“When you see a TinyURL, you have no idea what the link is going to point you to. Viruses, spyware, porn and all sorts of other unwanted or inappropriate stuff are just a click away. …what if you actually could trust a shortened URL?….The need for safety and security online will not go away. Don’t …
Author Archives: Garrick van Buren
Cull.us: Branded URL Shortener with Google Analytics, CNAME, and .htaccess
One of the biggest problems with URL shorteners – aside from being needed at all – is it’s not easy to move from one to another without breaking all the previous links. Culld.us hopes to change all that. Use Your Own Domain Name At Culld.us, you get a subdomain – like grv.culld.us – and just …
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Labor Day: Celebrating Opportunity
“Isn’t it sad that we have a job where we spend two 2 weeks avoiding the stuff we have to do fifty week a year?” – Seth Godin, Tribes Almost 15 years ago now, a fellow student at the German design school I was attending, purchased a run-down flat. When he wasn’t focused his design …
auth via params API Access with Authlogic
Authlogic, my current favorite Ruby-based authentication library and I were in a fight the last couple of days. I was trying to add token-based, auth_via_params, authentication (vs. login and password) to a project – but Authlogic and I weren’t agreeing on how it should be done. I had assumed: @person_session = PersonSession.new(single_access_token => params[:token] ) …
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RealTimeAds Out of Beta, Taking Paying Customers
“After a successful beta test this summer, Real-Time Ads is now accepting paying customers, and we have eight so far.” – Joel Kramer, MinnPost In case you were wondering what I’ve been doing this summer 🙂
You Aren’t Here
“[ iPhones and Blackberrys] are built to take you away from where you are and put you somewhere else.” – Dave Slusher. “Cyberspace is the ‘place’ where a telephone conversation appears to occur” – Bruce Sterling, Introduction to The Hacker Crackdown
Culld.Us – URL Shortening Reimagined
We don’t shorten URLs just to shorten them. We shorten them for the same reason big box retailers sell flat-pack furniture – greater confidence during transport. With that in mind, I’ve completely rebuilt Cullect’s URL Shortener1 – http://culld.us It’s still custom brand-able. In a way I’m much happier with than in the previous version – …
A CraigsList Re-Design Challenge
Many in the web design community re-designing CraigsList.org since it launched [1, 2]. Each one of these efforts feels like missing the part that makes CraigsList special to me – it’s the simplest thing that could possibly work. Anything more – while perhaps adding value – absolutely adds overhead. If only in the number of …
Rails Cookie Settings for Cross-Subdomain Sessions
For the past day, I’ve been tracking down a hair-pulling-ly frustrating bug in Rails ( with Authlogic on Passenger). My sessions weren’t sticking in production Cross-domain or otherwise (doubly frustrating because a) Authlogic has been so rock solid for me otherwise, b) worked as expected in development). Turns out, I wasn’t setting the session domain …
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Countdown to Dow 10k
Yesterday, I was asked if I’m still holding my Dow 10k by Labor Day prediction – considering it now means at least a 60 point gain for the next 11 trading days. Yes, for 2 reasons. First, my original prediction factored in a 75-point daily shift. Second, Conference Board’s Aug 20 Leading Economic Indicator report …