Digital Bridge

Found a very interesting read today: Secret Out - How Google Ranks Websites. Now I’m wondering if all those language links on Blank Slate are such a good idea after all…

Technorati Tags: Google

I’ll be spending more time learning Ruby on Rails now that I’ve sent the book to press, so I guess I’ll go back to reading Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby. It doesn’t seem like it’ll be that hard to pick up, really. What I need is an idea for a Rails project that I’ll actually use. Hmm… Ah, I’ve got it: I send out a weekly newsletter to my ward and provide a list of date ideas in it. There are plenty of recurring events which I have to type in again and again, and so it’d be nice to store the events in a database and then just export the list each week when I need it. (I talked about an idea like this on Top of the Mountains last week.) You know, it may be good to expose the site to the ward members and give them access to add date ideas (and tag existing ones). It looks like I’ll need two tables: one for dates and one for users. Simple enough. Hmm, what other functionality will I need? From a user’s standpoint, I’d want to be able to search for dates and limit results by cost, time of day, category, etc. Would I need to bookmark dates? Probably not, since most people will be checking the site on a weekly basis and a week isn’t enough time to warrant more permanent links. It’d be nice to have an RSS feed for new date ideas… It’d also be nice to interface with Google Maps, either directly (like Frappr) or via normal links. Okay, I’d better get back to class, but I’ll write more about this later.

Technorati Tags: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Google Maps, Frappr

I now get well over a hundred spam messages in my new account each and every day. What gives? It doesn’t seem like anyone out there would actually buy whatever it is they’re selling, but I guess there has to be some kind of return or else they would stop doing it. (Unless they are bent on making the rest of the world hate them, in which case I have to say they’re succeeding admirably.) Spam filters are okay but it would be nice if there was some way to stop it at the source. And alas, because of the internationality of the Internet, I fear there’s no way to do that. Well, there’d better be no spam in heaven.

Technorati Tags: spam

I’d hoped I wouldn’t have to do this for a long time, but today I’m changing my e-mail address. See, two days ago I opened a message in Hotmail that was addressed both to my Hotmail account and my BYU account. The odd thing was, I never got it in my BYU account. I then tried forwarding it over, but it never arrived. Yesterday I called the IT people and they found that Spamassassin was marking certain messages (those with subject lines in Thai, because they were in a foreign language and it thought they were uppercase — common spam markings) and dropping them. It’s really disturbing to think that I never got a large number of messages sent to me from my Thai friends over these past few months.

The other problem I’ve run into with BYU’s e-mail servers is that on occasion I would receive e-mails with long paragraphs clipped halfway through the paragraph. I ran some tests to see if it was the sender’s end (by sending messages to my Hotmail and Gmail accounts) and they came through fine, so it’s definitely a BYU issue.

So, instead of living with e-mail angst in the future, I’m switching to Gmail. My new address is ben dot crowder at gmail dot com. (I have another Gmail account but the new convention seems to be firstname.lastname@gmail.com, so I may as well go along with it.) Thank heavens for Gmail SMTP — that’s what makes it possible (since I’ll still mainly be using Apple Mail, just through the Gmail servers). And while I’m at it, I’ll switch my MSN account to Gmail too (apparently you can use a Gmail address for MSN Messenger). Then I can finally consolidate down to one e-mail address.

Now I just have to tackle the somewhat-dreaded task of notifying everyone of the new address… (Thank heavens BYU at least has e-mail forwarding!)

Technorati Tags: e-mail, Gmail