Adaptive Path is a User Experience consultancy. They maintain what is essentially a group blog featuring occasional long-form essays from their principals, as well as links to other items of interest. They even use Movable Type to maintain it, but near as I can tell, there is no way to receive updates via RSS or Atom.

Dumb.

Jeremy Zawodny notes that most of Google’s applications present two UI modes.

“1. Type into the box and hit the button. Look at results.
2. Use other navigation to browse. Repeat.”

With search and others use mode 1, and others use Mode 2

He closes by asking;

I’m not convinced that the “one box” view of the world is going to be the primary mode of interaction over the next few years. Are you?

I’m not convinced either, but I do think that the ‘one box” interface is pretty powerful and 3 years ago I observed that Google seemed well on their way to becoming the command line for the internet age, which sounds a bit like I’m damming them with faint praise, but the truth is quite the opposite. Command lines offer you an entrypoint into an almost infinite world of information in a tiny space.

Google is evolving into the command line for the information age, and I think it is great.

I just stumbled across its ability to give a phone directory listing for people when you include a city along with their name in the search box. Once it works properly for businesses, this will soothe a long-time frustration with web phone directories.

It always seemed to take too much clicking and typing to get a useful answer, but I never looked up numbers often enough to justify having any dedicated UI exposed to facilitate finding them. Now, I don’t need to, because the functionality is hidden on the google toolbar.

The great power of the command line is that it can provide access to a nearly infinite amount of functionality and information in a small amount of space. The classical limitation of a command line is that the means to accessing that information is opaque. The user must know before and the proper commands.

This limitation is addressed by the Google example in two ways. First, Google uses what can loosely be termed “natural language processing” to guess at what answers the user is looking for. Then, it uses the space afforded in a web page, and the navigational ease of a point and click interface, to offer those answers to the user.

Google has added a fair amount of functionality to that interface int the past 3 years, and I’d say they still have more they can do.

Back when I was using Blogger, I used to have a linkblog called, cleverly, “Geekfun Links.” I tried to use Geekfun Links as a spot to blog stuff I thought was cool, but wasn’t going to say much about.

I’ve decided to dust it off again and wire it up to the cool blogging integration in Onfolio’s new version 2 beta. I just wish their blockquoting of text snippets was better.

So, one of the problems with stuffing your mouth with pistachios as fast as you can shell them is that you might still have the meat of several perfectly good but under-chewed and unswallowed nuts in your mouth when you start to chew a bad one. What’s worse, it might take a couple of chews before the bad one is really obvious, by which time you’ve probably added a few more nuts. The result is that you have to spit it all out, and then it might take a few more nuts before the flavor is really purged.

This is not unlike the branch-prediction miss penalty suffered by the Pentium IV processor. Only rather than chewing on nuts, its chewing on instructions and data.

I’d like to set up a Wiki, but which one?

I installed MoinMoin about a year ago but didn’t end up doing the project I installed it for and at this point would rather try something new.

Basically, I’m looking for;

1) Easy to install
2) Attractive URLs. MoinMoin’s URLs looked like crap in the CGIWrap environment I ran it in.
3) Ability to attach files
4) Ability to include images
5) Ability to set read/write permissions on subtrees.
6) Versioning without a dependancy on CVS
7) RSS Feeds of changes
8) Inclusion or plug-in integration of a simple WYSIWYG editor.
9) Abilty to do Wiki level read/write permissions
10) Python, PHP, Perl, but not Java due to the constraints of my web-host.

Also nice but not important.
-Sortable/filterably lists
-Structured Data in pages
-Easily created aggregate view of pages with Structured data.

Any suggestions?

I got sick of comment spam a few months back, so I did a half-assed job of dealing with it. I installed mt-blacklist and disabled comments on new posts, but did little or nothing about closing comments on older posts.

Since then I’ve had to spend 15-20 minutes a week deleting comment spam that slipped by mt-blacklist and got added to old entries that still had open comments.

I’d made a few false starts at turning off comments on old posts en masse in order to reduce exposure but kept stumbling over the fact that most of the solutions seemed to be for MovableType 3.x and I am still on 2.66. I finally fixed that though, by installing mt-close, which lets me close comments on all posts older than a certain number of days, which I’ve now done.

The result is that I seem to be catching a lot less comment spam and so far the only new comment has been a legitimate one. On the flip-side, I’ve seen my first bogus trackbacks, but so far, only a few.

The good news is that now I have the tools in place to make managing comment and trakcback spam managable, so I’m opening new posts for comments again and I’ll only close them when the rate of comment spam gets high enough that it takes me more than a minute or two a week to deal with it.

I’m now state-of-the-art for 2003! (if one ignores my barely customized template).