Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: users

  • Useful User Agents

    Rather than depend on end users to accurately report the browser used, I look for the user-agent in the web server logs. (Yes, I know it can be spoofed. Power users would be trying different things to resolve their own issues not coming to us.) Followers of this blog may recall I changed the Weblogic…

  • DDoS of Social Media

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    Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and other sites all admitted to suffering from a DDoS attack. It seem to me the purpose of a Denial-of-Service attack (DoS) against a web site is to flood it with so much traffic the site becomes unusable. The DDoS is where multiple other computers are coordinated into launching the attack. All…

  • Trusting Social Networks

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    Sunday at brunch we had an interesting conversation about Facebook. Establishing the appropriate privacy levels to the various constituents see appropriate material is hard. So hard it takes a long pages of text and screenshots to just paint a picture of what to review for the top 10 Facebook privacy settings. We were discussing how…

  • Email Harvesters

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    I missed the story about brothers convicted of harvesting emails the first time. Well, I noticed a followup. Back around 2001, the CIO received complaints about performance for the web server. So, I went log trolling to see what the web server was doing. A single IP dominated the HTTP requests. This one IP passed…

  • Worldwide Photo Walk

    I’m looking forward to this Athens part of the Worldwide Photo Walk in four weeks. I’m even more impressed it filled to the 50 person capacity. We have been having meetups for Athens Flickr users since September. I don’t think any have approached half that number. (There are only 32 members in the Flickr group.)…

  • Facebook Usernames

    If you cannot find me, then you are not looking. If you search on Facebook for Ezra Freelove, then I am the only result at the moment. Maybe all you knew was Ezra and the city where I lived? Facebook search is not so great you could find me through my first name plus something…

  • Expression Costs

    (This started out as a blog comment for Sania’s post Facebook Killed Your Blog. I’m posting it here first.) We share blogs with the whole world. So our blogs get lost in the noise, bolstering the need for a whole industry optimizing getting found in search engines. Its a concerted effort just get noticed. That’s…

  • The LMS is So Web 1.5

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    The claims Blackboard’s Learn 9 provides a Web 2.0 experience has bothered me for a while now. First, it was the drag-n-drop. While cool, that isn’t Web 2.0 in my opinion. A little more on track is the claim: The all-new Web 2.0 experience in Release 9 makes it easy to meaningfully combine information from…

  • The Twitter Timesink

    Glenn asked: “What is it about Twitter that makes it more of a time sink than Facebook?” I consider a time sink something where I invest a high value of time for boring and poor value. My contacts mostly duplicate in Twitter what they provide in Facebook. The time I spend reading Twitter posts I’ve…