There’s lots of push lately in the tech community to chase the dragon of real-time. I do see real-time it most valuable during events that I’m not able to attend in person (the recent IgniteMpls event comes to mind immediately). Even then, there’s always delay. Each second delay brings an opportunity to filter for relevance. …
Author Archives: Garrick van Buren
Goofy Side Projects
More Usable URLs: Twitter.com
URLs are consistently the least usable aspect of our interaction with web-based information services – which is terribly unfortunate considering their prominence in how we access, share, and interact with these services. With that in mind, let’s take a look at how Twitter’s URLs could be more usable – by either being more logical, more …
A Proposal for Shorter Google Maps URLs
I was adding a link to a Google map into my iCal and noticed Google is encouraging me to share the the map URLs in email and IM. But there’s a problem with the Google Maps URLs. They’re +/- 155 characters. Here’s the full URL: http://maps.google.com/maps?oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&ie=UTF8&q=the+red+pepper,+plymouth,+mn&fb=1&split=1&gl=us&cid=1854680882426337660&li=lmd&z=14&iwloc=A This URL is neither short, nor easily memorable, nor …
How To Cache Highly Dynamic Data in Rails with Memcache – Part 3
In part 1 and part 2, I laid out my initial approaches on caching and performance in Cullect. While both of them pointed in the right direction, I realized I was caching the wrong stuff in the wrong way. Since then, I tried replicating the database – one db for writes, one for reads. Unfortunately, …
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My Long Bet Against Mobile Carriers: Update 1
Late last year, I extended my T-Mobile contract 2 years. When I signed it, I had a hunch it will be the last time I’m locked into an agreement like that. Now, I’m confident – so confident that if I was holding any mobile carrier stock, I’d start shorting. A couple weeks back, we got …
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Short URLs Re-defining SEO
It’s conventional search engine optimization wisdom that URLs should contain words, separated by either dashes or underscores. This approach improves the readability of the URL – making it more usable for people while simultaneously giving internet robots something to work on. But with people sharing URLs within places – like Twitter and Facebook (and … …
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 …
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 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 …
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> …