitter ever gets competition, or thinks competition might be coming soon, they will buy a news organization, maybe several. But it hinges on this question. Can there be another Twitter? What if a service did everything Twitter did but had a 280-character limit. Just enough to be interesting, but not enough (maybe) to blow away the mode of use of Twitter. Would you try it? Do you think it would be useful?

Posted: 5/26/12; 7:51:39 PM.

I keep getting emails from the NYT with offers for a digital subscription. They say I can get it really cheap for a certain number of weeks. Then what? Well, I thought, what if I made them an offer. I thought of Doc Searls. This is what he advocates. Let users make offers to vendors. So I gave it some thought and came up with $50 a year to be able to access as much of the Times site as I want, no paywall. $50 they're not getting now. Money on the table. Act now! Or make a counter, which I would consider. I don't want any limited-time offers. Give me an offer for a year, or don't make a counter at all.

Posted: 5/25/12; 9:24:59 PM.

Discuss.

Posted: 5/23/12; 2:51:05 PM.

I'd fight Facebook with RSS. Re-integrate RSS with Chrome. Make subscription something browsers support. Provide an open, clonable, simple web service that returns a subscription list for any user (with permission of course) so a million ideas for RSS aggregators can bloom. A browser button that says Subscribe To This. Surround Facebook with open innovation from small developers everywhere.

Posted: 5/22/12; 9:10:49 AM.

1. Amateurs don't have relationships with the vendors to protect.

2. The reviews don't all come the week before the product is announced.

3. They aren't rehashes of press releases.

4. They reflect actual experience using the product, over a period of weeks instead of minutes, in the case of some professional reviews.

Posted: 5/17/12; 10:16:38 AM.

They're bigger than tweets, not 140-char constrained, and express simple ideas that can be understood in a second or two. They inspire informational responses. The responses are stored elsewhere, and that's a problem, but the source is on my server.

Posted: 5/16/12; 12:38:58 PM.

I've spend a couple of days working fulltime in Chrome, and it's improved my workflow.

Firefox disappears sometimes, I sit there waiting for my computer to come back. Doesn't seem to happen with Chrome even though I accumulate a ton of tabs, as with Firefox.

I've launched Firefox a few times to access Firebug. I haven't figured out how to get Chrome's builtin debugger to open in a separate window. Once I have that, I probably won't need to go to Firefox.

Posted: 5/15/12; 11:29:06 AM.

I've heard or read a half dozen reports on the $2 billion loss at JPMorgan, but don't understand why this is such a big deal. To a bank the size of JPM, $2 billion isn't very much money. If a company like GM or Microsoft lost $2 billion on a product, they'd shrug it off and go on. Probably happens all the time. Why is this so important?

Posted: 5/13/12; 2:07:11 PM.

I was leaving a comment at Pando's site and noticed a funny URL in the web interface pointing to 127.0.0.1:8795. They must have a desktop client that has a builtin HTTP server. Anyone know what's up?

Posted: 5/12/12; 3:45:58 PM.

Scratching my head over this page. Why is there a white gap at the top, above the menu? Looked at it in Firebug, but it seems it shouldn't be there. I know that's not right. Any ideas?

Posted: 5/9/12; 4:02:02 PM.

I don't know all the features that are in the new version of Disqus, the commenting software we use here. I thought we'd dive right in and see. If you've used it elsewhere and know what's up with it, what we should look for, feel free to post a comment.

Posted: 5/8/12; 5:32:26 PM.

What a fucking great show. I loved how they had NYC play a role, every scene in the last half had city noises, either that or President Johnson in Vietnam.

And Megan reminds me so much of an old girlfriend, makes my heart ache. How could I have been so stupid.

Posted: 5/7/12; 10:10:48 PM.

I'm looking for examples of beautiful yet simple and efficient (fast loading, easy to read) designs for blog stories.

The basic information that must be conveyed: 1. Title. 2. Byline (author, when it was posted). 3. Prev/next. 4. Body. 5. Disqus comment block.

There will be a menu at the top of the page, like the menu at the top of this page, but that's not part of the page design, it's more a component of the site.

Clarity is key. The writing must come through, not the cleverness of the design.

If you have designs that you think are worthy of mention, please post a link here. Thanks!

Posted: 5/4/12; 5:52:39 PM.

I got the Canon 320 with wifi and of course immediately tried to set up the wifi access. The instructions in the manual are crap. They tell you to press buttons but they don't tell you where they are. And of course there's nothing like the buttons they describe on the camera or on any of the screens I was able to find. So far no luck.

Posted: 5/2/12; 5:24:40 PM.

I watched the first game of the Knicks playoff series with the Heat on TNT. I didn't know that MSG was also broadcasting them. That is of course where I watched Game 2, last night.

I totally missed Walt Frazier's narration of the first game. Because he played the game himself, and was one of the coolest most zen-like competitors ever. When players get upset about a call, Clyde (what every calls Frazier) says this is not good. Teams that are focusing on the past, a bad call, aren't in the present game. They lose their fluidity. They're grunting and groaning. If the other guys are dishing and swishing, they win. Sometimes both teams lose the plot, that's pretty interesting too.

There's a lot more to basketball than most announcers get to. But when you watch every Knicks game, you always want to know what Clyde has to say. And I'm sure he's not liking what he's seeing.

Posted: 5/1/12; 2:20:49 PM.