Tim Marman's Loosely Coupled

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• Happy (Belated) 5th Birthday to Loosely Coupled

  I started blogging on January 29th, 2003 . We've been a little heads down trying to get Notches to launch and I completely forgot to write about this, but I've now been blogging for over five years. I talked last year about my motivations for blogging, and they definitely continue to hold true even if I've been somewhat inconsistent in my writing. Jeremy Miller has a great post about the virtues of blogging ( via Rob ), and I think I've covered all of them (except the whole getting fired thing). So far, I've written over 1,000 posts - some of them good, I think, and some of them trivial - which somehow amounts to a post every other day. Wow... really? Much of this has come in bursts and there have been dry spells, but that still amazes me. More importantly, there's been nearly as many comments. So, once again, thanks for listening and making this a worthwhile and rewarding experience. Posted Feb 23 2008, 02:11 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Personal, Blogging, Slashstar, Site News

• Creating a better 404

  Jeff Atwood rants about the typical 404 page , saying "the average internet user has no idea what 404 means or what to do about it. To them, it's yet another unintelligible error message from the computer. Most 404 pages are unvarnished geek-speak." Jeff lays out 5 ways to make the 404 error page better. Drop the 404 Yes, the HTTP response code is 404, but there's absolutely no reason that ever needs to be shown on the actual page. Error codes aren't helpful . A simple explanation of the problem in plain English is all that's required. Any 404 page that has the characters "404" on it, if not already an outright failure, is already well on its way to becoming one. Automatically notify you of the 404. Repeat after me: it is not the user's job to inform you about problems with your website . If you require the user to click a button to notify you about a 404, or if you require the user to fill out a broken link form, you have utterly failed your users... Posted Dec 31 2007, 08:33 AM by Tim with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Software Development, Blogging, Design, Programming, Slashstar

• Security implications of MyBlogLog vs. BlogRovr

  According to a TechCrunch story , Citibank is putting a warning message up for users of comment and blog tracking services. As it turns out, there is a known issue with the coComment plug-in and, though I'm not familiar with the service, it sounds like BlogRovr also has a browser extension. Since I use MyBlogLog here, I want to re-emphasize that this message above doesn't apply to this service. MyBlogLog works by saving a cookie to your machine under the @mybloglog.com domain. When you go to a site that has included the MyBlogLog JavaScript, it can interact with that cookie and know who you are. The MyBlogLog tracking script does have some logic for tracking clicks within an IFRAME (to handle Google AdSense clicks). Since Citibank doesn't include the MyBlogLog script on their page, it doesn't interact with the service. When you're here or on any other blog that uses MyBlogLog, the service doesn't even know you were on the Citibank page much less being able to track... Posted Nov 27 2007, 03:22 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Technology, Security, Blogging, Slashstar, Site News

• The Intense Debate Experiment

  As some of you may have noticed, I've been trying out Intense Debate on this blog. Though the Intense Debate homepage advertises that you can import your existing comments, I haven't found a way to do so. As of now, this means I need to show all of my existing comments. In fact, right now I'm showing the Intense Debate code above the built-in comment form for Community Server. Interestingly, since I've installed Intense Debate, I've found more of you still use the built-in form despite showing up after the ID form. Given that they have the ability to export comments, I may remove the built-in form soon. I'd still need to write something to import back into Community Server, but given the comment volume here that's something I'm willing to risk. I'd much prefer to outsource the entire comment system, but unfortunately that's not an option until I can figure out how to import. I also appreciate that Josh, one of the co-founders, reached out to me after... Posted Nov 27 2007, 11:40 AM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Technology, Blogging, Slashstar, Site News

• Sorry for the downtime

  Right after the move , the power supply in one of the new servers died. Unfortunately, the database was also running on this server and I didn't have mirroring set up yet. It required a physical trip to the data center, but we recovered the data and failed over to the second server. The first server is back up on a borrowed power supply. We have have ordered a replacement, but this shouldn't require additional downtime. Sorry about this... hopefully you've at least noticed the speed improvements. The site should be snappier now - and we can get back to writing good content. Posted Apr 03 2007, 02:49 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Slashstar, Site News

• Moving Day!

  If you're seeing this post, then you're on the new load-balanced hardware. If you see anything wrong, please drop me a line ! Posted Mar 30 2007, 03:48 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Slashstar, Site News

• Wahne's World

  Please give a warm welcome to our newest blogger, Wahne . Wahne has some great insights into information architecture and UI design (her latest post is about design considerations when building AJAX applications ). I've been pestering her for years to start writing - I guess she was finally tired of the constant nagging and caved. Now I just have to have her help me finish my redesign... (for those of you reading this in your aggregators, I've done a bit of a makeover over the past month - better than it was, but still a long way to go). You can subscribe to her feed or the aggregated site feed . Posted Mar 07 2007, 01:43 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Blogging, Slashstar