Stefan Hayden

Google has come out with a WYSIWYG editor to go along with there brand new web hosting service. In general the service is mediocre and on par with most other services. 100 mbs of storage with the ability to up load images. The editor is smooth though lacking in features. Clearly there is room for improvement and a straight forward path of features to add. This is a product aimed at people who don’t know what they are doing and so no web designer need to worry about losing their jobs yet.

What is interesting is the code it created. Google is know for writing bad code and discarding standards. The Google front page alone, in all it’s bleakness, has 66 errors. Making a quick page and running through a validator shows only 10 errors which is a large reduction.

Looking deeper in the the code you can see they have put some good effort in to making this a new age editor. About 95% of the design in done in CSS. Al the code is very readable though there are browser hacks abound and it will be interesting to see how that degrades with time.

I don’t know if they are storing the entire text file of HTML or generating the page on the fly. If it’s generated on the fly they can update the CSS as needed but if it’s all saved to a static file they might be saving hacks that will one day be a big problem to fix.

While no techy person is going to be overly impressed buy this release I think it’s mostly a good thing that will hopefully help people who don’t know what they are doing make better formed websites.

Akismet is really starting to piss me off. It’s a great spam filter for wordpress and has really stopped all spam.It has also stopped all commenting. This is a tiny tiny blog in the midst of a vast blogosphere and get few to no comments at all. Every comment I get is like a small flower that I want to tend and encourage to grow.

Akismet insists on placing comments in the moderation queue and then never telling me. It sends me no email and I don’t check often enough to see new comments. In general I would like actual comments to float right through to the page.

Akismet might be great at stopping spam but what’s the point if it just stops everything else as well? It would be one thing if I could turn on email notification, or change the level of security but there are no options to mess around with.

Previously I was using spam karma. I don’t know if that’s been upgraded to wordpress 2.0 but I’m missing it a lot these days.

Matthew Mullenweg could comment about all the great think Akismet could do and all the improvements he will make but who knows if I’d ever even notice the post to approve it.

This is only internet history for the few. if you love Joss Whedon, Warren Ellis, FireFly, or just comics in general you have to read this comment war between Joss and Warren. It has to be one of the most exciting things I’ve seen unfold before me I have ever witnessed.

This week has been full of crazy websites that no one but me would find funny but me. I hope this isn’t one of them and others can get some enjoyment out of this as well.

Just finished watching the last four Arrested Development episodes and they were amazing. It has been a bittersweet year for the shows I love and watching The last episodes reminded me all to much of my heart break at the end of the Serenity movie. It’s sad when you know things are coming to an even when there is so much story left to tell but it lets you never take a moment for granted. I miss the show already.

Check out YALit which is a site for young adult book release dates that I’ve been working on with Keri for a few weeks now. This obviously serves what I like to call a “super niche market” which is sad because I will not become world famous for building it and yet wonderful because this is a resource that is greatly needed by the young adult literature community.

How needed? After being listed in google for about a week we are already seeing tons of people organically finding the site. Not to mention that we’ve already been pick up as a resource on the YALibrarian blog.

While having a simple one stop shop to find out what is coming out when is great I hope to also build a small community to help support the site. Book release dates are not distributed in any logical fashion and it will take a wider then we currently have to catch every single book release date.

I’d love to hear any questions or suggestions you might have.