Travis Pettijohn: Blog

The title says it all. OutSync: a little utility you run that logs into Facebook and syncs the profile pictures of your friends with their contact in Outlook. Fun!

I just discovered this site, http://recaptcha.net/. They do the regular "image verification" stuff you see to prevent spam on web sites, except they use scans from real books. They present two words: one for which the result is known and a second for which the OCR had low confidence. If you match the known word, they assume you're probably right on the unknown word, too (and they verify it multiple times to improve confidence). I think it's a great idea: as a side effect of preventing spam, they're digitizing old books. Cool.

I'm on I-90/39 in Wisconsin in between corn fields, using my carpool friend Mark's Sprint phone to connect to the Internet. I'm getting over 1.1 MBit/sec down and 90 KBit/sec up. In a car. In the middle of nowhere. I can't believe how good this is, especially compared to my T-Mobile Dash with dial-up quality EDGE. And his data plan is $15/month, compared to my $30/month. Weak, T-Mobile, weak.

My blog has been getting tons of comment spam lately. I moderate comments, so they never appear online (though there's a bug where not-visible comments still increase the counter on the main page), but still...every morning I get to log into the moderation page and click "delete all." Some of the stuff is filthy...like the one with links to twenty different types of rape porn--no, seriously. Mostly it's for viagra, etc. There was a funny one today that started with "sorry for this post." These guys seem to know what they're doing, since the IPs seem to be random. I also employ the rel="nofollow" trick, so even if they made it online (which they won't), they wouldn't have the desired effect of increasing their page rank. Anyway, thought I'd share.

I got my cable modem installed today and just updated my DNS entry to the new IP. This new place is starting to feel like home :)

I left a comment on the Oddumse wiki with a feature request on Saturday. Alex replied about three hours later agreeing. It got checked into revision 1.701 about 45 minutes later. How cool is that?

I was recently introduced to Oddmuse, a simple Wiki engine written in Perl. I initially set it up for a side software project I'm working on with friends (we needed a simple way to capture and share requirements and ideas). After that, I made www.pettijohn.com use it. One thing about it that appeals to me is that it's so easy to set up. Literally drop the script in, change one config value, and it works. You can tweak (which I've done), but there are no dependencies on databases or anything (it's filesystem-based). Nice job, Alex.

I was thinking about all of the places on the Internet where I create content: blogs, photos, restaurant reviews. The list seems to keep growing. Here's the list and their RSS feeds, as of now:

• Personal blogRSS You're looking at it. The mundane details of my life.
• Work blogRSSATOM Technology and business focused.
• Flickr RSS My photos.
• del.icio.usRSS My bookmarks.
• Yelp RSS Reviews of restaurants, bars and other establishments.

Sorry to my one reader for the downtime...thanks for sticking around. What can I say, I moved. The new cable modem is up and running, the network has been pieced back together. Until I move again in a few months, that is. Sorry to my friends: I still haven't installed a feed reader on this laptop yet, so I'm behind on reading your blogs. I'll do that soon and get caught up. I've got a few blog entires outlined in OneNote that I'll be posting over the next few days. Stay tuned.

I found this today: someone picked up a link to one of my "click here" rants with a comment about how it's frowned upon by experts. I can't help but laugh. FYI, he found my blog from a comment I left on Jeremy Zawodny's blog. I think Tim sent me that last link.

Sorry if this info is a bit rough. It still needs to be more thoroughly tested, but here's what I've done to make my Apache 2.0 web server be a proxy server for HTTP and HTTPS.

LoadModule proxy_module modules/mod_proxy.so
LoadModule proxy_ftp_module modules/mod_proxy_ftp.so
LoadModule proxy_http_module modules/mod_proxy_http.so
LoadModule proxy_connect_module modules/mod_proxy_connect.so
LoadModule ssl_module modules/mod_ssl.so

<IfModule mod_proxy.c>
        ProxyRequests On
#specify a list of port numbers to which the proxy CONNECT method may connect
#allow 22 to use PuTTY w/Proxy to connect to arbitrary SSH over HTTP proxy.
        AllowCONNECT 80 443 22

#secure your proxy server with Basic auth.
        <Proxy *>
                AuthType Basic
                AuthName "my proxy server"
                AuthUserFile /path/to/file/.htpasswd-proxy
                Require valid-user
        </Proxy>

#Mask your point of origination
        ProxyVia Block
        CustomLog logs/proxy_log common
</IfModule>

<VirtualHost *:80>
#allow SSL proxying to occur on port 80
        SSLProxyEngine On
        SSLProxyVerify none
</VirtualHost>

Following up to my previous post and Renice's comment that "context-relevant links are rumored to help a page's Google rank," I submit this:

The first result of a Google search for "click here" is the Acrobat Reader download page.

This leads me to believe that the biggest abuse of "click here" as link text on the Internet looks something like this: "This site requires Adobe Acrobat Reader. Click here to download."

Possibly my biggest web-related pet peeve: web sites that use "click here" as link text.

My eyes skim over a web site, following visual cues. I process information without really thinking, stopping for a second look where I pick up something meaningful, skipping over things that aren't. A link (with its unique style from the surrounding text), is a visual cue. But "click here" delivers nothing meaningful.

With a particular company with which I have an online account, I had scoured their small online bill payment section trying to figure out how to change my email address. For the past 3 months, I've looked every time I've logged in. I had come to the conclusion that it was not possible to do online. Well, it was. (You see where this is going, right?)

This evening, after finally "clicking here" to find the page where I could edit my account, I was inspired to send this email to their "webmaster."

Webmaster,

Please don't use "click here" as link text. It reduces usability of the web site.

I was trying to change my email address for my online bill payment. The help said, "visit the 'Edit Account' section." That's incorrect. It should have said, "visit the 'click here' section."

(Actually, your help is wrong regardless: the link reads "Click here" followed by "to edit online billing info." There's no mention of "edit account.")

Web users look for navigation cues, like menus. Or they skim the page for links. "Click here" gives nothing meaningful at a glance.

This is a good article on the subject: http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/noClickHere

I hope you act on this feedback,

Travis Pettijohn