Update 11/24/2006 3:52am PST: Faster, easier: you can now also add MakeYouGoHmm search by scrolling to the bottom of any Hmm search results page and clicking the “add search to FF” link.

Internet Explorer users can search this site using the free MakeYouGoHmm IE toolbar, but unfortunately there is no Firefox version yet. In the meantime, I’ve created a custom search for Firefox (pictured to the right) so readers can search the past of MakeYouGoHmm right from Firefox. Here’s how to use.

STEP 1. Download (2.4K ZIP) MakeYouGoHmm search for Firefox.

STEP 2. Unzip the package and copy the two files: makeyougohmm.src and makeyougohmm.png into the following directory:

C:\Program Files\Firefox\searchplugins

Note: change the path above to the location to your Firefox browser if it’s not in the C: drive.

STEP 3. Restart Firefox and you should see MakeYouGohmm in your Firefox search menu.

If you’d like to build you own custom site searches, the following excellent O’Reilly article: Build your own Firefox Search Engine explains step-by-step how to add your own custom searches with your own custom icons to the Firefox search menu. You can also study and use the MakeYouGoHmm file as a template.

Cool stuff!

If you were building a site for sight-challenged people, you wouldn’t use tiny font sizes and impossible to read text, so if you are designing a site that is specifically aimed toward Tablet PC users, then it’s logical to design it so that it is optimized for folks actually using Tablet PCs.

As a Tablet user for 167 days (only know that because there’s a counter on the front page of this blog), I could go on a rant about some Tablet PC oriented sites look and behave uncomfortably in a Tablet PC, but I’ll save that for another time. If you’d like to attract Tablet PC users in large numbers, then consider that besides obviously having good Tablet PC oriented content you probably want to have a design that is friendly for Tablet PC users to actually use.

I don’t have any Tablet PC specific websites, but if I did have a tablet PC website then I’d try to do at least some of the following to make the site easier and more Tablet PC-user specific:

- portrait mode. keep in mind that some Tablet PC users prefer Portrait mode (I use this 95% of the time). This means if you have a really wide website it will require scrolling in a tablet. Grab a pen and try scrolling with it sometime? It’s not as smooth experience as using a mouse. It is possible with Javascript to detect the user’s screen resolution:

<SCRIPT language=”JavaScript”>
<!–
if
{
window.location=”landscape.html”;
}
else
{
window.location=”portrait.html”;
}
//–>
</SCRIPT>

Consider using something like that to see how a Tablet user is viewing the website and redirecting or reformatting the content to be portrait view focused. 768 pixels wide is the most common format for portrait. That’s more narrow than the older, less used 800 width. So if your site looks messed up at 800 pixels, imagine how it looks with 32 pixels less.
- slate users usually don’t have keyboards by default. Slates do not come with keyboards (took me a month to buy one), so think of your UI for a moment and consider if you are requiring a lot of typing for tablet users to interact at the site. If/when you can support ink or audio on your site then take advantage of it.
- think ink. It may sound cliched, but come up with innovative ways for us tablet users to share in ink with others at your website. Ink is one of the coolest aspects of owning a tablet so a site which thinks all text and little to no ink isn’t really catering to Tablet users. A good example of thinking ink is Tablet PC buzz using ink signatures for their messageboards or, even better, Channel9 actually allowing users to post in ink.
- color scheme and outside viewing. Consider using a color / design that can be easier seen outside and also in poor lighting conditions. Tablet PCs are meant to be mobile and assuming they are used primarily in an office condition is flawed.
- user bookmarks customization. Allow Tablet users to customize their favorite bookmarks of your site on the homepage of the site. Again, this is a non-keyboard thing. Provide one click frontpage bookmark saving for each primary area if there is not already a very visible, obvious link on the front page. If they can customize their favorite links on the front page of your site it makes it easier to navigate to them. Sure, Greasemonkey could be used to provide a handy mod like this for your site.
- choose shorter, easier to type/remember domains. Would you want to ink (or type) one character at a time: thissiteisgreatfortabletpcusers.com? If you don’t have a short domain that means something, then choose one that does. Consider using URL shortening services like TDurl.
- everything else I forgot to list. Helps to actually be a Tablet PC owner I suppose, so if you want to design a killer Tablet PC website so probably the first thing to do is become a Tablet PC owner. I’ve probably left out a ton of additional great ideas, so feel free to use the comments to add your ideas on the subject.

Just released version 0.2 of BlogCompare, which adds some more goodies for helping to compare Technorati stats between blogs. These are the changes and additions:

• added minimum source stats with a default of 10 incoming sources - this can be adjusted back to zero in the dropdown menu or up to 2,500+
• added comparison checkboxes - easily compare any group of blogger stats in the database by checking the box next to their name
• colorized and fontified - for easier readability and to make it look a little nicer. Includes the logo shown above with the caption “forever beta” — which follows the current trend.
• added blogcompare category to MakeYouGoHmm - for changelog and instructional posts like this one. Those interested can subscribe to the RSS feed for only this category, just like any other category here (shown as #7 in picture below)

Screenshots and Examples
Let’s say I wanted to compare the blogs stats from some well known bloggers like Robert Scoble, Dave Winer, Chris Pirillo and Doc Searls.

Navigate to the BlogCompare homepage. When you first arrive you’ll see a v0.2 screen that looks like this (minus all the red numbers and arrows, of course):

Here are the important numbers explained (1-6):
1 - Sort by field. There are several choices to sort the data by here including blogger name alphabetically (A-Z), reverse alphabetically (Z-A), number of *Inbound Links by the lowest number of links (zero) to highest (low->high) and highest to lowest (high->low), *Inbound Sources by low to high and high to low, *Technorati Cosmos rating by lowest (best) to highest (worst) and highest to lowest and finally a custom BlogCompare quality score which is based in v0.2 on the ratio of links to blogs. A perfect ratio would be 100% which would 1:1 ratio of sources to links. Therefore a blog with lots of links from a lower number of sources would have a lower quality ratio. Note: ‘quality’ doesn’t have anything to do with how good or bad a blog’s content actually is or not.

* these figures come via the Technorati API

2 - List field. The list field provides four choices: Top 500, A-List, B-List, C-List. The A,B,C lists are pulled from Blogebrity’s TheList OPML files and are not chosen by me. Anybody who adds their own blog through BlogCompare, will go on the ‘o’ther list. The ‘o’ther list is sorted within the Top 500 list. In fact when you first visit, currenly there is 1 ‘o’ther blogger listed, 3 C-List bloggers, 4 B-List bloggers and only 1 A-List blogger in the Top 10 with sort by Quality Rank high->low. So it is quite possible to make the default top 10 as an add-in with a relatively small number of sources and links. In this blogger’s case, there was 35 links from 34 sources for a Quality Rank of 94.2857%. #11 is also an ‘o’ther link, added by the blogger.
3 - Minimum Sources. This was added in v0.2 to add some sort of minimum sources threshold to the default Top 500 list. Users can still sort by 0 (the v0.1 default) which means that 0 links / 0 sources can still be viewed. There are options for 50, 100, 250, 500, 1000 and 2500+ sources. By using this option you can limit the list considerably.
4 - View List submit button. Once you’ve selected your comparison or view choices, press this button to run the query.
5 - The Database (Top 500). This section will change based on the dropdown menu choices made. For the least amount of results you could set: quality rank high->low, list: A-List, Minimum Sources: 2500+ and you’d only see 27 of the A-Listers make the cut (as of this writing, anyway).
6 - Comparison area. This is where bloggers you choose by checking the boxes will appear. You can choose any bloggers on the list, so find the ones you want to compare, check the boxes, and then press the View list button and you’ll see these bloggers compared in this area sorted and ranked by the criteria chosen.

Search for the aforementioned bloggers using the Find command in Internet Explorer and Firefox (CTRL + F). Just enter in the last name of all the bloggers mentioned: Scoble, Winer, Pirillo, and Searls.

Now press the “View list” button and look in the Comparisons section (colored cyan in the center) to see the bloggers you’ve chosen stats ranked. You’ll note that the boxes are checked by default in the comparison section so you only need to change the dropdown menus and click “View list” to resort/rank based on the new criteria.

Voila! That’s the easy three step BlogCompare process. If you add your own blog (shown as #8 in the red numbered screenshot) it should appear in the Newly added area just below the Comparisons and then you can compare. You must appear in Technorati and have at Technorati API key (free) to be added to the database. It’s all automated at this point, but if it is abused a moderation queue can easily be added.

If you want to learn more about this experimental tool, then see the original post: Resorting and reordering the Blogebrity A-B-C blogger list

AOL Journals, which here was first reviewed clear back in July 2003, and was previously only available to the AOL paid members is now being opened up to the web as long as folks sign up for an AIM account.

The move marks the latest effort by the company to expand beyond its base of paying Internet services customers. For years it has offered AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) service for free to anyone willing to sign up for an account and download AOL’s desktop software. The company estimates that there are more than 20 million active users of the IM service

How to create your own AOL Journals blog - step-by-step
STEP 1. I just went over to AOL Hometown and clicked on the link on the right column that says “Create a Journal.”

Note: If you do not have an AIM account, then you’ll need to create a new (free) AIM account.

STEP 2. Fill out the details about what your blog will be about (shown below):

STEP 3. Add your first blog entry through the web or through the AIM instant messaging client:

Note: if you are going to be prolific with your blog entry and/or include lots of HTML, the generous 25,000 character limit might be something to keep in mind.

STEP 4. Modify the layout to suit your needs including adding links to other blogs of interest.

STEP 5. Share your RSS and/or Atom feed with others. AOL creates either RSS or Atom (nice move there to satisfy both camps). The RSS feed will be in the following format:

http://journals.aol.com/AIM_NAME/BLOG_NAME/rss.xml < -- RSS
http://journals.aol.com/AIM_NAME/BLOG_NAME/atom.xml <-- Atom

There are specific links on your blog home page. You can see my AOL blog here

Happy AOL Journaling to you!

I realize that sometimes my mini-reviews and first reactions to products/services/events on the web can be critical; sometimes very critical. My position, as a web developer, webmaster and small business owner for years, is that it doesn’t provide folks like me with any real value receiving a bunch of flowery praise and/or generic: “this is cool” comments. Instead, these folks require real, honest feedback to make their products/services better. I look for and encourage the same thing when I publish something. Just don’t bash things though, try to give some sort of fix or solution.

So one of my primary objectives when I look at anything new is not to pull any punches just to be nice but when possible to also provide suggestions/solutions. Also, this way if I do respond favorably to something, it actually means something. If I like something I will say it (as I’m about to in a second), but I’m not trying here to spin my commentary to be positive, but ask myself: would I use this either for business or personal use? If I would use it, how much? What would cause me to use this more? Would I pay for this? How much? Is there value?

Quid pro quo.

Suffice to say, most people do handle this professionally but there have been a couple who do not handle this well, like this guy who started out being receptive to the feedback and later turned ugly. At one point he believed I was somehow out to get him and his business for simply giving my honest opinion. In that particular case, I was confused (and a bit concerned) how the guy was trying to patent something that wasn’t altogether original (though I’m sure he’d disagree). Too many patents being registered these days, IMO, that have no business being patented.

But enough of that ugly story, let’s examine a positive one.

Last week I took a detailed look at the Q & A service: Wondir and was happy to see that my comments were taken as they should have been: constructively.

One of my questions had been where was the Wondir blog and the answer is not on the Wondir site, but on a Typepad-powered site here (which seems a bit odd, marketing wise, but hey, maybe there’s a good reason).

In particular I found this comment from the official Wondir blog useful:

Btw, we’re absolutely fine with people promoting their product, service or cause (and even making money doing so) through Wondir, as long as it’s done as part of legitimately answering someone’s question.

This comment alone made me add Wondir back to my ‘keep a closer eye on this’ list. This sounds like they aren’t against affiliate links in posts as long as the answer is relative, nor are they against suggesting solutions on your own websites. Now that’s progressive.

Maybe I can live with those annoying frames after all, which BTW, they had an answer for too:

It’s a necessary evil. In order to have the Jabber IM-presence automatically available to all users (so that you can IM someone with a response or get a response yourself by IM) we have to use frames, at least for now.

Sounds like an exorcism is in Wondir’s future. Well done, Wondir!

With Tadalist you can create your own to-do lists and (optionally) share them with others. RSS feed available for all tadalist todolists. The screenshot shows a quick to-do list I put together as a demonstration. You can see this tadalist to-do list publically available here

Last Easter I posted instructions on how to photoshop an image on a bunch of Easter Eggs. Some things are worth repeating. For those who celebrate, have a happy Easter!

A reader suggested that I repost how to disable NoFollow in Wordpress 1.5. This is for those folks who do not want rel=’nofollow’ on the links submitted by commenters.

STEP 1. download the comment-function.php script in /wp-includes/
STEP 2. open in any text editor and edit line 173 that looks like what’s shown below:

STEP 3. Change the highlighted line to read as follows:

$return = “<a href=’$url’>$author</a>”;

STEP 4. FTP that in ASCII mode back to /wp-includes/ and then you’re all set.

###
While on the WP kick, I just noticed a problem with the importer involving the missing post slugs. For older posts on the same day with the crufty format we’re using /domain/hmmentry/yyyymmdd/post-slug/ there is no individual link for older posts. The post ID can still be linked directly, but this really calls for a post slug.

I added to my to-do list to whip up a quick PHP script that will go back through the prior archives (all 1,587 of them) and where there is no post-slug then to create one using keywords in the title of the entry. It’s unlikely that I’d ever have any two titles the same on a single day in the past, so this format will work. I will integrate this logic into the importer. I’m glad I waited before sharing that code. I’ll wait some more.

Also, still on the to-do list are:

• integrating the MakeYouGoHmm custom toolbar with the new WP search and (maybe) with the Yahoo API and/or Google API
• fixing the old entry.php script so that it redirects all requests to the WP page where comments can be left
• fixing the search results page so it actually looks like a search results page
• fixing the individual entry pages so they aren’t so query intensive — I believe an additional theme template is all that’s needed here
• fix the list CSS and comments CSS because in IE it’s bolded and is hard on the eyes (looks much better in Firefox)

Back to work before the list grows even longer.

This is almost like reading an Agatha Christie novel, with Mike Davidson’s compelling account of the detailed steps he took to buy an expired domain that he really wanted. He never actually tells us what that domain is, but his writing style drew me in, and that’s an easy ticket to landing on my reading list. Check this out from how to snatch an expiring domain:

So if domains are available to the general public 75 days after they expire, how do you know your GoDaddy backorder isn’t one of many other backorders from other people using other services? The answer is, you don’t. And thus begins the cloak-and-dagger game of “getting in on The Drop.” “The Drop” is the unpredictable three hour period of time in which the domain is deleted from VeriSign’s database and released back into the ecosystem.

So there’s the magic number (my bolding above) to remember: 75 days after the expiration date. And to boot Mike is from the Seattle area, right on. Well done, Mike. Subscribed!

A webmaster friend of mine was angry yesterday that a site was stealing the entire content of her blog and displaying it through their site as if it was their content. They weren’t using the RSS feed and reformatting with just snippets of the content or quoting things as any legitimate blogger might do, no, they were taking the entire graphics, text, everything and adding their own links around the content and serving from their domain through a sneaky CGI script. They were even rotating these calls through different subdomains. The screenshot above shows Scoble’s blog being called up by this thieving website and how they automatically add their own pr0n blog link to the footer of the page.

I wrote the following Javascript code to deal with this problem – how to stop site/blog serving on a third party website – just put this code in between the HEAD tags in your HTML document and don’t forget to put the whole script language=”Javascript” and closing script tag around it, also make sure to change YOURDOMAIN.com to your actual domain name. You are welcome to use this freely on any of your websites/blogs with no strings attached:

// code by TDavid at http://www.tdscripts.com/
var domaincheck=document.location.href
var accepted_ok=false
if (domaincheck.match (”http:\/\/www.YOURDOMAIN.com/”)){
accepted_ok=true
}
if (domaincheck.match (”http:\/\/YOURDOMAIN.com/”)){
accepted_ok=true
}
if (!accepted_ok){
window.location = ‘http://www.YOURDOMAIN.com/’
}

This will not redirect those users with JavaScript disabled in their browser, but most surfers have JS enabled, so this will stop many of these type requests. While on this subject, if you want to stop users from framing your website or blog pages you would use the following JavaScript code:

if (window.location != top.location) {
top.location.href=window.location
}