Archive for Internet category
Facebook’s bizarre search algorithm
I’ve been having some problems trying to locate friends on Facebook and now I know why.
Facebook’s search algorithm is the most bizarre search algorithm known to man.
If you know how to spell their name exactly and type it all in lower-case that works fine. As soon as you introduce a capital or partial then spacing, which letters are capitalised and the length of the match all seem to play their part in the bizarre matching process that never delivers what you would expect although does deliver the same results every time.
I’ll use my name as an example (~ indicates additional space character):
Damien Guard / damien guard
Finds me, two coast guards named Nick Zieser and Patrick Fernandez, a person called Romy Domingo and two groups that match on description. The other people have nothing in the “Matches” field to indicate why they were bought in but not too strange.
Damie guar
Finds me, Damien Guarnieri and Kyle Damien Guarco. This one makes sense.
damien guar / ~damie guar
Should return same as above but oddly excludes Kyle.
Damien Guar / damie Guar~ / ~Damie Guard / dami Guard~ / dami guar / dami guard / dami guar
No matches at all.
damie guar
Curiously only Damien Guarnieri. Worrying given that many people search with lower case.
damie Guar
Damien Guarnieri and Kyle Damien Guarco only. No sign of me.
dami gua
The above two plus Damian La Guardia but still no sign of me or Damian Guard.
Damie guard / damie guard / damie Guard / Damie Guard / damien Guar / ~damie Guar~
Just me.
dam guar
Finds a Damian Guard in Tulsa but nobody else.
~dami gua~
Includes most of the people mentioned here but excludes my partial-namesake Damian Guard.
Damia Guar
Finds Damian Guardia and Damian La Guardia which didn’t show for “Dami Guar” yet excludes Damian Guard again.
It’s likely a case of devs trying to be intelligent and ending up with a usability nightmare but until they get their act together be prepared to try all sorts of combinations for partial matching.
[)amien
Access AIM and ICQ via Google Chat
Google just added support for AIM to Google Chat so you can just enter your login details and chat right away from your GMail or Google Apps for Domains account as if they were Google Chat users.
Better yet you can actually enter your ICQ number in the user-name box, fill in your password and integrate your ICQ account although this is seemingly undocumented and likely just a result of the ICQ and AIM integration from some time back.
It’s not as comprehensive as the fantastic Mac-app Adium or the clever Meebo web-interface and doesn’t offer support for MSN Messenger like those two but it’s a great extra tool to have at your disposal when stuck behind a proxy needing to get hold of someone.
[)amien
My favourite WordPress plugins
I’ve been asked what plugins I recommend for WordPress so here’s the ones I currently use. Some of them require work in your theme – I started with the Redoable 1.2 theme which supports many of them.
Akismet
Probably one of the most well-known plugins for WordPress this little wonder
screens all comments for spam using the Akismet web service. Get a key to access the service by signing up for a at WordPress.com and then configuring it in Plugins > Akismet Configuration.
Feed Statistics
I’m don’t want my subscribers in the control of a third party but I do like FeedBurner’s subscriber counts and analysis tools.
The Feed Statistics plugin provides a small subset of that functionality, the important one being a subscriber count which I now show in the sidebar. I went with a 3 day count configured from the Feedin WordPress admin.
Google Analytics for WordPress
There are a bunch of Google Analytics integration plugins out there but Google Analytics for WordPress apears to be the one currently using Google Analytics New Tracking Code ga.js instead of the old Urchin one. This actually uses a new URL and technique that hopefully won’t be blocked by so many viewers and also promises access to exciting new features as they become available…
Google Reader widget
I’m still in love with Google Reader especially since they added search to it (quite how they forgot that I’ll never know). One of the great things is that you can share your stories with your friends or better yet expose it as another RSS.
Google Reader widget adds a sidebar widget to show the stories you have chosen to share in your sidebar so no need for the annoying link-list posts (unless you need to add opinion or commentary of course). Configurable via Plugins > Google Analytics.
Gravatars2
Blog that don’t allow comments don’t get onto my Reader list without a fight. Without comments a post can’t be trusted – the author isn’t interested in any other opinions or thoughts.
Gravatar is a great site where you can register a picture with your email address so any site implementing Gravatars will show it next to your comments. In no time you’ll start recognising faces and pictures and decide if you want to check out their blogs too.
The Gravatars2 plugin puts those images next to the people who comment on your blog and can helpfully cache them locally for you given permission. It is configured from Options > Gravatars and the cache managed from Manage > Gravatar Cache.
Gregarious
Social bookmarking is incredibly popular through sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Delicious, Technorati, Windows Live Favourites or plain old email.
Gregarious takes care of providing links to submit your posts to these sites at the whim of a passing viewer. You can configure it in Options > Gravatars to choose the sites you want (I added DotNetKicks with a URL of http://www.dotnetkicks.com/kick/?url={url} ) as well as emailing you when a post is dugg and draw those famous little ‘n diggs’ yellow buttons.
Related Posts
Problogger’s Darren Rowse recommends interlinking posts to keep readers on your site and interested.
Related Posts automatically provides a list of likely related posts & pages based on keyword matching.
StatPress
Google Analytics is nice but the stats tend to lag a bit behind and sometimes you want to know what’s happening right now.
StatPress collects and reveals interesting real-time stats on Dashboard > StatPress including per-day & month counts of visitors, pageviews, spiders and feeds as well as recent hits, search terms and referrers. It also shows some visitor analysis and an interesting spy mode that shows recent visitors path through the site including how they got there.
My only complaints are that the MySQL database grows quite quickly and the analysis pages are slow. This is most likely caused by logging and analysis of raw data. Still it seems a lot less resource hungry that FireStats.
WP-PostRatings
An attempt to get quick feedback on what posts people are finding interesting and which aren’t with a simple star-rating next to each post.
Through no fault of it’s own WP-PostRatings has failed rather miserably here with few people wanting to click a star to rate a post. Will be dropped in the redesign.
WP-PostViews
Another visitor-retention seeking effort. By presenting the most popular content in the sidebar I’m hoping to entice people to look at a couple of other posts and hit the magic RSS subscribe button.
WP-PostViews records the stats and provides a method to get the post stats out you can put into your theme but most importantly comes with a widget to render a sidebar full of your most popular content.
[)amien
Friends Reunited violates own privacy policy to spam users
Hello Damien
You have received this email as a customer of our sister company, Friends Reunited.
Stared back at me from my inbox yesterday purporting to be from UK television company ITV. It was curious because I always de-select the marketing option. I visited Friends Reunited site to confirm the option was indeed off which it was. More interestingly it stated it would be for their own marketing messages, not third parties which their privacy policy clarified:
We, and (where relevant) our credit card processing agents, will not supply your personal data to a third party for commercial exploitation – thus, you can rest assured that we will not sell the lists of our Members’ email addresses to a third party; and
Yet here they are doing exactly what they claim not to.
Two subsequent emails to their support team resulted in one stating they have switched my third-party emailing option off (there is no such option, they claim never to do it at all) and when I clarified this for them another stating:
All members comments and suggestions are noted and passed onto our management team for consideration.
Such blatent disregard for their own policies and European regulation should not be ignored. If you live in the UK and a UK company is spamming you then complain to the Information Commissioners Office.
[)amien