Semicolons

Wordpress blows. All the cool kids switched to Tumblr!

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 18:17:00 +0100

Haven’t posted in a while. Actually, it’s been over a year since I posted anything here — hell, I wish I knew why. And I get a long-lasting impression that it isn’t just me, latterly most of my favorite RSS subscriptions either went offline or fell into some kind of idleness.

See, taking a break usually helps but when it comes to blogs, it’s a different story: when you loosen up, it only gets harder and harder in time to brace yourself up. Glad I finally got over it. Well, after all I haven’t gave up on blogging yet. Plus, Tumblr is such an amazing service; it’s so neat that moving from self-hosted installation of Wordpress to a Tumblr powered blog doesn’t feel like a hard work, but more like a pleasure.

TL;DR

Feed address changed, please update your RSS readers to the new one. If you don’t, I plot to swap it really soon with a stream of videos of kids doing it and some nasty animal pictures; you’ll face criminal charges, and ultimately see each other in prison! Seriously, you will end just like that famous Polish movie director who went on a trip to Switzerland the other day, and never got back. Remember, I told you so. Seriously. Better update.

(I’m told that all modern RSS readers update themselves automatically, when given a 301 redirect. Better safe than sorry. Also, please have mercy on me for these 16 new items popping up in your readers all of a sudden; unfortunately, no way of solving this when using a redirect!)

New domain name, new site design

The blog has got a new domain name, finally a generic one. None of the Tumblr themes seemed nice, so I also took an opportiunity to come up with a new design — this time contentes of the website got into a 1-column layout, and a slighty diffrent set of colors. Looks clean, feels readable; I think I’m pretty satisfied with the end result.

Here’s what it looks like now.

The site looks best in Google Chrome, and all other WebKit-based browsers. Seems just fine in Firefox, and almost as good in Opera Browser (actually, if you give a miss to one nasty Opera-specific bug with CSS outlines making it through transparent background overlays, it’s even better than Gecko). From what I see in IE NetRenderer, things also look good in Internet Explorer 8; that’s nice, at least the newest version.

There’s no such tool like a “Wordpress to Tumblr” plugin

The process of blog removal went smoothly. I was planning to sort out all of my old postings anyway, so even though there’s no such tool like Wordpress to Tumblr import utility, I really didn’t need one — by any means I was planning to do all of this manually from the very beginning, so I can polish things up while on the subject. 14 entries made it through the selection — considering my writing skills back then, which were rather questionable — it’s quite an impressive number.

Technical details

People say that Tumblr is an awesome service. And that’s true, it really is; ability to run custom JavaScript being my favorite feature. But like every other thing in this world, it has got some glitches, too. I have put most of them in a list:

No static pages in here. If you want to get something like a static page, you ought to write a new post, and publish it as private, so it doesn’t appear in the stream. And that particular thing isn’t nice; every post has got a 9-digit long ID number in its URL, so every time you want to put a reference to the page, you gotta copy/paste the URL with the long ID in it. Not nice, definitely.
- I worked around this one with jQuery. That’s why I love the custom JavaScript feature, without client-side scripting I wouldn’t be able to do such neat things like this. It’s not that I’m this much into fancy JavaScript pop-ups, I just can’t stand something with address looking like semicolons.org/private/279050831/tumblr_kuhw5lAywM1qa9lo5 being an accessible “contact me” page.
Inability to set a redirect. This means that if you’re into moving from self-hosted blog to Tumblr, and you don’t want to lose the track on all the links and references your website has collected so far, you ought to get yourself a new domain name.
- So you can use the old one for redirects pointing to the new one, being your Tumblr blog.
You can’t upload a big picture; anything more than 700 pixels of width gets scaled down. Actually, you can post such things by email — but these get dynamic URLs, so if you want to use it for a CSS background or something, Tumblr isn’t going to help.
- That Reddit guy, the owner of Imgur — being a student — surely can afford popular image hosting, and allow people to hotlink stuff without limits; Tumblr cannot. You know, the bandwidth, it’s so expensive. Otherwise it wouldn’t make sense.
The service ruins the mark-up of your posts. Not as badly as Posterous, yet still the thing gets on your nerves once in a while. Want some examples?
- Here’s what a sane person would use to add a picture with a caption.
  
  Don’t ask me why HTML entities go into the RSS feed as regular characters, making things look weird in the reader. Might be Tumblr!
  - ```
      
          
          Picture caption
          
       
```
- This code doesn’t make it through the editor. No div, no span. Instead, you gotta use something like this.
  - ```
      
          Picture caption
  
          
       
```
- The blockquote seems to be the only tag that Tumblr lets you use for wrapping pictures in it. Yeah, now that’s odd; I can’t think of any sane reason to prevent people from using an innocent div!
- By the way. Forget about strong and em tags, Tumblr will convert all these to b and i. Dunno, maybe they want to save on bandwidth.
- Also, due to an iframe injected by default into all Tumblr blogs, this very page isn’t a valid HTML 5 document.

Alright, that would be all. I’ll fill that Opera bug report now, and I guess it would be enough of blogging for me this year. Oh my, I almost forgot — I turned off the comments. No more “I like this post!“ coming from fellows writing themselves as “Buy cheap LCDs”. Now I’m looking forward to hearing from you via email.

Right, email. I mean, that old-fashioned, pre-Web 2.0, Google Wave kind of thing. You used that when activating your profile on Facebook, didn’t you. Remember now? My, oh my — you almost forgot! Bet you got some junk in there!

How many people use Firefox, Safari, Opera Browser?

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 14:54:00 +0100

Recently Opera’s market share increased from 0.87% to 0.99%, I was discussing about it with a group of fellows and one person stated: “with only 1 percent of share Opera has no importance at all!”. Dude… I wish you knew the number of all internet users at first!

Here’s the chart showing the current Browser Market Share (provided by Net Applications).

Web browser market share

According to these numbers there’s around 1,244,449,601 people connected to the web so far – let’s calculate how many of them use respective browsers:

IE (around 969,052,904)
Firefox (around 184,800,766)
Safari (around 62,844,705)
Opera (around 12,320,051)
Netscape (around 7,964,477)

Now you’ve got to know that Opera’s 1% is THAT much, and why social bookmarking version of Netscape.com was a huge success.

Evolution of Web Browsers, from 1991 to the present

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 14:29:00 +0100

Today I found a chart depicting the evolution of web browsers. In this picture you can see a very interesting look at the past and how far we’ve come. For instance, honestly I didn’t even know that Netscape Navigator is older than Internet Explorer! For those who cannot view Scalable Vector Graphics, here’s a picture converted to the PNG format.

Evolution of Web Browsers

Well, I’m afraid I haven’t even heard about 50 percents of all these applications (Arachne? WebRunner? HotJava?). Awesome.

A few quotes from Digg:

Netscape Navigator brings back horrible, horrible memories.

I remember once counting the number of Netscape versions in the 90s and I stopped at around 350.

I didn’t know SlipKnot made a web browser

Great use of SVG!

Compiz Fusion – An Amazing Video Demonstration of the Development Version

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 14:22:00 +0100

Compiz Fusion is a collection of plugins for Compiz, an OpenGL based window manager for the X Window System (read: available for all Linux distributions, natively build in Ubuntu) that uses 3D graphics hardware to create fast compositing desktop effects for window management.

Compiz Fusion, collection of plugins for Compiz

Most of you have heard about that great piece of free software, and I really don’t want to rewrite what was already written. Instead, I’m gonna share with you a well-performed video demonstration of all Compiz Fusion plugins which was recently recorded by one of my compatriots. Definitely worth watching.

For further information go check out its page on Wikipedia.

Firefox Girl — the story of Alexandra Ansgar

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 13:10:00 +0100

Photoshopped picture of the girl in a Firefox t-shirt I added to one of my postings got a warm welcome (not as warm as Ubuntu Girl, mind you!), so I decided to hit on an idea and seek for more information. What’s her name, where is she from, and — before anything else — what on Earth does she have to do with the Firefox browser.

Alexandra Ansgar, the Firefox Girl

Here’s what I found so far – photo leaked for the first time at some Portuguese blog, and after that, it was posted at several tech blogs all around the world (below you can see my translation of its Portuguese description). It looks like the fake information about “Scandinavian top model Alexandra Ansgar” wasn’t published by original author of the faked photo, but much later, in a story produced by folks from Gadgetizer.

I can write a text that probably would be a summary of 5000 words of the advantages in moving for Firefox and about all disadvantages and terrible dangers behind MS Internet Explorer… But the following image will be much more successful, I guess.

After all, people of Museum of Hoaxes posted a more detailed story about Firefox girl, and there I found that blonde girl is also known in web as Emy18. I got a link to some crappy site filled full with softporn pictures. Unfortunately, due the lack of her true name, and no white t-shirt photos, this particular site wasn’t much useful for later research. ~~Finally, thanks to folks posting random things on some adult forum I got to know that I needed to do was a search for “Francesca Lee”.~~

The Firefox Girl, before the Photoshop makeover

Her name is Francesca Lee, she is based on the south coast of the United Kingdom and has been modeling for about 1,5 year. She started modeling for a friend who was an amateur photographer; she really enjoyed it and things went from there.

Two finest pictures of Francesca Lee are added to this post. If you are looking for more, go straight to her official portfolio. It’s not safe for browsing at work, so you better make sure that your boss is far away from your desk when you’re browsing this stuff ;)

Update #1: First of all, thanks for the GREAT feedback you have been sending in by emails, and comments added to this post. Special thanks to DailyTech readers that seem to refer to my writings in comment discussion to every Firefox news published on their site. That’s nice.

Update #2: I made a promise to share with you more NSFW pictures of Firefox Girl. Here they are – click here to see all the photos taken during the Firefox session, 14 other galleries of Francesca Lee are also available. In contrast to the official website, they are all available for free.

Update #3: Alrighty then. After almost two years after me publishing this blog post, I finally got some feedback from Francesca. Not from Francesca, from Emy. I mean, from Haley. Well. Just see for yourself!

Im not Francesca Lee. For a start she doesn’t have my face shape or the scar above my right eye that I got on my friends parents coffee table when I was a kid.

My name is Haley Emy Bickers. I grew up in UK. Moved to LA at 15. Now live in Ontario. Emy was my grandmothers name and is my middle name.

I used to sing and the firefox picture was created along with other mock ups to take to sponsorship meetings. I posted them on a blog page i had at the time and someone took them from there and spread the firefox rumour.

Here’s some of the mock ups:

And this is what I looked like at 15:

This is me with my parents Brenda and Tony.

And this is me now:

Ubuntu Girl — Spread the Linux with a chick

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 12:30:00 +0100

Don’t waste your time on listing all advantages of switching from Windows to Linux, there are at least a few better ways to evangelize. For instance, I’m sure this picture will be much more successful than any other right-minded strivings!

Ubuntu Girl

Photo was made by Ubuntu fans from Hungary, the caption says something like: “if yours is micro and soft, my t-shirt never drops”.

We don’t know who the girl really is. At least we can say that our new-born Ubuntu mascot is at least as pretty as the girl from the story of Alexanda Ansgar, the Firefox Girl. The other thing worth a notice is the fact that the Ubuntu Girl picture was made by the same person who threw eggs on Steve Ballmer, the Microsoft CEO, some time ago.

This post was originally published at August 15th, 2007; got dugg, and became pretty popular since then. It also collected an impressive amount of comments; however, I’m afraid that the only thing I find worth a repost is this ridiculus conversation:

Scaramouche at May 29th, 2009:

Since when do we need naked pictures of women to encourage us to use ubuntu? And the first person who calls me a homo will get his head bitten off. I use ubuntu, and I’m glad to use it porn-free. And yes I’m male, yes I like seeing naked women, but I try to exhibit self-control. You guys are just a bunch of perverts, “oh I like her boobs”. How dumb is that? Get a wife bozo!

Gary at May 29th, 2009:

@Scaramouche: you’re a fag. Go touch some boys.

Scaramouche at May 29th, 2009:

No, I said that the first person who called me gay would get his head bitten off. What are you, some teenage boy on his laptop, back in his room, away from his parents browsing for porn?

Scaramouche at May 29th, 2009:

And by the way, you are guilty of hell-fire. Hell is a place of endless torment. If you don’t repent of your foolishness and follow Christ then you will go to hell. The Bible says that whoever lusts after a women is guilty of adultery, whoever hates another, is guilty of murder. If you steal anything you are also guilty. But there is a way out of this, repent and ask Christ to enter into you.

Gary at May 29th, 2009:

@Scaramouche: are you lds

Scaramouche at May 29th, 2009:

No. I’m Reformed Presbyterian, and angry at all the men who are extremely into pornography. It’s a waste of time, money, and effort. I’m spending those supporting a family.

Nice, isn’t it? Well, okay, this one also seems nice:

sageb1 at May 30th, 2009:

her boobs are perfect. If we had surgically enhanced boobs marketing Linux, wouldn’t that be unnatural?

even Asia Carrera’s boobs were 34B after losing weight before she was pressured into getting an expensive boob job she can’t reverse because the implants are both under her breasts and also inserted into the muscle underneath her original breasts.

This is not unlike the mix and match of OSS and proprietary ware in certain Ubuntu Linux repositories, of which are not OSS about which both the OpenBSD founder and Stallman had fought with Linus Torvalds!

Ms Doll’s boobs are truly analogous to Ubuntu Linux fresh out of the box, as you have to adjust your sources.list so that the not-so-free stuff is installed, because Adobe Flashplayer is needed, not the two OSS-compliant analogues.

Volleyball Girls — What Would You Give to Date One of The World’s Hottest Women’s Volleyball Players?

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 06:59:00 +0100

Volleyball is an Olympic team sport in which two teams of six active players, separated by a high net try to score points against one another by grounding a ball on the other team’s court. The complete rules of volleyball are extensive, but in general, play proceeds as follows… OK… forget the rules… as if anyone cares who the winner is anyway!

Instead, let’s focus on the real benefits volleyball brings the world…

Following a rigorous selection process and a great deal of deliberation (*cough*), I am finally able to present the 10 finest pictures of the 2007 FIVB Women’s World Cup, showing only the sports hottest cheesecakes in all of their athletic glory!

Katarzyna Skowrońska (POL)

Jaqueline Carvalho (BRA)

Francesca Piccinini (ITA)

Stacy Sykora (USA)

Mirtha Uribe (PER)

Bethania De La Cruz de Pena (DOM)

Kimberly Glass (USA)

Yoshie Takeshita (JPN)

Yumilka Ruiz (CUB)

Eleonora Dziękiewicz (POL)

You can find these and MANY more hi-res photos in the official gallery of the Federation Internationale de Volleyball. Thanks to Eskey for bringing my attention to that site.

Comments (used to be turned on, now they are disabled):

Jon Holato at January 29th, 2008

The first one (Polish) is best of course.

Mike at January 31st, 2008

Man, the first Polish chick is nice. Two thumbs up for East European women. Man, do I miss Europe!

My gf used to be a volleyball player. I’m trying hard to get her back into it.

Breee at February 5th, 2008

Guy, there are a LOT more beatyful women even in the polish team. Your selection is rather questionable

volleyball voices at February 22nd, 2008

Interesting comments. I like the fact that the top 10 choices were truly international.

paulette at March 29th, 2008

Ms. Katarzyna Skowrońska is really pretty!

Dark Side TWM at July 16th, 2008

I’d second @paulette. Skowrońska is the girl of choice.

YG at August 14th, 2008

kimberly Glass (usa) is stunning….and the first one also….damn kimberly ur soooo hot

ELEMENT at August 16th, 2008

The two Polish girls are by far and large the most beautiful and the one from Peru is also very pretty.

ayo at August 18th, 2008

kim glass from the usa is the best. Man she is one of the hottest girls ive ever seen

mau at August 23rd, 2008

Kimberly Glass for me is the best shes really hot

Jeux at September 9th, 2008

I love kimberly too

Blazer at October 10th, 2008

I’d go with Bednarek, then Skowrońska or Baranska, all from Poland. Manon Flier of Holland is up there also. I imagine there are some incredible Czech volleyball players(Czech and Poland have the most beautiful women in the world), but I’ve never seen them play.

volleyballer at December 12th, 2008

they are super women, super players and super beautiful all over th planet!!!!!! i am volleyballer and this i the best game for girls and boys too……….V O L L E Y B A L L FOREVER!!!!!!!! :*

Daniel at December 26th, 2008

Skowronska and Dziekiewicz…

Nice…

Joe Paterno at January 20th, 2009

I think you should include Cynthia Barbosa from USA. She is really pretty too and smart.

timmy the dying boy at March 20th, 2009

Don’t waste your time unless you’re at least 6′ 2. Hey! I’m 6′2′

mexxican at May 19th, 2009

Heh, I think Russian girls are still much pretier than the stupid American… Stacy Sykora (USA) looks like a old male hockey player!

Adalberto de Töpë at August 3rd, 2009

Mexxican are right. This Yankee player is ridiculous. Stacy Sykora is so aargh!!! Mirtha Uribe(PER) und Katarzyna Skowrońska (POL) are very hot, but I think Sheila (BRA) could be included.

Daniel at August 18th, 2009

Ok i think tha the most beautyfull volleyball players comes from Puerto Rico national team. Look at Vilmarie Mojica, Karina Ocasio,Deborah Seilhamer is the most beautyfull team in the world look at them in the internet.

Bart at August 25th, 2009

@Daniel: Thanks a lot for your input. Even though Debora Seilhamer doesn’t seem to be much to my liking, Vilmarie Mojica and Karina Ocasio are definitely worth a mention here.

These are the best pictures of them I could find (it takes a while to find any pictures of players from Puerto Rico; the team hasn’t been doing very well in the championships lately.

Vilmarie Mojica: link #1, link #2, link #3

Karina Ocasio: link #1, link #2

Victor at September 17th, 2009

I think you should include Cynthia Barboza. She is very pretty.

Go Daddy Girl — Candice Michelle. And the true colors of Go Daddy’s offer hidden behind her boobs.

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 09:30:00 +0100

Everybody knows Go Daddy, it’s the largest domain name registrar in the world. The company is mostly known from pulling shitloads of dollars into the booby Super Bowl marketing campaigns filled full with sexually suggestive material, which get always rejected a number of times before being accepted to air in the television. See, I was just stumbling around; trying to find what made Go Daddy the world’s leading domain registrar…

Guess time — how much time would it take to find complete information about pricing on the Go Daddy website? Five minutes, ten perhaps? Well, to tell the truth I can say that after 15 minutes of hard-digging through all of the marketing brainwash at goddady.com you just come up with nothing. Well, let’s try Google Search instead!

Turns out, googling for go daddy renewal prices takes you to series of comprehensive articles clearly showing the way GoDaddy deals with its clients. Go on, find out how the world’s most popular domain registrar does it’s shiny business. Wincent’s writings about “suckers who get lured” are really compelling, just go on and read them.

Candice Michelle, the Go Daddy Girl

Beware.

Comments (used to be turned on, now they are disabled):

Dark Side at May 23rd, 2008

Boobs will sel almost everything, an tell me – how many people bother to look behind the marketing hype? I bet less than one in a million.

Nonetheless, the prices should be readily available, but guess the majority doesn’t care.

Dark Side at May 25th, 2008

Looked at the next, eNom and Networksolutions, they don’t seem to have a pricelist easily available either (eNom does have a corporate pricing at the bottom it seems). So, the guess that it’s the girl that sells the domains would be a safe bet in my opinion. Maybe “the less you spend, the less you care” is true, but in most cases you can expect another equation to work just as well “the less you spend, the more you pay”.

Dark Side at May 25th, 2008

BTW if the size of her breasts is real she’ll have some severe back problems in a few years ;)

HP Girl — Outstanding Beauty of Another Promotional Model

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 09:19:00 +0100

When I was checking out the stats today, I noticed a number of people coming here from DailyTech article. Then, following the discussion that was taking place on one of the other articles — I found something really special.

HP Girl, promotion of energy-saving HP products

This photo was taken during promotional campaign of energy-saving set of HP products – i.e. HP Pavilion S3260, a compact-size computer unit reconciling high-performance with a nice design and low power consumption. Here’s the official press release — just in case someone may be interested in reading about the hardware instead of staring at the picture!

I did a little research on Chinese internet and I didn’t find more pictures of that girl, which isn’t much surprising when it comes to booth babes – they all do their work anonymously. All of the pictures I happened to find are included in this post published at Chinese Engadget. Anyway, some fellow dropped few links in comments added below the DailyTech article, have a look at that stuff.

Thank you very much DailyTech readers, I have seen LOTS of pictures of trade shows before, and I must admit — HP Girl just seems to be the finest one. By the way I learned that northern Chinese have sharper noses and less rounded faces when compared to the southern Chinese — not sure if that makes them more good-looking, or not. If so — what would you say about Koreans?

Comments (used to be turned on, now they are disabled):

Dark Side at August 14th, 2008

Lol :) , i tried to find someone who knows a bit more about the girl on yahoo answers but there was only one answer off-topic, so here is the link. Unfortunately the girl remains to be named.

Nice try.

Digg Effect — 2635 of Diggs, 85k of unique visitors and 130k of pageviews

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 09:02:00 +0100

The Digg Effect, as seen in Google Analytics

Five days ago my post about Ubuntu girl was dugg, few folks requested some report, so there it is. The picture above my writings shows a chart of traffic that was brought by submission upvoted 2635 times. Ubuntu girl was one of the most popular stories on Digg service for that day, I guess perceptive analysis might be quite interesting.

83,790 unique visits (according to Google Analytics, WP Stats were comparable)
128,058 pageviews (readers were also interested in other stories, this is nice)
71.94% of visitors were Firefox users (Digg users do use modern browsers, only 14 percents of Internet Errorer)
70.68% of visitors were Windows users (read: the message archived its own goal)

Also the post about Ubuntu Girl received 148 blog reactions (according to Technorati) and batch of links from forums, message boards and other more or less social websites (Spanish, French, German, Italian… Wait, there’re even Arabian and Chinese ones!).

Comments (used to be turned on, now they are disabled):

Jon Holato at August 20th, 2007

Congrats on hitting the Digg front page, I’ve yet to make it there.

Reddit is a great site too, just a much different scope overall. I’ve been on the Reddit home page four times, and 3 of the 4 were politically-oriented, which is the base of Reddit. (Avg 5-8k users I’d say.)

Stumble Upon is good too, however the volume is significantly less than Reddit and especially Digg.

In a nutshell: Reddit = educated and civilized, Digg = uneducated and uncivilized.

Well. As it turned out, Jon did what he wanted to. His post about Polish pop singer made it to Digg and Reddit front pages, all at once.

Friendly URLs — Possibly all of what makes a good URL structure

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:57:00 +0100

Long story short — I strongly suggest following the convention of organizing files and directories in a file system. This is what users are already familiar with, and since majority of them aren’t willing to learn, you’re better keeping your URLs this way. Among all other things, friendly URLs have one additional benefit — when an URL address is easy to read, people are more likely to click. For e.g. references left somewhere in the comments section on a popular news site can drive pretty high amounts of new users to your website. More people on a website is what makes a webmaster happy.

Friendly URLs generator

First, probably most important thing to describe — if you want to make your URLs pretty, you need to generate static parts for use in URL addresses from various input, can be a headline of a news article, name of a file, say — whatever you’d use as a page title. Let’s start with with a short piece of code written in Python; later I’ll move to further details clarifying what we do in the code, following by a list of explanations of all other aspects as well.

If the favorite language of yours supports Unicode (hint — PHP doesn’t), you shouldn’t have much problems implementing such a function in it — it looks just as clear as a crystal. Don’t shy away from Regular Expressions — they’ll explained, too. See:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: UTF-8 -*-

import re

foo = "good example"
bar = u"*!Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn!*"

def pretty_url(input):
    input = input.replace("_", "-")                 # 1
    regex = re.compile(r"\W+", re.U)                # 2
    input = re.sub(regex, "-", input)
    input = re.sub(r"^\W+|\W+$", "", input)         # 3
    input = input.lower()                           # 4
    return input

print pretty_url(foo)   # Outputs "good-example"
print pretty_url(bar)   # Outputs "iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn"

Replace all underscores with a hyphen. Otherwise the regex special character of \W would leave them untouched — \W stands for a set matching any non-alphanumeric character, except an underscore.
We could skip the previous one and just use [^a-zA-Z0-9] instead but that wouldn’t handle non-ASCII characters. These two lines go as follows: “compile a regular expression pattern specifying an Unicode flag, then replace one or more occurrences with a hyphen“.
There’s always a risk of leaving a hyphen in the beginning or the end of the string. Literally, this regex means: “Replace one or more occurrences of a non-alphanumeric character with an empty string, matching only the start OR the end of the string“.
Convert all what’s left to lowercase.

This is a “prettified” version of function I used for generating urlslugs on a file sharing website — not a nice input if you ask me. And you know what, it’s almost perfect — it handles pretty much everything except really weird things such as KoЯn or Qu33n5_0f_th3_5t0n3_4g3. I didn’t make these things up, these are the real world examples (band names, actually). Such a wonderful piece of evidence for the Troutman’s Fifth Programming Postulate: “If the input editor has been designed to reject all bad input, an ingenious idiot will discover a method to get bad data past it“.

Further details & more explanations

James Gardner covered the problem of choosing a good URL structure with such an excellent list of tips in the Pylons Book. Even though the chapter feels pretty much comprehensive, I felt like I could point out a couple of more.

Here’s my take on the topic, I tried to put here together everything what comes to my mind:

URLs should describe the contents of your website — if users know what are they going to see, they are more likely to click. Also, search engines like them this way. Both things mean more users coming to your site — therefore, instead of/in addition to content ID you use an urslug generated from the page title.
URLs need to be short, you should strip all the unnecessary parts. Visitors of your website really don’t need to know that your news controller has a view action in it, if it’s the default one. As long as you don’t run a website processing large chunks of data, dates and ID numbers aren’t necessary either.
Striping everything but an urlslug is an overdo. How do people know which pages of your website are located at the top of your site’s navigation structure? Which of them are more important than others?
Separate words with hyphens. No commas, colons, semicolons or any other punctuation marks — only hyphens. But what about an underscore — you may ask. Glad that you asked: no underscores. You can’t register a domain name with an underscore in it. Only hyphens. You use underscore, you create a mess instead of following the convention of keeping things simple.
Also, people tend to share URLs via comments. And a hell a lot of programmers haven’t grasped Regular Expressions yet, so if you use too much of the vivid imagination, their half-assed URL parsing function will break the address, referring people to nothing but a 404 Error. This is not a good thing.
Following the file system-like convention — every URL of yours should look like a static one. No place for dynamic-looking parts. No questions marks, no ampersands, no equals signs. Static. Just like in a file system. You need to get something via GET method, you achieve that using fancy URL rewrite, separating things with a slash. Queries separated by slashes are more readable and easier to type than, say, index.php?param=value&otherparam=other%20value%20and&will=this%20ever%20end.
Every page on your site should be available under one, and only one unique URL address. Search engines don’t like same content going from different URLs since that’s exactly how search algorithm measures the value of particular pages. Canonical URL is an ugly workaround for muddle-headed programmers, and doesn’t make things as good as one-unique-URL-per-page approach.
Stick to lowercase characters. This will make your URLs easier to read. Also, since URLs are case-sensitive, you’re better off people guessing if you used upper-case, or a lower-case character in there. This way you may end up having one page indexed under more than one address in the search engine index, and you already know — that’s a bad thing.
Since all of what you serve is just a plain HTML, consider ending your URLs with a .html extension. Except for the navigation parts, like category index or pagination — following the file-system-like convention, these would play the role of directories, organizing your URLs in a nice, user-friendly logical structure.

Friendly URLs handling

There are several different approaches to URL rewriting. Since all these mechanisms used for mapping the URL address are described in a great detail elsewhere, I’ll just leave here a few references so you can compare different approaches the fancy URLs problem.

Disclaimer

Remember — everything what’s written here is just a humble attempt of mine to cover up the topic in a comprehensive manner; by chance addressing all possible issues with a short explanation. Not a standard, just a convention — no need to argue why underscore is better than hyphen or so — you’re free to do whatever feels right for you in a given moment.

Just make sure if it really is a well-considered decision. Because when it comes to URL structure, fixing what seemed-to-be-right-back-then after a year or so might be more problematic than one would expect — you will need to trouble yourself with redirects, in addition to that — Google still hasn’t made such an operation painless, years go by and not much has changed in that matter.

Please send in your input, for I am willing to add some more.

Janet Cho — Does one Korean Model have three names?

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:28:00 +0100

Janet Cho, posing with a fancy arcade game controller

Well, isn’t she pretty? Here’s the i4u gadget model gallery page, that’s where I that picture. The girl is described as Korean model Janet Cho. That’s fine, but when I type that phrase into search engine, not so many photos are showed. First thought – Janet Cho is just an alias. Great, this means I’m unable to find more pictures of her. But wait, they also mentioned that she was chosen Miss Korea 2000!

UPDATE #1:

It looks like buddies from I4U made their readers wrong with description of Janet. It looks like she isn’t Miss Korea, and her name isn’t Park Shi Yun. I asked Glenn of Pacific Pro Digital for more information by email (take a look at comments added to this post) and now we are waiting for her response. There may one another update with proven info about Janet.

UPDATE #2:

Janet added a comment to this post, and I’m a bit disappointed. It looks like she didn’t even read over my writings — only that would explain why instead of putting us on the right track, the girl only leaves something like “Hey guys, here’s my MySpace. Have a nice day!” comment like this. I feel disappointed.

Comments (used to be turned on, now they are disabled):

Glenn Francis at June 27th, 2007

Thanks for the great article and your diligent research!

Janet ( Park, Bak ) is one of the most beautiful Asian girls I’ve ever seen or photographed, and she is truly great to work with. I plan on doing more photoshoots with her soon.

So check back on my website from time to time. I’m planning to do some “Artistic” type photos with her next.

a friend of the real “Janet” at June 30th, 2007

hey all. just to let you know, park si yun is not janet cho. Janet is her real name and you can find her in the 2007 East West calendar as Miss May under her real alias “Paris”. thanks guys and keep the reviews coming!!.. She reads all your comments and loves them!

Glenn Francis at June 30th, 2007

Please feel free to write articles or comment on any of models you see on my website or anywhere. I expect to be posting *a lot* of stuff in the next few months.

steve at July 2nd, 2007

in response to your last comment. we’re UCLA film students living in the same house. We’ve been fans of Paris C. since we met her at a mutual friends’ party. We’re looking at her picture right now (hanging above the computer!).. its always the month of May at our place.

Ugo at August 25th, 2007

Hi all, i met Janet more than 4 years ago while she was in Paris studying for one semester at the American University of Paris, so i find her real alias funny, lol. Just to tell u i saw some pictures of her made for a Sega game randomly, and i was shocked cause i immediately recognised her, she s exactly the same in real, sooooo beautiful !!!

If u read it and remember me, just want to wish u great success!!! take care!

steve at August 27th, 2007

@Ugo: I got your comment forwarded to my email and I promptly forwarded it to Janet. She says of course she remembers you and have been trying to reach you for some time now…something about having fond memories of you together in Paris. Is there any way she can reach you?

Ugo at August 30th, 2007

i would be very glad to have news from, her, she can e-mail me through my Myspace Page: http://profile.myspace.com/ugogunners

Glenn Francis at October 3rd, 2007

I received an e-mail from Janet. She said she’s currently touring with Bruce Springstein and the E Street Band until December. She said she’ll send me some photos of her as Miss Korea when she gets home from the tour.

janet at November 24th, 2007

hey guys! check me out in Steven Seagal’s new movie, Urban Justice. have a small part as Danny Trejo’s girlfriend. you can see more pics of me as well on myspace.com/jsc92880. haven’t had time to build my site but feel free to visit and leave comments. I will reply back!! much love and god bless!!!

Daniel at February 6th, 2008

I saw images of Janet on I4U!! strictly amazing^ I’m from Canada and living in Seoul right now..I have the worst case of Korean fever and Damn Janet is so fine!!

Bobby at June 4th, 2008

Hello, just wondering if this is the same Janet Cho I’ve worked with back in TAG / Santa Monica, thanks!

Belardo at June 18th, 2008

Having had a Koren GF for a few months with LOONG hair, it was hot… she was hot. When she’s on top in the bed, your in a curtain of black and all you see is a face. Oh yeah.

Damn I miss her. She’s almost as hot as the girl above abut 15years older. When we went out, every one thought we were hot. Why are we not together? Koren parents is #1. They want her to settle down and find some “nice Koren guy”. UGH!

Belardo at June 18th, 2008

OOPS! I just checked out her other photos on the link… She’s a hottie. But my Koren ex-GF was still hotter, even thou she had smaller boobs. Oh and she was a model from her teens to mid 20s.

Think I’ll go cry now.

John at October 22nd, 2009

Well… having lived in Asia for many years, I would say that she is pretty run-of-the-mill as far as Korean girls go. But you boys have your fun with it. I see better looking women walking to work everyday.

Mashup of posts on your Wordpress Homepage

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:12:00 +0100

I’m starting to think that idea of showing a bunch of full posts on homepage isn’t always the best solution to choose, so I think we can do something with it. The goal is clear – I want to show complete content of newest posts, and only excerpts of older writings. Wordpress engine offers 2 appropriate template tags that provide showing our expected result. You can find them somewhere in your main index template file.

the_content displaying contents of the current post within the Wordpress Loop
the_excerpt that shows only post excerpt, as a replacement for the_content() Template tag

In common use, you are able to show on your Wordpress homepage only complete post contents, OR only excerpt variants of your posts. Solution looks pretty simple, if you want to use it in your Wordpress template of choice, open up index.php file, and replace this (or code looking slighty similiar to this one):

With the code listed below:

Also, there’s one other thing that you have to add to your index.php file. It will give you a chance to be ok with the template order, by setting different limits of posts. First number for most-recent posts on your homepage, and the second for older ones that your readers see when they click Older Posts link (you can set that number somewhere within the Wordpress Dashboard).

Right before opening

in the index.php ofyour Wordpress theme, paste the code added below. Of course you’re free to replace “7” with some other number.

Use "nofollow" to enjoy the better rankings

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 07:01:00 +0100

Some time ago I promised to write about my approach to use of nofollow for blog comments. Personally I do think that all comment links at dofollow blogs have no SEO value, and now I’m gonna clarify my thesis.

Being out of the “context”

If you are interested in SEO, you know well that links from sites topically related to yours can offer measurable boost for your rankings. So if you do SEO for a website about gaming, in most cases links from sites run by people interested in gaming do best for your business. Unfortunately, that thing is also able to work in a opposite way – if all of links to your site are coming from bad neighborhoods, your site probably will be not marked as a trustworthy place in the web, too.

Number of external links on a single page

There are two different schools of SEO, one claims that number of outgoing links decreases your Google PageRank. In my humble opinion it’s enough to know which of them is preferred by services owned by Google – both Blogger and YouTube do use nofollow for all needless external links. Consider it.

Even short comments matter

My friend from Italy made a smart WordPress plugin that does block all short comments before processing. However, I’m afraid this is not the best way to fight spam. Even a few-word-long comment could be fine, don’t you think so? Just take a look at comments at Digg, or Reddit.

There’s only one good way to share the link juice

When you remove “nofollow” from comments written on your blog, your link juice simply gets out of your control. And I think we can say that use of dofollow plugins can only decrease both PageRank & TrustRank of your site. Sharing link love with people that participate in local community by making use of Top Commentators ranking looks much safer to me. When someone does have a “spammy habit” you can easily add his name to the blacklist.

Comments (used to be turned on, now they are disabled):

Krzysztof Lis at September 19th, 2007

Indeed, I believe that we need to learn from Blogspot, since it’s owned by Google.

Giving dofollow for comment links makes commenting valuable, visitors gain SEO_Power. So you get more comments. If you have “top commentators” installed, you give SEO_Power only for few people, so it’s something like you had contest for “who writes most comments”. So you probably get even more comments.

Bart at September 19th, 2007

@Krzysztof: What are you thinking about? Which option is better: to save SEO power for sites linked within your posts & Top Commentators ranking, or to have a spammy-stinking blog-bucket? I don’t have a dilemma, guess you do the same.

However, larger amount of comments is pretty delusive haha

Krzysztof Lis at September 19th, 2007

Every young blogmaster (blog owner) wants to have as many comments as possible. The younger he (she) is, the more intense is that urge.

I simply want to have comments so I know that my work is being read by others. I also want to know if they think what I write is interesting and what they me to write, ’cause sometimes I know I should write something but don’t know what…

Bart at September 20th, 2007

It’s all about Hitnosis (refreshing your browser repeatedly to see if your hit counter or comments have increased), Commentariat (readers who comment) and Blogstipation (writer’s block for bloggers).

Krzysztof Lis at September 20th, 2007

I only have RSS readers counter, and watch hits on Analytics with one day delay. Good for me.

Acopic Web Design at September 24th, 2007

I personally haven’t got a problem with dofollow or top commenters. It really should’t be an issue. We’re only discussing it here because it gets abused. If someone wants to use nofollow then thats fine – people shouldn’t be leaving comments just for the link.

Jon Holato at September 26th, 2007

Wikipedia has flip flopped with this but I believe currently they are using nofollow.

Bart at September 27th, 2007

And this is exactly why I do add rel=”nofollow” to every link to Wikipedia

Krzysztof Lis at September 27th, 2007

Me too. :) If they don’t share their PR, I won’t be giving them mine either…

mark rushworth at September 27th, 2007

nofollow is a complete fallacy… if you dont want outbound links form your comments dont give people the option to post url’s simple as that. the principle of nofollow is complete lunacy. “add your link… but ah HA… we’re not gonna give it any weight” whats the point.

Krzysztof Lis at September 27th, 2007

And I always thought that leaving comment with url gives me some visits from people interested in what I have to say.

Bart at September 27th, 2007

As well as nofollow added to links doesn’t make spammers much impressed.

Jon Holato at September 28th, 2007

@ Mark Rushworth – I must respectfully disagree with your statement, because there is still a value to putting your link in a comment even if it is nofollow. That value is that it’s still a gateway to your site, even if search engine spiders don’t follow it, users like you and I can. I often see commenter’s links getting clicked hundreds of times on my site if they make a good comment.

@ Krzysztof Lis – You’re exactly right, it does. I’ve clicked on all of your (Bart’s commenters) pages before.

14. Mark Rushworth at September 28th, 2007

Jon Holato: yes but as far as SEO goes, only on Yahoo and to a lesser extent MSN. Any click based traffic is purely based on comment merit and as we’re not selling anything through comments the chances of a conversion are low.

Bart at September 28th, 2007

I found a good explanation of it – check this out.

Asuka at March 12th, 2009

I have not been working at my blog lately and the pagerank went down… When I did blog actively my pagerank was gaining a point every update (3 x) I was not using nofollow, I had plenty of outgoing links…All my inbound link where from related sites, so I think that does the major impact…relevant!

Jan at March 19th, 2009

Mark Rushworth is completely right. From my websites I link to those which I want link to. I don’t link to sites which I don’t want link to. What’s the point of a link which carry no weight? It’s not a link!

Even though Google is sending more than 150K visits to my best site, I think that if people at Google want to fight against spam (in terms of links) and paid links, then they should come with new algorithm that would ignore links. New algorithm would bring more or less visits, but men, this is the world that Google created! They based the ranking algorithm on links.

No instead of giving nofollow links… link or don’t link. This blog should be one of those many which need the “website” input field disabled. Agree or disagree… I DON’T care.

And BTW, filtering short comments is a perfect way how to fight against spam! Also filtering comments without at least one dot is good. Senseless sentences are… useless.

Bart at March 19th, 2009

@Jan: One question to you — saying nothing of this *new algorithm* ’cause the issue is rather unsolvable at this moment of time — how would you keep the quality of search results without use of nofollow? How would you deal with spam with no ability to convert literally *all* websites in the World Wide Web to that *link or don’t link* statement, with no chance to keep an eye on all these nasty scripts running through the web filling up the forms?

@Asuka: I am afraid that I don’t have enough data to come up with a reasonable conclusion — from what do I know I can only say that your assumption relating PR to site updates seems to be very likely. Actually, testing it out would be quite difficult to put over without a larger number of websites that *suddenly* switched from frequent updates to no updates at all. PR export frequency and all other PR factors would be only one another problem here, so I guess that giving up on complex research I’d be satisfied with the assumptions alone.

Jan at March 19th, 2009

@Bart: I am not sure, but nofollow links still DO count. I’ve seen plenty of such links in my google webmaster tools account. And wonder or not, these links carry some weight! I tested it and you can do it too.

And how about forms that can’t handle spam properly? You already answered the question. Fight spam, not links. When I run a website that is powerless against spam, then such a website has no place under the sun! On my websites I’ve been receiving plenty of spammy comments – without links. But they’re still spam. Did I approve or decline such comments? Naturally, they didn’t become published. Easy as pie. Control every form and spam has NO chance.

Jan at March 19th, 2009

My apologies… I just want to add. Have you all who like that fuc*ing nofollow thing ever checked backlinks.com for instance? Real spammers can buy links for peanuts. And these links aren’t marked as nofollow. Of course, they come from spammy sites… But that’s another story. I just wanted to mention that links buying is supported by spammers! And nofollow plays no role in this! Almost every webmaster would sell a link for $100 or $200 per month. Just because it’s easy money. Of course, I know that such links (and even more expensive) are being sold. Not once, not twice, but thousands of times each month. More times than you can ever imagine…

So the question is still… to link or not to link.

Bart at March 19th, 2009

Nofollow does not carry any weight that would matter for ranking calculation — that’s what has been tested, and that’s what has been proclaimed officially.

When I run a website that is powerless against spam, then such a website has no place under the sun!

Yes, but only partially. If you run a website that is powerless against spam, it’s just a matter of time when spammers will turn it into place with a rubbish look like, so your search algorithm can mark it as a *questionable source of reference*. The problem is, it will take an amount of time. Or maybe — if only a couple of fellows would notice the opportunity, the site could not get totally rubbish after all (here’s an example) — and have an influence on your search results! Since you can’t tell which of websites in your index face an issue like this — IMO use of nofollow seem to be the only reasonable way to go. And when I say “reasonable”, I mean the well-considered use (such as Reddit karma system which justifies whether the attribute should be added) — not the “black hole” way of adding rel=”nofollow” to all external references (such as Google, YouTube, Wikipedia).

Real spammers can buy links for peanuts. And these links aren’t marked as nofollow.

There’s a substantial difference between spam links and *paid* spam links — and it’s all about ROI. Spams of *the worst kind of spam* are not likely to make a profit with links brought for a meaningful amount of cash.

Five reasons why I don’t use Reddit for social bookmarking

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 06:22:00 +0100

Reddit Alien vs the Digg Shovel Guy

When I started writing this post, I was thinking about listening ten reasons, as you see finally I decided to share only five major ones. Let’s say the rest might be a little bit discussing. You know there’s a opportunity for Reddit fanboy to appear so it will be better if I don’t give him good arguments to start the fight within comment discussion below my writings.

#1 Reddit is ugly

First time when I saw the design it seemed a bit too simple. For the second time, it seemed definitely too simple. If you ever need an example of simplicity done wrong, head over Reddit. Seriously, it looks like crap; I don’t think I could name any other popular site looking as bad as this one!

#2 Reddit is confusing

There are no descriptions for submitted stories; also, the site doesn’t show the number of points that a newly submitted link has got so far. One can say it gives a better chance at judging a story by the community BUT thanks to that fact the users looking for fresh content are always forced to swim in the cesspit of everything that gets submitted to the site. It doesn’t seem like many of the like to swim across endless stream of spam, content listed on Reedit changes slowly. This leads us to the next heading.

#3 Reddit is so slow

Thanks to much smaller amount of users this service has a much slower rate of submission than Digg. Today I’ve got the news about 84 years old man that still drives his first car — the very same URL got popular on Digg something like a week ago. What kind of fresh content is does this make? The refreshed one, perhaps.

#4 Reddit is SO messed up…

The biggest group of interests always controls the front page. Even though I actively downvote all the links I don’t like seeing there (American politics, American Media, American airlines, all other stuff that may be interesting only for someone living in the USA), I still get the crap on my “personalized” homepage. Can’t the algorithm really learn that I’m not much into things like Walmart, Baloon Boy, Sarah Palin?

#5 Reddit is boring

The major reason why I don’t use Reddit. There’s no way to figure out how the userbase choose the stuff to upvote. At a time of writing this post, my personalized homepage shows only 3 URLs I find relatively interesting. This isn’t much impressive for a total number of 25, isn’t it?

Update!

This post is a travesty. I mean — seriously — it really is. I was wandering if it’s really enough to pick up the right topic (Digg, flame war with Reddit), list 10 nonsense things, and add a funny picture. Turns out, it was.

The thing almost went popular; even though eventually I did not manage to put 10 things on my list, Digg users started to vote this up. That’s just too bad I missed with that submission, I think I would try to actively help it out reach some more!

Or maybe not. The previous version of this post was an epic crime on English grammar like most of my other old blog postings (deleted, now they’re history); I just made a little revision, leaving such a neat thing untouched would be a shame!

Here’s a comment from Tammany posted at August 24th, 2007. There were some more; this is the only one I find being worth keeping here:

the interface is not good but they take pride in that. 2 their credit, reddit people read articles before voting. digg people tend to vote for their friends so their friends will vote for them – and digg has a lot of corporate people digging up their articles and burying others.

if you digg a science article all the physorg.com people will bury your article. if you’re digging a tech site the arstechnica people will. Both of those are just middlemen sites but they are on the front page every day because it is easy to get articles buried and only theirs remain.

I mostly do tech but it may happen in politics 2. None is perfect but reddit gives every site a fair chance. digg doesn’t care about burying as long as it’s the popular people doing it.

Reddit is less easy to game

Hello world

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 05:43:00 +0100

I’m moving my blog to tumblr, and I thought it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to take a chance to post a conventional Hello World in here. I’ve been thinking of getting rid of all old posting of mine once and for all.

Eventually, I decided to move selected ones to a new home. Since the archive needs a bit of fixin on it, the process may take up to a couple of days.

Stay tuned.