Author Archives: Christopher Finke

Digg, Social Media

Solidarity for supernova17

I just noticed that 4 of the top 31 users at Digg (MrBabyMan, koregaonpark, TheAttacks, and charbarred) have all replaced their avatars with that of supernova17, who was banned from Digg for submitting (yes, just submitting) a story about how there might be a so-called Bury Brigade.

I’m not sure what the Digg moderators were thinking, banning a user for submitting a link to content with which they don’t agree. Maybe I’m just naive, but if they’re going to ban users, maybe they should start with glenjammin, who, in a sampling of 1700 buries, accounted for 17 percent of them. What are the odds that the majority of his 284 buries were justified?

Update: And jasnmb makes five.

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Netscape Blog

Netscape 9: What’s my line?

This post originally appeared on the Netscape Blog.

Rather than just posting a new browser feature or an update on Netscape 9’s development, I thought I’d switch it up this week and have a little contest.

Netscape 9 will have a new top-level menu (as in File, Edit, etc.) that does not appear in Firefox or any previous version of Netscape. The first person to correctly guess the name of the menu and its function will get their name included in the Netscape 9 credits, which you can view in the browser via the “About Netscape” dialog.

You must post your guess below, and anyone with inside knowledge of the browser (like a current or former Netscape employee) is ineligible. Your name is probably already in the credits, so you’d have nothing to gain anyway.

Let the guessing begin!

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Netscape

Netscape 9 Teasers: Week VI

This week’s Netscape 9 teaser is up at the Netscape blog; I’ve switched things up by having a little contest:

“Netscape 9 will have a new top-level menu (as in File, Edit, etc.) that does not appear in Firefox or any previous version of Netscape. The first person to correctly guess the name of the menu and its function will get their name included in the Netscape 9 credits.”

Go ahead and take a guess; you know you want to.

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Blog, Greencode, Nerd, Nintendo Wii, Themes, WordPress

Optimizing Your Website for the Wii

I’ve optimized my blog (and thus my Greencode WordPress theme) for browsing on the Nintendo Wii. So if you read my blog on the Wii, it will look like this:

My website on the Wii

It was pretty easy, and you can do it too, by following these two simple steps:

1. Create a Wii-friendly stylesheet. This is similar to creating a mobile-friendly stylesheet, and it involves enlarging the text, removing superfluous crap, and just making your site easier to read from a distance. You can see the stylesheet I created here.

2. Serve the Wii stylesheet to Wii users. The user-agent string of the Wii will be something like Opera/9.00 (Nintendo Wii; U; ; 1309-9; en), so in PHP, you can accompish this like so:

if (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], "Wii;") !== false){
[... wii stylesheet ...]
} else {
[... regular stylesheets ...]
}

And just for fun, I also added an “Optimized for the Nintendo Wii” watermark in the top-right corner and enabled the Wii stylesheet for anyone who adds “?wii=1” to the end of a URL. For example, here is the Wii-friendly version of this post.

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Netscape Blog

Netscape 9 and Social News

This post originally appeared on the Netscape Blog.

Netscape 9 will include built-in tools to share, vote for, and discuss interesting things you find on the Web directly from the browser’s URL bar. The image below shows the state of the address bar for a page that

a) hasn’t been submitted to Netscape.com
b) has been submitted and you haven’t voted for it
c) has been submitted, and you have already voted for it.

voting
The vote and comment totals are shown in the tooltips for the images as well as in the status bar.

We feel that having these tools in the browser by default will introduce the idea of social news to a whole new set of users, and it should make it easier for those who are already familiar with the concept.

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Netscape, Netscape.com, Social Media

Netscape 9 Teasers: Week V

My latest teaser for Netscape 9 is up at the Netscape blog:

“Netscape 9 will include built-in tools to share, vote for, and discuss interesting things you find on the Web directly from the browser’s URL bar. […] We feel that having these tools in the browser by default will introduce the idea of social news to a whole new set of users, and it should make it easier for those who are already familiar with the concept.”

Something I’ll add here is that while this announcement reveals the main pieces of this feature (in-browser voting), it does not reveal all of the features of this piece.

There’s an additional forum for discussion at Netscape.com.

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Life, Writing

Prison

I found this poem today that I wrote in college. I think I used to be much more cynical.

Prison

They trudge out to the Yard
Wearing the standard-issue uniform,
Forming single file lines to get their designated time of fresh air.
The new ones, the fresh meat,
Cower, fearing the cruelty of the “old pros.”
Bells ring, and they all get back in line
As they are herded back through the corridors
And into each of their assigned spaces.
All those admitted wile away the hours
Daydreaming about freedom,
And, finally,
The three o’clock bell rings.
They hand their homework forward
And go home until tomorrow.

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Digg, Social Media

Digg’s 100% Club


Everybody knows that Kevin Rose has a perfect 1:1 ratio of Digg submissions to frontpage stories, but what other Diggers belong to this exclusive 100% club? The following Digg users submit popular stories with pinpoint accuracy, and like the best military snipers, they never miss.

User # of submissions
kevinrose 216
cmptrge3k 5
Diggnation 4
poshsuicide 5
saguratus 4
rebal 3
drackett 3
Jolene 3
fcuk 3
bobbybobington 3
reidman 3
lolhax 4
Bryan 2
leolaporte 2
Mygly 2
Sujay 2
akamia123 2
callsan 2
K3V2 2
Norseman 2
whiterabbit 2
dvshadow 2
evilgold 2
mallawaani 2
rpeterclark 2
shoemoney 2
SteveCUBE 2
Axolotl 2
sinistrad 2
ch3zyp00fs 2
AlphaToxic 2
puppeteer 2
maczag 2
slimat420 2
thenoise 2
rickcarson 2
kijiro 2
mspice 2
mournsanity 2
informant 2
aolhome23 2
RandomEngy 2
evil1337 2
User # of submissions
jimmajamma 2
NickHodges 2
netcrusher88 2
edwardscherf 2
bg86 2
fydo 2
Pirsqed 2
nuttzy 2
Hazardc 2
wtf242 2
nawckz 2
ColleenDoran 2
LouJrz 2
alteredbeast 2
racarrberyl 4
ambermac 1
danimal 1
replica 1
grtek 1
tsocx 1
ellingswin 1
alexw 1
neooptik 1
sneak 1
Adam0431 1
suMMx 1
cr4sh 1
nikorc 1
mercano 1
Goatweed 1
Twelve-60 1
zybch 1
cky3 1
bentoman 1
swoosh_bnd 1
kf_man 1
marymaier 1
eseiat 1
AaronD12 1
felz 1
next 1
xzeromark 1
jsco 1

Besides Kevin Rose, you might also recognize Leo Laporte, Diggnation, and one of the Suicide Girls.

Note of interest: for a while, Kevin did not actually have a 100% popularity ratio, with only 215 of his 216 submissions being shown as having made the frontpage, but his profile was recently modified to show all of his submitted stories as having been popular.

If you are interested in who the top Diggers are in terms of total frontpage stories, that list is available here.

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Netscape Blog

Netscape 9 Saves You Time

This post originally appeared on the Netscape Blog.

Ever tried to visit google.cmo? How about irs.gvo? I’m sure that everyone has, at one time or another, made common mistakes like these when typing addresses in the location bar. What normally happens is that you notice your mistake after waiting for the page to load and it fails. That wait is a waste of your time – your browser spell-checks everything else you type, why not URLs?

Netscape 9 will be the first major browser to automatically correct common typos entered in the location bar. For example, if you accidentally type techcrunchcom, Netscape will fix it be to techcrunch.com. If you type slashdot.orgg, Netscape will change it to slashdot.org. mozilla,cmo gets changed to mozilla.com, and so on and so forth – no fuss, no muss. The browser will watch for nearly 30 different types of common mistakes and correct them for you (asking you to confirm, if you choose to enable confirmation), hopefully saving you some time and frustration in the process.

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Netscape, Software, URL Fixer

Netscape 9 Teasers: Week IV

Update: URL Fixer was acquired and is now hosted at http://urlfixer.org/

I just posted this week’s Netscape 9 update at the Netscape blog: Netscape 9 Saves You Time:

“Netscape 9 will be the first major browser to automatically correct common typos entered in the location bar. The browser will watch for nearly 30 different types of common mistakes and correct them for you (asking you to confirm, if you choose to enable confirmation), hopefully saving you some time and frustration in the process.”

Additional forum for discussion at Netscape.com.

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Games, Recommendations

I will crush you and your armies.

Recommendation of the day: Warfish. It’s a basic online Risk game, and it’s tons of fun. You can get an idea of what the gameplay is like by watching this timelapse of a game. Games can last hours/days/weeks, and you can have it e-mail you when it’s your turn. It’s the perfect 3-minute break from whatever else you were doing. Signup is invitation only, so if you want in, leave a comment or e-mail me for an invite.

Oh, and by the way, I’d like to thank Tom for getting me addicted to this game when I was supposed to be working. Thanks Tom!

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