Infinite Web Design

Digby has opened its doors to the public and while there is clearly work to be done I’m pretty impressed with the software. Digby is a desktop application that puts all your instant messaging, email, and social network updates in one spot. The interface is nice, with some basic themes you can choose form. I like the simple system notifications as well. The IM one is really cools since you can respond from the notification bubble.

They also offer a nice embeddable chat widget you can add to websites. I’ve the one below to our Contact page. It took me about 5 minutes to customize and add to the site. I love that it lets a visitor instantly interact with me if I’m available. I’m looking at adding these to more of our sites to help with customer service. Google Talk has a similar feature that works much the same way. Both are free and easy as pie to add to a site.

One small thing I’d like to see in the chat widget is a change in the Edit Nickname at the bottom. It’s not obvious that you should select it and change it. I’d like to see that as a more apparent form field and for the text to highlight when selected… I don’t see many people putting in a useful name when they start chatting using the widget on a site.

I got an email today from a teacher friend of mine telling me that the Mandy & Pandy website was blocked by the internet filter at his school. They apparently thought that the nice site selling children’s books to teach kids Chinese contained sexual content - the official categorization from the Websense Enterprise filter was “Sex”. Now, having built the site I’m pretty confident that is a pretty wildly inaccurate categorization of the site. In fact, I don’t see how anyone who looked at the site or even spidered the content of the site could find anything even slightly sexual on it. It’s about a little girl and talking Panda who do such things as walk in the park and learn to count. I did contact them, though I had to go through a long registration process where I was forced to put in a lot of really inaccurate, made up information about myself before I could point out that this was stupid and should be fixed.

So, it seems that a site that could help a kid learn about China and how to speak Chinese is not available at a school and who knows where else because someone set up this very dumb filter and the makers of this dumb filter went out of their way to make it hard to report the blacklisting of the site as foolish. It makes me ask how many other educational opportunities kids are missing out on because of these dumb filters. Perhaps it would be better if young kids were properly supervised when online at school and once they are given internet access, they are taught about what is and is not appropriate content to view. Instead of just using a stupid filter that blocks good things and can miss bad ones, lulling people into a false sense of security, we should focus on educating kids and teaching them about exercising good judgment when online. That is a basic life skill now and should be taught from a young age so it is ingrained as a habit. Kids need to know about not giving out private information, about using good judgment when deciding what sites to visit, how to sift out good things from bad in search engine results, and how to read a web site critically as a source of authoritative information.

But, if you are going to have a filter, at the very least make it one that uses a blacklist produced by smart people with good judgment. Reviewers who are smart enough not to put Mandy & Pandy in the “Sex” category.

[via Lifehacker]

Xobni is a new plugin for Outlook that is in a private beta. A video on Lifehacker shows what it is capable of and it adds some really cool new ways to interact with your email. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on it.

Jesus was a carpenter. He built things out of wood before he got into the whole Son of God / Prophet / Messiah thing. He was known for being relaxed and groovy and exceptionally forgiving and fault tolerant. If the Church is to believed he befriended Mary Magdalene despite her being a whore, if the Da Vinci Code is to be believed he married her. I imagine that when he built a staircase he built it to work even when someone jumped up and down on it, slid down it on a rug, stacked scrolls on it, or used it in some way other than walking up and down the middle of it. He built it to be resilient. I bet that staircase wouldn’t completely collapse even if one of the steps cracked a little. Of course, that’s how it should be.

Tim Berners-Lee and his contemporaries took some lessons from Jesus when they designed the system for the Internet. Like Jesus’ staircase the Internet is forgiving and fault tolerant. It doesn’t shut down when used in new or unexpected ways. Bits of data are regularly lost when sent somewhere yet your email to Grandma arrives complete because the system is designed to be fault tolerant and survive errors. The Internet and World Wide Web are one of the coolest, most world changing technologies ever. Web technologies work and have spread and grown in popularity because they are forgiving and fault tolerant.
Continue reading What Would Jesus Build?

I downloaded Firefox 2.0 RC2 Portable and I’m really pleased with the experience. It’s everything I liked about Firefox 1.5 with some subtle improvements. The upgrade only took about 5 minutes and went smoothly.

A few things helped out with making things go smoothly including:
Continue reading Firefox 2.0 RC2 Portable