Month: April 2009

Thursday, 9 April 2009

Unspoken, Unfortunate, Synonyms

by Garrick van Buren 1 Comment on Unspoken, Unfortunate, Synonyms

From what I can tell;

  • “SEO” is an unspoken synonym for “works better in Google”
  • “Social Media” is an unspoken synonym for “works better in Twitter”

Both of these are unfortunate for they:

  • turn something easily understandable into something vague and amorphous – the exact opposite of good framing
  • mask the monopoly those companies have on their respective service.

This is analogous to using “entertainment” as synonym for not just “television” but the specific televised offering from BBC Four.

Of course, promoting yourself as an expert in Twitter (without having a Twitter-issued business card) should elicit giggles from anyone within earshot. But at least it’s being honest and authentic – the first step to being more social.

Elsewhere 11 Nov 2009

“That tweeting it is a private breed of microblogging verges on irrelevance. Twitter is now as necessary to tweeting as Google is to search. It’s a public activity under private control.” – Doc Searls

Wednesday, 8 April 2009

Dog-Eared

by Garrick van Buren Comments Off on Dog-Eared

Some quick reviews of the handful of books I savored during my recent trip in Mexico.


The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy–If We Let It Happen
endofprosperity
I found this month’s Economics book club selection (my first Kindle purchase) an extra-ordinarily frustrating read mainly due to the Fox News-esque partisanship. Despite that, the sections on the incentives and implications of the Laffer Curve, Flat tax, Fair tax were thought-provoking and highly recommended.


Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods
wildfermentation

The most inspiring cook book I’ve ever read – all about improvising in the kitchen and embracing the microorganisms around you. The recipes for Persimmon Cider Mead and fruit Kimchi sound pretty delicious.


Belgian Ale
brewlikeamonk
Great book (like all the books in the Classic Beer Style Series) on the history and definition of Belgian ale. The key – don’t be afraid to use 20+% sugar and focus on flavor rather than strict tradition.


Brew Like a Monk: Trappist, Abbey, and Strong Belgian Ales and How to Brew Them
brewlikeamonk
A deep dive into the history, brewing process, and recipes for some of my favorite Belgian beers – Afflighem Blond, Westmalle Trippel – and some of the American beers brewed in the same style. Stan Hieronymus makes a pretty good argument that it’s the Americans that are moving the style forward.

194X: Architecture, Planning, and Consumer Culture on the American Home Front (Architecture, Landscape and Amer Culture)
194X
Fifty years ago, the Great Depression and WWII destroyed the careers of American architects – they switched from building to planning. Planning the new American cities, planning suburbia, planning for the war to be over and their careers to return.


Coffee Cupper’s Handbook
scaacuppingbookfulljpg
THE vocabulary book on describing coffee’s taste. The biggest ‘a-ha’ for me: cooling removes the sweet and bitter aspects of coffee – but has no impact on the sour tastes. Big thanks to Sam Buchanan for loaning me his copy.

Monday, 6 April 2009

WordPress URL Shortening Hack

by Garrick van Buren 3 Comments on WordPress URL Shortening Hack

My last post, Publishers Shorten Yourself, got me thinking about easy, low-tech ways to provide a short url for WordPress blogs.

Turns out, just 1 line of code is needed in the .htaccess file.
RewriteRule ^(d+)$ http://[YOUR-BLOG-URL]/?p=$1

Add it in just after RewriteBase so your .htaccess looks something like this:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^(d+)$ http://[YOUR-BLOG-URL]/?p=$1
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

To use this short URL in your templates do one of the following:

If you want to use the same domain your blog is on, use this:

<a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/<?php the_ID(); ?>"><?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/<?php the_ID(); ?></a>

If you have a different, perhaps shorter domain, use this:

<a href="[SHORT-DOMAIN]/<?php the_ID(); ?>">[SHORT-DOMAIN]/<?php the_ID(); ?></a>

Note: You will have to add an additional redirect to the .htaccess file of SHORT-DOMAIN, but that’s not problem, because it’s very similar to the WordPress redirect we started with.

And like that you’ve got a short url, for every post in your WordPress blog. No more worries about whether or not a specific URL shortener will be stealing your referrers or even be around tomorrow.

Publishers Shorten Yourself

by Garrick van Buren Comments Off on Publishers Shorten Yourself

The Wege pointed me to an excellent article by Joshua Schachter on the issues w/ URL shortening services.

It’s consistent my concerns and my Insecurity of Short URLs post.

As I alluded to that post, I see 3 opportunities for URL shorteners, all of them revolve around increasing trust (branding, security, backup).

Let’s take that first one – branding. Another name for branding is accountability. Who really knows where a tinyurl a similar service will point you, but you can be confident a minnpo.st URL will point you to an article on minnpost.com and a grv.me URL will point you to something I authored.

From my perspective there are 3 parties that should have a good short URL corresponding to their identity:

  • the author (i.e. grv.me)
  • the publisher (i.e. minnpo.st)
  • the share-er (imagine a link blog of short urls)

Sometimes all 3 are the same.

Conveniently, as greater accountability is introduced to short URLs, the issues of security and backups address themselves.

Now.

Take one step back.

Web publishing engines – like WordPress, MovableType, and all publications engines really – should automatically generate nice long human-readable URLs as well as a short, easy-to-share URLs (at least the URL keys, you can supply your own short domain if you want). (Dave Winer said this last month in “Solving the TinyUrl centralization problem“something along these lines a few weeks back, but I can find the link right now)

One more step back, and you can see this is only an issue now because of the growing popularity of 1 specific website and an expectation that these short URLs are permalinks. If you don’t have that expectation, shorten with RE07.US