Java Developers, If You Say “Works on Mac”

Posted on May 11, 2009 by Lloyd

Please Play By the Mac OS X Rules

Today, I’ve been trying various password managers — seems like thousands of mostly complete solutions, all lacking polish. One of them was JPasswords, after I tried it I found a lone file in my home directory, jpws.ini.

Before iCal supported CalDAV, I tried Calgoo Connect to sync my Google and 30 Boxes Calendars. I laughed as it’s menu icon was the only colored one. Bonus was the “Calgoo Connect” folder in my home folder filled with logs and a “data” subfolder.

Java has come a long way from the “write once, debug everywhere days”, but still almost any Java application I try, poop in my home directory.

Mozilla SEO & Firefox Tips & Tricks Web Page Bugs

Posted on May 5, 2009 by Lloyd

Update Thurs, May 7th (2 days later): Mozilla is working on the issue for Mozilla.com “Bug 491985 – Title tag changes for select product pages on Mozilla.com to help SEO rank “. To clarify, the improvement is more search engine clicks than ranking.

I provided some feedback to Mozilla just over a month ago about the Mozilla Firefox Start Page tip of handy tips & tricks (how meta):

“Get the most out of your Firefox! Improve your skills with some handy tips & tricks.”

I’m sure web browser developers share my passion for these web page details, but nothing has changed yet.

As I often see other sites with similar issues, I might as well share this web development tip & trick and other suggestions.

<Title> Tags

First, the <title> field is bad SEO. Says
<title>Mozilla Products | Tips & Tricks</title>
instead of including “Firefox”:
<title>Firefox Tips & Tricks | Mozilla Products </title>
Actually, all the product pages are likely in need of switching the “Mozilla Products” to the end.

This made a big difference for WordPress.com search traffic way back when.

I work with many of our WordPress.com VIP new customers on this issue. Their instinct is to always have their brand or blog name first. But think of which search result you would be more likely to click on? In fact, WordPress historically made it to easy to get this wrong, so in version 2.5 a 3rd parameter ‘seplocation’ was added to wp_title() to make it easier to do it correctly.

So http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/products/ title would become

<title>Firefox Web Browser & Thunderbird Email Client | Mozilla Products</title>
(Plus title case for the win.)

I suggested they give it try and see what happens I’d be surprised if it does not squeeze a little more juice out.

Wow, there are lousy <title> tags all over their sites

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/ title is just <title>Featured Projects</title> Hopefully, David Boswell will have a chance to coax out of someone some work here during the current redesign

Firefox Tips & Tricks

The Manage Your Downloads is an advanced tip? Say what?

“Find it a Flash” intermediate tip reads:

The Find As You Type feature is another handy timesaver. Rather than
using the “find” bar to search for a word on page, just click anywhere
on that page and start typing the word you want. Your cursor will
immediately jump to the first instance of that term.

“You can use it for links, too. For example, instead of moving your
mouse across the page to a “learn more” link, just start typing the
word and when the cursor finds it, press enter.

It does not say that this is disabled by default, and can be enabled at Advanced > Accessibility or any other hint or tip Also, the phrase “on page” feels awkward, maybe “on a page”.

PS. I would not recommend enabling this, because it breaks some web apps that have click to edit.

Trying a little Objective C – Cocoa – Mac OS X

Posted on April 2, 2009 by Lloyd

As well as surely-but-slowly working on a little web project, I’m trying to learn a little Objective C – Cocoa – Mac OS X.

My motivation is two folds:

Create some small (open source) Mac Apps to solve my own itches.
Exploration of what makes Mac special; the Mac tools and communities, and new insights into the Mac experience.

Open Source Software Project Management Web Service?

Posted on March 3, 2009 by Lloyd

Wow, the title “Open Source Software Project Management Web Service?” is a mouthful.

Working on a small project with a friend (mentioned in “Learning by doing something else“) is a great opportunity to check out tools in other parts of the web development stack. I’ve been interested in trying out some of the software project management services and software.

(At Automattic, we mostly use prologue and trac. This is a fantastic combination!)

Likely the best approach for this project would be to first identify our needs and wants and then work through the available web services to find the closest matches.

After it being a web service, the next big want is for it to be open source software.

I have not yet been able to find any software project management web service that is open source software. Any hints?

Programmer Diss in Email Signatures

Posted on March 25, 2008 by Lloyd

I’ve been corresponding lately with a software developer in a large corporation whose work email email signature ends:

“If you put a million monkeys at a million keyboards, one of them will eventually write a Java program. The rest of them will write Perl programs.” — Anonymous

I laugh every time I see it, because of the possible arrogance of it, and the reflection of the competitive spirit at the center of our culture, as opposed to a collaborative spirit.

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When Knowledge Disappears

Posted on December 20, 2007 by Lloyd

The other day, I went to reread an amazing article Eli Goldberg wrote on “Verifying a bug” written when we were both working at Flock. I was saddened to find that http://wiki.flock.com/ has been replaced by a sparse “Flock developer website” and I couldn’t find that article.