Home pages are dead. Yahoo! GeoCities should re-invent itself as a blog site. Fresh content is better than stale content, and blog authors have an incentive to keep their blogs up-to-date.
Monthly Archives:: December 2002
It’s a Wonderful Life
Every year around X-mas time I’m sure to mention the story about how It’s a Wonderful Life became a holiday classic due to a snafu with copyright law. Earlier this week, NPR reported on this very story: NPR’s Rick Karr reports on how a 1946 box office flop became so ubiquitous on television this time… Read more »
Duraflame and egg nog
We lit a fire tonight in our fireplace. It was the first time we’ve had a fire in our new home. A chimney-sweep came out a few weeks ago and said our chimney was OK to use as long as we didn’t have a fire for more than 8 or 9 hours. Avital drove out… Read more »
Keeping my blogroll up-to-date
My blogroll (the list of RSS feeds I subscribe to, which appears in the right-hand column of my blog page) is now going to be more consistently up-to-date. Here’s how I did it. First, I set up a cronjob to fetch mySubscriptions.opml from my Radio Userland page. Next, I’m using Jeremy’s opml2html.pl script to convert… Read more »
Dog-sitting
We’re dog-sitting this week. Our friends Rob & Lamelle are in east Asia, so we’re watching Chaya, their Israeli mutt. I’ve been told by friends before that dogs are much more work than cats. You’ve gotta walk the dog two or three times a day! Luckily, Ariella has been taking mornings (I like to sleep… Read more »
Top 10 Web-Design Mistakes
Jakob Nielsen’s Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002: “Every year brings new mistakes. In 2002, several of the worst mistakes in Web design related to poor email integration. The number one mistake, however, was lack of pricing information, followed by overly literal search engines.” As usual, Jakob is right on the money. Did you notice… Read more »
Ray Sun has a blog
My friend Ray Sun, longtime MSFT employee and all-around kewl guy, now has a blog. I set him up with my tool of choice: MovableType. I didn’t even bother to run uname -a or perl -v. I just unpacked it, tweaked mt.cfg, and the thing just worked. Ray used to be a program manager for… Read more »
YHOO is buying INKT
In a not-so-surprising turn of events, Yahoo! is buying Inktomi for $235M. There has been a lot of discussion both outside and inside the company about search engine competitor Google, so clearly Yahoo! is doing this to stay competitive in the search space. Whereas Yahoo! has something like 74 different properties in 25 countries, Google… Read more »
Will McDonald’s follow United Airlines?
One of the nation’s biggest airlines recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Now I read this headline from Investor’s Business Daily: McDonald’s Expects Its First-Ever Loss As Chain Retrenches Amid Weak Sales. Another sign of the weak economy? Hardly. Maybe McDonald’s is losing money because they’re not vegetarian-friendly. I completely stopped giving Mickey D’s… Read more »
Permission-based burglary
Former co-worker Derek Balling writes, “You know you’ve made it in the world when NPR quotes ya…” Derek, sign me up! To make it a little easier for you, I’ve reset our the combination to our safe to 9-24-66 (YAHOO).