Quick links as of June 4th 2010

  • May 28
    Jeffery To’s Show Short Link GreaseMonkey Script displays an existing short link for the current page (in the bottom left corner of the window), taking advantage of the short link microFormat. Flickr, YouTube, TechCrunch and all WordPress blogs already use the rel=”shortlink” mircoFormat. Nice!
  • Clarify Your Story Excerpt is a set of questions will help you through the process of testing and validating your idea. Aimed at “Enterprise and Small / Medium Facing Businesses (EME)” they are equal valuable as a questions for any startup.
  • May 31
    Mathew Ingram does a great job puncturing gasbag Nick Carr in Nick Carr’s Retreat From the Internet Continues.

    Mr Carr likes to make big (big) contrary positions and watch as people read and buy his work. He does a service in setting up (some of) these debates, but they rarely seem to hold up.

    Nick Carr’s argues that links (aka HyperLinks, aka “the web”) are bad because readers might click on them and get distracted from the quality of the writing or argument. This looks like the 2010 version of Plato saying “Writing is bad because it causes people not to rely on memory but to rely on something external to them and depend on signs belonging to another.” (Phaedrus).

    This de-values the reader by not connecting them to the referred content, and de-values the writing in assuming the quality of the writing can not hold them or that the content (the argument) cannot stand up, either to the referred content, or to comments. Maybe in a age of finite page size and dead (fixed media), but this goes against the nature and the technology of the web. It also does not trust the reader. In this age, link to the primary sources, the raw data and to the debate. How to link may be a interesting question. But not linking is to show lack of trust and respect to your audience and to suggest you have something to hide.

    See also The Economist’s Tech Blogger Babbage in To link, or not to link? That is the question.

  • An interesting, and non trival test of Comparing E-mail Address Validating Regular Expressions using PHP’s ereg() and preg_match() function finds a winner (where it’s better to accept a few invalid addresses than reject any valid ones) :

    /^([\w\!\#$\%\&\’\*\+\-\/\=\?\^\`{\|\}\~]+\.)*[\w\!\#$\%\&\’\*\+\-\/\=\?\^\`{\|\}\~]+@((((([a-z0-9]{1}[a-z0-9\-]{0,62}[a-z0-9]{1})|[a-z])\.)+[a-z]{2,6})|(\d{1,3}\.){3}\d{1,3}(\:\d{1,5})?)$/i

    I wonder if these results in torturing regexp email address recognizers will hold up given the variations in regular_expression engines?

  • June 2
    Twitter Exposes Intersections in the Social Graph like my Greasemonkey Follow Rank script http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/64286.
  • June 3rd
    via Geoffrey Wiseman, Git support in Eclipse getting stronger with the release of EGit and JGit 0.8.1

One Reply to “Quick links as of June 4th 2010”

  1. Pingback: Validating URL and Email Addresses with regexp in Lotus Notes | False Positives

Leave a Reply