In Hunting the elusive search strategy Jon Udell proposes to study the methods that people use to effectively search. He proposes capturing individual cases of searching for something and then analyzing those cases. The point is to help people learn to search. That’s an interesting approach, and it would benefit from having some good tools [...]

What? A brand shiny new WordPress blog with exactly the same content as the old blog. Same name, same posts, same comments. Why? The old MovableType was too much trouble to change. The templates were awkward to manage and I was tired of the busyness of the pages. Plus I wanted to be able to [...]

I’m putting the finishing touches on Endurance Central. Basically the UI is done and all of the user functionality is complete, if not yet fully exposed. I have started to collect race data (the current data on the site is unreliable test data – I need to clear that out). One of the last features [...]

On the Mac, I use iTerm, an open source project, as my Terminal client. I don’t have any strong objection to Terminal, I haven’t really used it enough to tell. iTerm has tabs, I installed it the day I got my Powerbook, and customized to my needs. It has keyboard shortcuts to open terminals on [...]

I found a bug in the acts_as_authenticated plugin. The activate method in User fails to update the user record when using both activate and 2-way reversible encryption. The symptom that I was is that @user.save was false in the controller. It fails at this line: update_attributes(:activated_at => Time.now.utc, :activation_code => nil) This fails because there [...]

Lots of rants and raves over the Smackdown at LesBlogs. Mena Trott, cofounder of conference sponsor Six Apart, was opening the second day and calling for “civility in blogging.” While this was going on, in fact through the entire conference, there was an irc back channel which you can read here. Mena took exception to [...]

There is an occasional problem with Thunderbird and imap mailboxes that can destroy your user experience, especially if you tend to navigate using the keyboard, but even with the mouse it can interrupt your work. The problem occurs only with unselectable mailboxes. These mailboxes don’t contain any mail, instead they contain other mailboxes that may [...]

Dave Winer has an idea for Firefox: Failing that how about a setting that tells the browser to ignore what the site says about font size and always display text in the font and size I tell it to. Basically the web is and has been broken forever. Maybe one of these decades we’ll get [...]

Robert Scoble wants search engines to pretend that the web is different than it is. I think this would be a bad idea. Scoble’s objection is that search results don’t reflect his notions of what is important in the world. “As long as I’m the #1 Robert and Robert Redford isn’t as high up as [...]