brandondawson.org

Interesting little graph of the marketing capabilities of major social media sites here.

During a brief foray into Wikipedia today, I found myself deposited on a site operated by the National Archives, that preserved the whitehouse.gov website as it existed during the transfer of power between George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

It got me to thinking: viewing the evolving capabilities, style conventions, and sensibilities of the website of this most visible of American institutions might provide insights for communicators of any stripe, whether they be marketers, writers, or political operators/organizations such as the White House is.

Failing that, it’s still an interesting walk through 256-color gifs, table layouts, the dawn of Javascript, and the birth of powerful content management systems.

Since the Clinton-era website was not preserved by the National Archives, I had to turn to Archive.org, “The Internet Wayback Machine”, in order to see the real evolution, as well as the evolving internet face of the subsequent Bush Administration.

Here are some screenshots documenting that evolution. You can click on the screenshots to pull up an embiggened slideshow view.
Continue reading…

The solution would seem to be quite simple: present Wikipedians with something that cannot be neatly classified, and watch the semi-anonymous digital bloodsport ensue.

Randall Munroe, the creator of the webcomic XKCD seems to have accomplished this by coining the joke word “malamanteau“, a parody of Wikipedians’ never-ceasing zeal for categorizing wordplay into ever-narrower segments and assiduously incorporating those obscure linguistic distinctions into every article.

The resulting brouhaha, whether Munroe intended it or not, has laid bare the truth of essentially every charge anyone has ever laid against the “Encyclopedia that Anyone can Edit”, as can plainly be seen on the resulting talk page, a hilarious swirl of earnest editors spewing the lingua franca of Wikipedia’s bureaucracy and “deletionists” and “inclusionists” bickering over the linguistic and encyclopedic merit of the newly-coined word.

Nice work, Mr. Monroe, you’ve successfully pulled in grand fashion that most righteous of pranks: the kind that makes people think. Too bad both the joke and any hope of rational thought seems lost on the Wikipedia hivemind.

This is why the principles of net neutrality and universal access to the internet should be enshrined in law.

Remember those commercials, the ones that ran on national TV, proclaiming some nifty thing you’d be about to do through “the nets” in years to come? I’m speaking of the ones that went on to add, “….and the company that’ll bring it to you, AT&T”.

Those ones?

Most folks aren’t aware that they’ve been paying for those nifty things for twenty years now, and only half of them are getting anything closely resembling the commercials.

I just figured I’d drop a brief note here, for posterity, to assist others who fail to inspect their own .htaccess files to see if, perhaps, they’ve restricted access to only their IP address, and have embarked on a wild goose chase to track down an obscure “client denied by server configuration” error.

I spent an hour researching this issue this evening. The Googles present a wide variety of potential fixes, but it turns out that the real problem was that I’d outsmarted myself by restricting a particular directory to my old IP address via an .htaccess file.

I’ve constantly had this problem, as I’ll often want to replace the “Joomla default” feeds with Feedburner. I finally came across a solution on the Joomla forums that worked really well, and I wanted to share it here for posterity, as it involves simply applying an SQL query to suppress display of the feed functionality across all menu items.

Therefore, it requires no hacking of core files or adding any new modules or components. I’ve extended the version on the J! forums by adding instructions for doing this from the command line on a LAMP server.

How to globally suppress or disable the core RSS in Joomla 1.5

1.) Edit your template and include a link to your Feedburner or other alternative RSS feed.
From here, I’ll provide two sets of instructions: One for those with phpMyAdmin, one for those with only shell access.

phpMyAdmin

2.) Open your database within the phpMyAdmin application.
3.) Export your database so that you have a backup.
4.) Click on the SQL tab, and insert the following query:
update jos_menu set params = replace(params, 'show_feed_link=1', 'show_feed_link=0')
5.) Click “Go”.

CLI method

2.) Open your shell.
3.) Dump your database so you have a backup in case things go sideways.
mysqldump -u your_database_username_here -p your_database_name_here > your_database_name.sql
4.) Run this command to run the appropriate query:
mysql -u your_database_username_here -p your_database_name_here -e "update jos_menu set params = replace(params, 'show_feed_link=1', 'show_feed_link=0')"

A little tip here: If you’re getting this message when trying to log into Plesk Billing via Plesk:

Warning: fopen(/var/log/sso/sso.log) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: Permission denied in /usr/local/sso/lib/Log.php on line 24 FATAL ERROR: Can not open log file ‘/var/log/sso/sso.log’ (CWD is /usr/local/sso)

This would seem to be being caused by changing the hostname, for which Plesk Billing generates an automatic self-signed SSL certificate for. Attempting to re-register the hostname using the /usr/local/psa/bin/sso utility is useless in this context, as it keeps beating up against the entrenched cert.

To remedy, simply:
1.) Back up your Plesk Billing database
2.) command: yum remove plesk-billing
3.) Re-add Plesk Billing via the Plesk Updater

I’d like to announce two new Facebook groups I’ve created:

Web 101: [link] The idea with this group is to build a collaborative community of professional developers and businesspeople who need to learn how to adapt their business to 21st Century realities. The thought had occurred to me that too many developers don’t know how business works in the real world, and certainly, I run into a lot of clients who don’t know how business works online.

Obviously, the side benefit is networking and cross-pollination between web-oriented people and more traditional businesses. I’m very keen to see what happens when we draw the two groups together without the pressures of deadlines and deliverables!

Web Symposium: [link] This group is by invitation only, and aims to serve the professional design/development community. As with Web 101, the goal is to see what free-form ideas can be derived by taking away deadline and delivery pressures and just putting genuine professionals in the same place to talk. Folks are encouraged to apply for membership, but be prepared to supply a professional portfolio as a means of gaining admittance; subsequent members will be voted on by the membership (or by a committee; that’s still up in the air.)

So, I recently got a DVD from Netflix that wouldn’t play. Of course, I immediately flagged it as such on the Netflix website, which as everyone knows is phenomenally well-designed with a very high degree of thought placed into every widget, button, and tab. And Netflix delivered the replacement DVD just a day later. No surprises there.

I decided to hold onto the damaged DVD until the replacement came, because I like to hoard the occasional Netflix envelope as a hedge against ones that come damaged in the mail. I’m always afraid that one of them will get torn out of their little red envelopes by an unscrupulous mail handler or by sheer accident.

When I went to send the replacement and the damaged DVD back in the same red envelope, I put little Post-It notes on them describing which DVD was damaged, and which was not. And then I pretty much forgot about it.

But Netflix didn’t. Continue reading…

I was downloading a series of free add-ons for a particular piece of software, when I was forced into downloading it from one of those “file hosting” services. This got me thinking, because it was mildly annoying to have to use such a service for a file that was only 1.8 megabytes in size, after a sixty-second wait due to my not being a “Premium” member.

Of course, hosts like RapidHost and their kind derive a large amount of their traffic from, shall we say, less than fully legal data. But to see something that was 100% legal, and 100% free, being offered on such a service….well, suffice it to say I spent the 60 seconds thinking, I hope, somewhat productively.

Because this is a market that “old-school” traditional web hosts can handle, as well. The people putting files like these on download services do not need privacy; in my specific case, they actually had it linked from their online profile. And they probably have an account on that service, which means they’re willing to pay for the service. Continue reading…