"Web Sites" archive
Friday 4 August
- Wikipedia and quality (17:07) - I read a really interesting article today at InfoWorld about Wikipedia and the quality of the entries there. According to the article, the powers that be want to steer Wikipedia away from growth and instead concentrate on quality. To this end, they're talking about putting together an advisory board. I guess I'm a bit skeptical that an advisory board is going to be do much advising over a worldwide group of public volunteers, but hey, the Internet has always been...
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Wednesday 14 June
- I'm not crazy! It's true -- people don't read! (20:32) - One of my common lamentations about web site creation & design is that people do not read. You spend all this time creating nice, informational pages, and then you get asked questions that could easily be found by reading those very pages. To help combat this, I have been relentless about keeping pages as short as possible, using as few words as necessary to get across the relevant information. Sometimes people think I'm crazy based on how much time I...
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Sunday 15 January
- I've been replaced (on the site, anyway)! (14:28) - In November, we replaced the front page montage with an image that showed me using an old tin can "phone" with a witty caption. While this was an improvement over the jumbled montage that preceded it, it still seemed that it wasn't really saying much. It made a statement of what BitWIse was not, but it didn't really help say what BitWise is. After a lot of searching and thought, it became apparent that there's no image that just says...
Saturday 7 January
- Unveiling the BitWise DocuWiki (15:25) - A couple of weeks ago, I announced the upcoming BitWise DocuWiki. Now, we are ready to unveil it at http://www.bitwiseim.com/wiki/. There is tons of information contained in the DocuWiki, and even long-time BitWise users will find ways to use BitWise that they didn't know before. Remember that the DocuWiki will become the official documentation in the near future. The old documentation will be removed and the new Docs link in the navigation bar will be updated. We are very excited...
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Tuesday 6 December
- Features area of BitWise site updated (15:25) - In the last week or so, several parts of the Features area of the BitWise site have been updated. The main features page has been rewritten to have more whitespace, better organization, and fewer words. The focus has also been changed to help give a better overview of BitWise as a whole. The headings in the feature list on the left side of the screen have been made to stand out more from the list itself, using a colored background...
Friday 9 September
- MacMerc: Freeloader Friday Download of the Week (14:43) - BitWise IM has been included in this week's Freeloader Friday Download of the Week on MacMerc.com. See here. The title of this week's tool collection is "Corporate Contacts."...
Saturday 27 August
- A few slices of Kevin pie (10:27) - I don't have one major thing to post about today, but since I haven't posted since Wednesday, here's a smattering of short blurbs: - BitWise is now "leetware." Check it out. Look at the August 25th entry. - The BitWise Wiki got a nice start on life earlier this week. I think all of the documentation could actually be gradually moved over, and the wiki easily allows other interesting documentation, like a index of BitWise terms. - BitWise Plus got...
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Saturday 20 August
- Don't bother stealing my mail anymore (14:55) - A word of warning to any budding entrepreneur: registering a business is your ticket to an untold number of credit card solicitations arriving via mail. I put up with this deluge for a while, but one day when I got four solicitations in the same day, I decided that it was time to take some action. Instead of just shredding the offers, I started calling the 800 numbers and requesting that my name be removed from the mailing lists. Every...
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Saturday 30 July
- Ultimate Boot CD (22:10) - This is too cool: Ultimate Boot CD. It's a tech person's dream come true! It has hard drive diagnostic tools, installation tools, wiping tools, cloning tools, sector editors, partition managers, and file tools, plus other great stuff like CPU and memory test suites, network tools, free anti-virus tools and much more. Why haven't I discovered this before now? This will make so many things easier!...
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Saturday 16 July
- Mirror mirror on my web site, what's the best layout of all? (14:49) - If you haven't seen our BitWise IM home page since yesterday, check it out. Notice anything different? In case you need some assistance, here's what it used to look like. Isn't it amazing what a difference a little switcheroo makes? We hope you agree that the new layout is much improved. Special thanks go to Ooklah for sending the full non-cropped version of the really cool 3 OS logo. Tux looks so much more complete than before. ;) PS In...
Thursday 9 June
- Choosing the right icons the first time (20:21) - This is an official companion piece to my April 20th post, "Choosing the right name the first time." The Icon Makeover continues to draw rave reviews (not one negative comment yet!). The client truly looks great, but unfortunately, all of the old screenshots on the web site don't look so great. Today was spent updating screenshots, whether just replacing icons or redoing the screenshots entirely. If you're bored, you can check out the updated screenshots:Frontpage Montage Features - Text Messaging...
Friday 29 April
- Getting ready to "flip the switch" (14:50) - If nothing catastrophic happens in the next day or so, I'll be throwing the switch on the new web site sometime tomorrow (Saturday). What this will mean is that the old site will no longer be accessible; redirects will automatically move you from the old site to the new site. About time, eh? Hopefully doing it over the weekend will allow for a smoother transition and any major fires can be put out before Monday (though hopefully there won't be...
Thursday 28 April
- It's a match made in heaven (16:57) - One of the tasks for the new web site was integrating the navigation of the site into the phpBB forums. I did this a while ago, and the result was functional, but not completely satisfactory. The navbar colors clashed with the default theme, the navbar "shifted" a bit between the forums and the other pages, and the shadow had to be removed for the integration not to look really bad. So, basically, it looked... bad. After realizing that the new...
Friday 25 March
- For the first time: the new web site unveiled (21:22) - It is with great pleasure that we want to give our loyal users and forum/blog readers the first chance to use our new web site and provide feedback. We hope that you will find the new site more attractive, more organized, more interesting, more informative and more fun. The full announcement is available in this forum thread. In order to facilitate and consolidate the discussion for the new web site, comments are disabled for this post; please use the forum...
Saturday 19 March
- More interactive new web site features (10:39) - The new BitWise web site has many more interactive pages where the reader has the opportunity to try something themselves or give us feedback. Some of the recent interactive additions:The FAQ and documentation pages provide a way for users to submit suggestions for FAQ questions and new documentation articles. Each documentation article can be rated by the reader to provide their thoughts about the quality of the documentation. A new Direct Connection Setup Wizard provides customized instructions for setting up...
Thursday 17 March
- First peek of the new web site (10:32) - Many of you have been wondering what the new web site will look like. Here's a shot of the new front page (click for full size): Some things to note:There are three site themes, for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Each theme has its own color, orange, green, and blue, respectively, and each theme will have its own screenshots. The news items are readable simply by clicking on the blurb, which will expand the item in-place. The screenshot will...
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Thursday 24 February
- Yes, Dorothy, there is a Javascript Blowfish implementation (20:07) - When trying to come up with something interactive for the new web site to demonstrate encryption, I thought to myself, "Self, what if we could let people encrypt text and see what encrypted text looks like, right on the web site?" Brilliant! Initially, I was planning just to do some lame transformation that wasn't really encryption but would give the same appearance. Then for fun, I thought I'd search and see if anyone had actually implemented Blowfish in Javascript. Imagine...
Monday 14 February
- Why does Mac OS X include IE? (20:09) - Today was a day of battling browsers. Victory was sweet with all but IE 5.2 for Mac OS X, which I hope has been banished from OS X 10.4. The latest version was released in 2001, and it shows. A couple of places on the new site make clever use of iFrames (which probably could be "better" done in CSS, but that's a discussion for elsewhere). In particular, two places resize the iFrame based on the content, which was relatively...
Wednesday 26 January
- Six Apart, Google, Yahoo and MSN fight comment spam (21:01) - As I've lamented here several times, comment spam is a problem. It's encouraging to see steps being taken by major players to combat comment spamming, using an HTML "nofollow" tag that tells search engines not to consider those links. Spammers have traditionally benefited by having links to their sites appear in numerous blogs, and without the search engines indexing and counting those links, the motivation to "publish" the comment spam is, theoretically, diminished. Hopefully it works half as well in...
Sunday 21 November
- BitWise Chat #1 result on google search for BitWise (17:50) - Most individuals like to google themselves to see where they are mentioned on the Internet. I would bet that most small or mid-size companies (maybe even some large ones) also google themselves to find "the buzz" on the Internet about the company. Every once in a while, I try searches for "BitWise" or "BitWise Chat" or other various related word combinations. For a long time, a search for "BitWise" by itself listed BitWise Chat as the #2 result. BitWise is...
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Thursday 18 November
- Microsoft joins the free IDE crowd (19:34) - Some developers use only command line software and tools, but many developers, myself included, find many benefits to using an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that provides a GUI editor, a source file editor, project management, a debugger, build configuration management, and more. Linux has several good IDEs available, my preference being KDevelop. Apple released XCode (previously ProjectBuilder) with OS X 10.3. Both KDevelop and XCode are excellent IDEs, and are available for free. Microsoft Visual Studio is the de facto...
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Friday 12 November
- Take that, blog spammers! (10:00) - The spam attacks in my comments have decreased since enabling the comment approval, especially from attacks that previously resulted in 4 or 5 posts all at once. Even still, I was getting 3 to 6 spam comments per day and it was getting old deleting these viagra-endorsing comments. I began to notice that all of the spam attacks were taking place in older posts, sometimes going back months. Using this information, the spam problem has been "solved," at least for...
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Thursday 11 November
- Firefox hits the front page of USA Today Money section (09:10) - I'm not particulary anti-Microsoft, but I always like to see a healthy dose of competition. I was really thrilled to see a front page article in yesterday's USA Today Money section about Firefox, which this week released the long-anticipated Version 1.0. It is almost unanimous among users and experts alike that Internet Explorer is beyond stagnant: it is dangerous. I hope that you will join with me, millions of users worldwide, and the companies and governments that have denounced Internet...
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Tuesday 2 November
- Dear blog spammers (17:39) - Congratulations on discovering my blog, which must now be popular enough to attract spammers. I would urge you to notice that comments must now be approved, so no one is seeing your spam comments because they are being deleted before made publicly available. I hope that you possess enough brain cells to stop wasting your time. And if you think that I want cialis, imported drugs, loans from the UK, gay porn, or any of the other things being posted,...
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Friday 18 June
- The "Perfect Website" paradox (14:33) - I've decided that web design is largely a thankless job. You can't please everybody all of the time, and on top of it, people are always either too reluctant or too willing to offer armchair advice. I find it amusing that there seem to be so many books and sites dedicated to how not to design a web site. Perhaps what's really bothering me is the world's obsession with glitz. We want glitzy cars, glitzy movies, glitzy stores, and among...
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