In the subtle-but-important department, this week the internet observed a small milestone.

To understand it, one must know a little bit about domains. Domains are those names you type in the address bar at the top of your browser window, after the http and ending with something like .com or .net. In their simplest form, a domain is an address that you type, hit enter, and your browser takes you to it and shows you their homepage.

But underneath that, a domain stands for the physical address of a web server somewhere — a less attractive, and certainly less memorable address that probably looks something like 75.126.67.221. Its called an IP address, and everything connected to the internet has one, and its part of the mechanism by which computers communicate with one another. 75.126.67.221 happens to be the current IP of this very website, and how likely are you to remember that?

So domains are aliases, serving an important function by making getting around the web easy on the eyes and on the memory. The problem, however, is that you can only make so many combinations of ten numbers and dots. And while four billion seems like a lot, we have been inching closer and closer to exhausting the worlds supply of addresses every year.

This is where our milestone comes in. This past week the world's domain registries began accepting a new style of IP address   one that allows for so many more possible combinations its hard to even understand the numbers. The new standard (called IPv6) allows for something like 2¹²⁸ possible addresses. To give you an idea of how unfathomably huge that is, thats 2²⁶ IP addresses for every known star in the universe! It ought to hold us for a while.

I tried Google Reader out when it was first released, but didn't like it at all. This week they released a completely reworked version, and its got a ton of promise!

My longtime wish has always been to have an RSS reader that worked more like gmail, allowing you to tag items and perform bulk operations across feeds. And thats exactly what Google Reader now does! Plus there are some neat sharing and blog widgets built in (see sidebar for the one I'm trying out). They still have some confusion between tags and folders (as far as I can tell they are the same thing, but referred to differently depending on the page), but even with that glitch its still infinitely more usable.

One unexpected feature of the reader is the ability to share entries that I like. It seems to be a little like Digging something, except that it generates a separate public webpage for all the items you've marked. Here's mine, for what its worth.

The introductory video for the site explains that Google Reader wants to be an "inbox for the internet," and I'd say they are on their way. Try it out!

The award for Co-worker Most Likely to Get Bought Out By Google currently belongs to Soma, who recently released a very cool application called Snacksby. You tell it what you have in your pantry, it tells you what you can make with it. Its a cool site, and he did a TON of work on it, but I take credit for the term snacksonomy. :)

Last night he made it to the most popular links on de.icio.us for 8 solid hours, and today he got a nod on Lifehacker. Next stop, Google!

And if you need more proof that Snacksby is destined for greatness, I give you Snackslet (the error page when you search unsuccessfully for a recipe):

SNACKSLET
You should not have believed me; for virtue cannot
so inoculate our old chicken stock but we shall eat relish of
it: I found you recipes not.

YOU
I was the more decieved.

SNACKSLET
Get thee to a grocery. Why wouldst thou be a
cooker of nothing? I am myself indifferent honest,
but yet I should accuse me of such things that it
were better my mother had not borne me: I am very
gluttonous, revengeful, ambitious, with more recipes at
my beck than I have cards to write them on,
imagination to give them shape, or time to cook them
in. What should such gourmets as I do crawling
between earth and heaven? We are arrant chefs,
all; believe none of us. Go thy ways to a grocery.
Where're your cookbooks?

YOU
At home, my lord.

SNACKSLET
Let the pantry doors be shut upon them, that they may play
fruitless nowhere but in'r own kitchen. Farewell.

YOU
O, help him, you sweet heavens!

SNACKSLET
If thou dost cook, I'll give thee this compost
for thy dinner: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as
snow, thou shalt not escape famine. Get thee to a
grocery, go; farewell. Or, if thou wilt needs
cook, cook for a fool; for wise men know well enough
what illusory meals you make for them. To a grocery, go,
and quickly too. Farewell.

YOU
O heavenly powers, restore him!

SNACKSLET
I have heard of your garnishes too, well enough; God
has given your dishes one face, and you make them
another: you salt, you drizzle, and you accent, and
put ketchup on God's creatures, and make your wantonness
your diet. Go to, I'll no more on't; it hath
made me hungry. I say, we will have no more meals:
those that have already, all but one, shall
eat; the rest shall starve as they are. To a
grocery, go.

Exeunt

There are times in my job when I feel like I know nothing about computers. When my business and graphics background betrays me and I have to seek help from someone who actually studied this. But then there are days like today, when I spend my day maintaining an application that I built, that gets viewed by tens of thousands of people a day, that provides our users with a wealth of knowledge and support. My commute home was spent talking a vice president through connecting to the system via the command line, and my evening spent supporting a live database fix. I found the issues and I knew how to fix them. Days like today, I actually believe I'm an engineer.

After waiting patiently for several months, I finally received my Google Analytics invitation code yesterday. There's a 24-hour lag in the reporting, so I don't have all that much traffic to look at yet, but what I see so far is cool! This goes way beyond the basic stuff I get with awstats or webalizer.

My favorite feature so far is called Site Overlay - it lets me surf through my entire site, except that google overlays a layer of statistics for which links get clicked and how often. I can follow a user path and see what the likelihood is that they will go to the Archives or follow some outbound link. There is also a wealth of tracking available if I ever ran ad campaigns through google Adwords - it will link up my ad performance and my site statistics, and then give me ROI and cost-per-click information broken down by page. I'd love them to take the next step and bring my Adsense performance into the mix.

At work we have entire departments dedicated to these type of metrics, so its amazing to see something so powerful available for even the littlest customer at no cost. All I had to do was put a little snippet of code at the bottom of all of my pages, and Google did the rest. If I ever get around to opening that online store I always talk about, this could be an invaluable tool.

Dear Internets -

I'm upgrading my site from MovableType 3.1 to 3.2 today. Hopefully this does absolutely nothing to my site from your perspective, but you never know. If you see anything wonky, please drop me a comment or an email and let me know what the issue is.

Thanks!
The Management

Every Christmas I find myself in the same predicament - trying to ship my holiday presents ahead of me so that I can wrap them when I arrive. Currently I'm watching three different shipments from various origins as they wing their way to Dallas (hopefully in time for Christmas). Today I found a neat tool to make that tracking easier: Simple Tracking. Enter your tracking number and shipping carrier, and they'll generate an RSS feed with the current status! So now I can watch all of my packages at once from the comfort of my feed reader. Isn't technology grand?

In the more than three years I've worked at my current job, this is the first time I've managed to get my hands on a picture of all of the members of my team. At our most recent all-hands my team got an award for generally kicking ass on our redesign back in June, so we had to leave the relative warmth of the huddled crowd and get a snapshot with the CEO on stage in the freezing cold wind.

The upshot is that now you can picture me spending my days with this wacky and fun group of guys (from left, minus the CEO in the suit): Jason, Craig, Sam, and Soma.

So my office has recently introduced yet another employee contest. They've begun to do a good job of dangling appropriately selected carrots in front of us, and this month's contest is no exception: the iPod Nano! My part in all of this is that I put little Netsol buttons in various places, and hopefully some of you click on them. At the end of the month they get counted and the people with the most links, on the most pages, with the most clicks, get iPod Nanos. I didn't win the airline miles in the last contest, but I figure this is right up my alley.

So if, over the next few weeks, you see me periodically put a little link like this..

Web Design and Web Hosting services
from the original domain name registrar,
Network Solutions

.. in my blog posts (its already on all my new-and-improved archive pages), give me a little boost and click it. :)

Techie Note: What motivates a company run a promotion like this? Besides boosting morale and getting its employees more involved on the web, the main benefit reaped by this type of contest is in search engine rankings. (The uptick in our traffic will probably be a drop in the bucket.) Major search engines like Google rank their results using all sorts of complex algorithms. But one of the main components they use to determine the relevance of a site is how many other websites link to it using the words that were searched on. For the cost of a couple iPods, the company gets valid, contextual, inbound links on thousands of pages that then get indexed by dozens of search engines. The impact is as good as anything a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) consultant could deliver, and a whole lot cheaper. Its a pretty creative approach, really, which is why I'm participating.

The announcement went out last night that Yahoo has agreed to acquire Flickr.

I'm a little blah about the whole thing - I wanted Google to acquire Flickr, integrate it with Picasa, and continue their pursuit of global domination.

Oh well. At least all of our accounts will get more storage and bandwidth.

I have a gazillion Gmail invites to give out.. Does anyone want one? Post a comment and I'll send an invite to the email address you specify in the field labeled "Email Address:" Don't put your email address in the "Comments:" section 'cause I don't encode that sucker and your email could get harvested by spammers.

Why is Gmail cool? Its free, clean, easy-to-use email with tons of storage. It has good spam filtering. You can check it from the web or through a client like Outlook or Thunderbird. Its by Google, which means its fast. Its NOT by AOL or Hotmail, which means other email programs trust it and won't filter your emails as spam. Did I mention its free? :)

Inspired by Olga's recent revelations, I have been watching with some amusement how visitors reach my site (followed by the number of times this search phrase brought people here)..

how to make a pizza (16)
how to make pizza (13)
how to make pizza crust (9)
not2night (3)
portobello road street where the riches of ages are sold (2)
seqouia restaurant washington dc (2)
restaurants seqouia georgetown (2)
penny whistle park (2)
katy harris (2)
soho chocolate boutique (2)
make a pizza (2)
yamagada (2)
personal library kits (2)
rachel yamagada (2)
anvicom (2)
silversmithing class pensacola (2)
maypole (2)
lee jackson day (2)
seqouia georgetown (2)

The Internets are unusually interested in making pizza, apparently. Not among the most requested, but among the most amusing:

sketches of monkeys
lobster boy pittsburgh - Lobster Boy strikes again!
charlie and the chocolate factory theme song
big night lighting amaretti wrappers
baby hammerhead sharks

Mozilla will be officially releasing Firefox 1.0 tomorrow. I've very excited about this! Not only is it a fantastic browser, but its also a triumph for proponents of open-source software. If my job didn't require me to test my work in several different browsers, and certain annoying websites didn't require IE, I'd use it exclusively.

A Whole Lotta Nothing had the right idea this morning, and I want to echo it: I volunteer to install it for everyone I know.

Microsoft has been losing market share to Firefox and other open-source browsers for months, and here's to chipping a few more points off.

I'm emptying out my RSS news bins again.. Enjoy! :)

Saul Bell Winners Announced
The Saul Bell Design Award Competition is an annual jewelry design competition. The stuff people come up with is amazing! The winners for 2004 were recently announced.

Movin' on up
Firefox aims at 10% market share among browsers by the end of 2005. This Firefox user certainly hopes they make it. I also hope that it propels certain large ecommerce websites (ahem, Art.com) away from making their core functionality IE-only.

Netflix for handbags
Pay a monthly fee and borrow as many designer handbags as your little heart desires. Interesting concept..

Movable Type 3.1 was released yesterday, and I spent some time last night upgrading to the new platform. There are some nice new features!

• Dynamic pages.
  MT now lets you choose whether your site is served up static-style or dynamically via php. This in itself is useful, but the cool part is that you can specify it at the page level. It requires a certain type of web server (Apache) and some mildly involved tweaking of your htaccess files, but overall looks pretty simple.
  
  
• Subcategories.
  Now this is useful for me. Whereas before if you wanted to subcategorize your content you had to install plugins or do some bizarre blogging contortions, now you can manage it all from the MT admin screen. Despite being currently invisible, I do actually sort my posts into categories. I hope someday to publish them that way too.

Even when I started at my current job, my team's intranet was a perfect example of the cobblers children not having any shoes. So one of my recent projects was to redesign it. And, more importantly, reorganize it so that information was easy to find again.

The first image is my concept design, and the second is how it actually turned out.

I used a publishing tool called WordPress. It has advantages over MT in that content is published dynamically, but it also lacks some of the flexibility that I like about Movable Type. But in a document-heavy worky environment it works pretty nicely.

Hah, made you look. :) Not really, but it looks like someone doctored up Notepad and moved it in a similar direction. The software is called, logically, Notepad2, and its released under a GNU GPL license. To translate from geeklish for you, that means Freeeeeeeeee! As long as you use it for good instead of evil. It looks like it can color-code and auto-complete a bit like Homesite. Excellent!

In other news, if you really must search for software that requires your money, I heard about StyleMaster today. It costs $60, and seems to be a bit like a morphed TopStyle/Dreamweaver type thing. Personally I don't use Dreamweaver, but I am all for anything that reduces the eye-poking, hair-pulling, and teeth-gnashing that usually accompanies my creating stylesheets. Then again, why not just buy what I really want (TopStyle) since its only twenty bucks more?

To round out this thoroughly geeky post, did you know that Google is beta testing its own distributed computing system? Its a plugin for the Google toolbar, and it lets to contribute your computer's excess processing power to scientists doing complex research. It adds an icon to your toolbar that lets you check your stats and see what project you're contributing to. Good fun!

Despite some initial concerns with MT 3.0 Developer Edition, I have quietly upgraded my software over the past week or so. I was pleasantly surprised by how fast (it took me about 15 minutes to upload all the necessary files, and another 15 or so tweaking my comments templates) the entire process was.

I made the choice for several reasons:

• Better licensing
  After much gnashing of teeth in the MT community, Six Apart altered their licensing scheme so that it was friendlier to smaller bloggers like myself. They also clarified their viewpoint on what consitutes a blog: Using several blogs to run a single site that appears on the same domain name with a consistent design only counts as one blog under the terms of the license. So while I use four blogs to run my site, I'm still legal to use the free, personal use version. Yay!
  
  
• Comment Spam
  I've started to get a lot of it, of the not-kosher-to-show-your-grandparents variety. I have grandparents (and young cousins), so that was a dealbreaker for me. I enabled the comment moderation feature, which keeps comments from showing up on my site until I personally approve them. You can also register for a TypeKey account and have all of your comments automatically approved.
  
  
• I just plain like MT.
  I appreciated their responsiveness to their users' concerns. And I wanted to try out some of the new plugins that were being developed just for this version. And I didn't want to hold out with an older version of the software once I felt comfortable I'd be covered under a license. Because lets face it - its still a great piece of software.

So there you have it. I'm a 3.0 girl now, and proud of it. :)

Incidentally I've had to opportunity to implement another CMS, WordPress, on an intranet site here at work. Its also a nice piece of software! The admin interface is especially nice (if you're like me and love lots of clean, crisp white space), and its relatively easy to customize. I wouldn't recommend it for those who aren't comfortable breaking out their php skills from time to time, however.

Despite some initial concerns with MT 3.0 Developer Edition, I have quietly upgraded my software over the past week or so. I was pleasantly surprised by how fast (it took me about 15 minutes to upload all the necessary files, and another 15 or so tweaking my comments templates) the entire process was.

I made the choice for several reasons:

• Better licensing
  After much gnashing of teeth in the MT community, Six Apart altered their licensing scheme so that it was friendlier to smaller bloggers like myself. They also clarified their viewpoint on what consitutes a blog: Using several blogs to run a single site that appears on the same domain name with a consistent design only counts as one blog under the terms of the license. So while I use four blogs to run my site, I'm still legal to use the free, personal use version. Yay!
  
  
• Comment Spam
  I've started to get a lot of it, of the not-kosher-to-show-your-grandparents variety. I have grandparents (and young cousins), so that was a dealbreaker for me. I enabled the comment moderation feature, which keeps comments from showing up on my site until I personally approve them. You can also register for a TypeKey account and have all of your comments automatically approved.
  
  
• I just plain like MT.
  I appreciated their responsiveness to their users' concerns. And I wanted to try out some of the new plugins that were being developed just for this version. And I didn't want to hold out with an older version of the software once I felt comfortable I'd be covered under a license. Because lets face it - its still a great piece of software.

So there you have it. I'm a 3.0 girl now, and proud of it. :)

Incidentally I've had to opportunity to implement another CMS, WordPress, on an intranet site here at work. Its also a nice piece of software! The admin interface is especially nice (if you're like me and love lots of clean, crisp white space), and its relatively easy to customize. I wouldn't recommend it for those who aren't comfortable breaking out their php skills from time to time, however.

Head on over to see the super cool new Sanjiva.org. It looks like there was a redesign, and perhaps a change of platform?

I like the glasses, Sanjiva! :)

One of my pet projects at work went live last week, so I figured I would show it off a bit! Its the newly-revamped Customer Service site. Not only is it powered by MySQL, PHP, and the Smarty templating engine, but it is NSI's first real foray into an automated content management system (facing consumers, at least). Now someone else gets to edit FAQs. Yay!

I can't really claim to have done a whole lot with the application itself - the design came from our design team, and the app's main structure was out-of-the-box and open source. But I did have the opportunity to get down and dirty with Smarty during the implementation. Good nerdy fun!

So I know I have a limited audience who will find this interesting as opposed to freakishly nerdy, but what the heck. My coworker Hatim just wrote us this cool little program. Despite working in a pretty technical job, the intricacies of writing software to run in Windows are still a mystery to me. So I'm pretty impressed!

The tool sits in my system tray (that's what the right-hand - or in my case, bottom - section of your taskbar is called) and monitors the status of some of the back-end systems that make our site work. (the picture at right shows my system tray as it looks this afternoon - the two green boxes are for Hatim's tool.) When something is down, there are funny little animations that notify us. Apparently the animations include cut-outs of our bosses looking sad (systems down) or jumping up and down with happiness (systems up) depending on the situation.

Its the little things like this that remind me that I work with a group of intelligent and creative people, despite the unfortunate fact that they are java developers. ;) I feel pretty lucky!

MovableType released its 3.0 Developers Edition to the general public yesterday. And after reading the feature list and the new (gah!) pricing schema, I must say I'm pretty underwhelmed.

First, the feature set. If you read the list of 3.0 features, you'll notice that there's not that much added to the new version. The main tweaks have been in the entry commenting functionality - developers now have the option of asking people to register with their site in order to post comments, hopefully reducing the comment spam that has become so rampant. But really, that's all?! Where are image galleries, the oodles of new tags (there are only 14 new tags in the release, 12 of which are related to the comments section), the easier template editing, the custom database fields? You have nothing else to offer me, and yet you want me to purchase this new edition from you?

Which brings me to my second issue - the price. Under the new tiered licensing system, MT 3.0 is only free if you have less than three blogs and only one author. Although it might not be readily apparent, my site currently runs on four blogs - main entries, links, fitness journal, and portfolio. When I get them up and running, there's potential for several more. And I currently have four authors on the site as well, although most of you probably don't know that I've set you up yet. ;)

For my intended usage, I'd owe MT $150 in licensing fees (although to be fair its currently on sale for $119.. bust out the party hats!). I just don't feel like there's enough of an improvement in features to justify such a huge hike in prices. Give me a must-have set of features and I just might fork over that money, but for now I'm sticking with 2.66 thank you.

Or perhaps its time for TwilightCMS? :)

Until then, here are some other readily available, FREE content publishing systems out there:
WordPress
Textpattern

Or see OpenSourceCMS.com for more...

This weeked I was inspired to do a little redesigning of katybeck.com. Maybe it was all of the excellent redesigns in the web design community lately, or my newfound desire to understand CSS better. Or perhaps I took a look at my site Friday and realized how sad my snowy and cold little nameplate looked compared to the lush green I could see out my apartment window. So I commandeered Adam's laptop (thank you!!), holed myself up in my apartment, and got to it.

This is the first draft of the design, so please feel free to comment, or let me know if something is broken or missing. My perception of color on a laptop monitor while sitting outside was not the greatest, so if some color setting makes things unreadable, send a comment my way about that as well.

As usual, I haven't really gotten around to converting the readings pages, the portfolio, the gallery, or the fitness tracker that I've been building for a while. Those will come soon I hope.

So much to do, so little time! Anyways, enjoy. :)

I've got a bunch of links waiting in my FeedDemon news bins, and I feel that its about time to share a few of them. I've also seen these lists referred to as web zen or link foo (someday someone must explain to me the etymology of the word foo), but I have no fun names for you. I just have bulleted lists. :)

• Zeldman.com redesigns - Drool really is bad for your keyboard, but I can't help it! For those unfamiliar with this site, Jeffrey Zeldman is a web designer, proprietor of A List Apart For People Who Make Websites, and an overall web guru.


• Patron Saints of Graphic Design - I think I like St. Pixela the best. Although I wish some of our copywriters would pray to St. Typo a little more often, if you know what I mean.


• MoCoLoCo - A recent blog find, MoCoLoCo is sort of a Gizmodo for modern contemporary design and architecture. My favs so far are the book reviews. My wish list runneth over.


• Foreword - Another recent blog find. Foreword is a blog about book cover design.

A local non-profit has announced plans to offer free wi-fi internet access on the National Mall. This could be really cool!

Side note: the picture associated with this article is from this Sunday's rally.

In response to Matt's announcement, I have put in an email to be listed on the DC Metro Blog map.

As the pace slows down at work, I tend to adopt little pet projects to occupy my time until the next release cycle goes into full swing. Currently I've adopted my team's intranet. Its one of those legacy websites that has years worth of content pasted in without any sort of organization or structure. As new stuff gets added, the information I tend to be looking for (a list of account information to test with, for example) gets nudged farther and farther down the page. I finally got so fed up with it that I vowed to reorganize the entire site.

Now I'm hoping to stand up a small open source content management tool on the back-end so that we don't find ourselves in this boat again. And today I discovered a fantastic tool to help me "shop" for one - OpenSourceCMS. Some poor soul with way too much free time actually hosts full demo versions of over fifty different applications, publishes the login info, and allows you free reign to play around with them! It has been a useful resource as I wade through all of my options.

And for all the purists out there - I did consider just building my own simple CMS, a bit like I used to have here prior to my conversion to MT. But I realized I didn't exactly have time to reinvent the wheel. ;)

As the pace slows down at work, I tend to adopt little pet projects to occupy my time until the next release cycle goes into full swing. Currently I've adopted my team's intranet. Its one of those legacy websites that has years worth of content pasted in without any sort of organization or structure. As new stuff gets added, the information I tend to be looking for (a list of account information to test with, for example) gets nudged farther and farther down the page. I finally got so fed up with it that I vowed to reorganize the entire site.

Now I'm hoping to stand up a small open source content management tool on the back-end so that we don't find ourselves in this boat again. And today I discovered a fantastic tool to help me "shop" for one - OpenSourceCMS. Some poor soul with way too much free time actually hosts full demo versions of over fifty different applications, publishes the login info, and allows you free reign to play around with them! It has been a useful resource as I wade through all of my options.

And for all the purists out there - I did consider just building my own simple CMS, a bit like I used to have here prior to my conversion to MT. But I realized I didn't exactly have time to reinvent the wheel. ;)

The winners of the 2004 Bloggies were announced yesterday at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Technology Conference in Austin, TX. I so wish I could have attended! My consolation prize is that I can find all of the winners online here. There are a ton of new blogs that I want to add to my daily list of reads. :)

On a similar note, SXSW also gives outs its own Web Awards for achievement in online media. There are some amazing site among these winners. I spent a good hour this morning completely engrossed in The Tofte Project, which won in the Green/Non-Profit category for its profiling of a sustainable development project on the north shore of Lake Superior. The very subtle and effective use of Flash is really worth seeing, too. Make sure your speakers are on!

The winners of the 2004 Bloggies were announced yesterday at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Technology Conference in Austin, TX. I so wish I could have attended! My consolation prize is that I can find all of the winners online here. There are a ton of new blogs that I want to add to my daily list of reads. :)

On a similar note, SXSW also gives outs its own Web Awards for achievement in online media. There are some amazing site among these winners. I spent a good hour this morning completely engrossed in The Tofte Project, which won in the Green/Non-Profit category for its profiling of a sustainable development project on the north shore of Lake Superior. The very subtle and effective use of Flash is really worth seeing, too. Make sure your speakers are on!

I enjoy checking out my web statistics from time to time. Well, ok, I admit to checking them on a daily basis. Typically I have wait for my web server's automated process that run an awstats report, which happens every 24 hours or so. Last night I discovered that I could manually run this process, thereby making real-time traffic statistics an attainable dream. Here's what the traffic looks like so far:

Excellent article on Byrdhouse explaining the ins and outs of printing business cards. Aimed at web developers, but useful for everyone.

Excellent article on Byrdhouse explaining the ins and outs of printing business cards. Aimed at web developers, but useful for everyone.

More and more of my friends are jumping into the blogging fray, and I couldn't be more excited! Cris is the newest inductee into the cult. Now there will be more and more intelligent, witty, and insightful blogs to read each day. The fact that they are the thoughts of some of my closest friends is icing on the cake! :) Here's a list of my friends' blogs I'm reading these days, including some very exciting new additions!

• JBrealist - Julie (New!)
• Neems Random Ramblings - Neema
• Things Pink - Cris (New!)
• Twilight Invasion - Matt
• writersbloc - Olga

To Adam, Jason, Lizzi, and Geoff: we're waiting. ;)

I finally broke down yesterday and purchased a full copy of Bradsoft's FeedDemon for my computer here at work. FeedDemon, as I have explained here before, is a software program that aggregates news feeds from various weblogs (including this one) and displays them in an easily readable format. It checks for new entries every 30 minutes, and lets me sort and organize posts that I want to keep, respond to, or write about. I highly recommend it! Especially if you are getting to the point where you read five, six, seven blogs a day - FeedDemon can make the morning blog-reading process much more efficient. If, however, you're like a lot of my friends and are actively *seeking* ways to use up time at the office, this program is not for you. :)

You can see how it looks here (click to see a larger image):

I finally broke down yesterday and purchased a full copy of Bradsoft's FeedDemon for my computer here at work. FeedDemon, as I have explained here before, is a software program that aggregates news feeds from various weblogs (including this one) and displays them in an easily readable format. It checks for new entries every 30 minutes, and lets me sort and organize posts that I want to keep, respond to, or write about. I highly recommend it! Especially if you are getting to the point where you read five, six, seven blogs a day - FeedDemon can make the morning blog-reading process much more efficient. If, however, you're like a lot of my friends and are actively *seeking* ways to use up time at the office, this program is not for you. :)

You can see how it looks here (click to see a larger image):

I don't think I qualify as the power user they are looking for here, but wouldn't it be so cool to be a MT 3.0 alpha tester? :)

I don't think I qualify as the power user they are looking for here, but wouldn't it be so cool to be a MT 3.0 alpha tester? :)

I really, really, really think this would be super fun:

SXSW Interactive Festival · March 12-16, 2004

The Bloggies are announced every year at this conference.. Even if I can't go to Austin, I will most certainly be voting.

I'm a bit overdue in posting this, but its just so exciting that it needs to be up here! Well, ok, its probably only exciting to other weblog nerds, but still. MovableType has announced that it will be releasing MT 3.0 sometime in early Q1 of 2004. Fun fun fun! Its going to support a bunch of new features, and add in some much-anticipated security fixes so that the spammers and the crazies can't post to your blog unless you want them to. Which, as many of you know, is becoming an issue for me. He he. ;)

I'm a bit overdue in posting this, but its just so exciting that it needs to be up here! Well, ok, its probably only exciting to other weblog nerds, but still. MovableType has announced that it will be releasing MT 3.0 sometime in early Q1 of 2004. Fun fun fun! Its going to support a bunch of new features, and add in some much-anticipated security fixes so that the spammers and the crazies can't post to your blog unless you want them to. Which, as many of you know, is becoming an issue for me. He he. ;)

I've stumbled across a site called MovableStyle (shown here with the Slashdot stylesheet) that offers free stylesheets that work with the Movable Type default templates. Doesn't really work for me now that I've customized my templates, but for developing unique blogs on the fly, this could be quite useful!

• Building Trackback into plasticbag.org...
• Trackbacks and Simple Comments...
• Observation on the Trackback "How To"...
  
  And my personal favorite...
• What is Trackback? (part one)

miserable failure
Where are the Weapons of Mass Desctruction?

My instance of IE just royally bit the dust, carrying with it my latest post in which I gave a fantastically simple and conceptual explanation of RSS feeds. Now I have lost my train of thought, and it will have to wait until later. Grrr. One more reason I want a PowerBook.

I'm testing out the subdomain functionality of my new hosting company. This process wasso incredibly simple, too.. I can't believe I have 4 more of these I can use.. I'm thinking katybeck.katherinebeck, jewelry.katherinebeck, blog.katherinebeck.. the possibilities are endless!

• Ad-Aware 6.0 (info) (download)
  This handy little piece of freeware scans your hard drive for data miners, tracking programs, and other unsightly lurkers on your RAM, registry and hard drive. It will find cookies, for example, placed on your computer by advertising agences (ahem, Doubleclick). Doubleclick uses these cookies to track your surfing habits and serve you more effective advertising - like popups - from their clients. Note: Not all cookies are harmful! Ad-Aware only alerts you to the cookies you don't want.
  
  
• SpamCop (info)
  Once you sign up, you can send the spam you receive to Spamcop. They generate a report for email administrators and ISPs telling them that someone used their system to spam you. Spamcop also maintains a realtime blacklist that is used by email administrators to keep spam from reaching your inbox in the first place. Contributing to spamcop won't get rid of your spam, but it does let you make a contribution, however small, to fighting it.

• Don't give out your personal email address, especially on public bulletin boards or chat rooms.
• If absolutely MUST participate (you know who you are), set up a separate "junkmail" account with yahoo or hotmail to keep your personal inbox out of a spammers reach.
• Don't feel like you have to give your email address. A lot of times various stores, websites, and organizations will ask for your email on forms when they really don't need to. If it doesn't say required, don't give it out.
• If things get really bad, start over. If you've tried everything and are still inundated, just chuck the old account and create a new one. Send a mass email to your friends letting them know of the switch, and then pull the plug.
• Consider getting email with your own domain name. Free email accounts, or accounts like name@aol.com, are far more likely to get spam because spammers can easily generate millions of random inbox names to send email to, and a good percentage of them will actually exist. A unique domain name, however, takes far more effort on the spammers part to locate, especially if you guard it well (see above!). Companies like Network Solutions, GoDaddy, and even Yahoo all offer packages with a domain name and web-based email for between $25 and $60 a year.

• A spruced up WHOIS interface with hacker-thwarting image key entry
• A kick-ass new Account Management tool. The requirements document for this one project exceeded 300 pages. I've been working with it for five months and there are STILL features I haven't located.
• A fully-automated password recovery tool. No more faxing your drivers license! This particular tool (we call it a "flow") was my primary project, so I am quite proud of it. Back in my pre-netsol days, I went through a horrific password recovery process involving faxing my drivers license AND a tax return in order to regain access. As a result, I was personally invested in making this part of the site work. :)
• A much-improved (but not yet perfect) domain transfer tool.

• Plasticbag.org - http://www.plasticbag.org/index.xml
• Megnut.com - http://www.megnut.com/index.xml
• Typographica - http://typographi.ca/index.xml
• Lose the Buddha - no RSS :(
• Textism - http://www.textism.com/rss.php
• Gizmodo - http://www.gizmodo.net/index.xml
• Kottke.org - http://www.kottke.org/index.rdf
  
  and of course...
  
  
• Slashdot - way too much going on for an RSS feed