Eponymous Blog

Reciprocality

Trey — Thu, 22 May 2008 18:23:05 +0000

I read about Reciprocality when I was working at helpdesk at Tennessee Tech years ago (perhaps linked from Slashdot?). It seemed really compelling, and I keep thinking of it from time to time.

I will periodically have thoughts like “what was that thing I read years ago that seemed to explain things and was kind of freaky?” Wikipedia says it verges on pseudoscience.

An article that I saw on Hacker News today reminded me of it.

I haven’t read about it in years, and didn’t re-read the site before posting this, but here it is.

How to Comment on Tumblr

Trey — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 22:03:21 +0000

If you haven’t already sign up for Tumblr.

Find an entry that you want to comment on and do one of the following:

If it’s not in your dashboard, click the ReBlog link in the upper right side of the screen:

If it’s in your dashboard, click on the recycle icon:

Write your comments either above or below the existing text (or erase it entirely):

Save it (see, Tumblr knows this is special content — it’s “ReBlog post” instead of “Create post”):

Go back to your Dashboard if you’re not already there. Click on the reblogs link:

Revel in the social nature of your online existence! Just use WordPress if you need more functionality than that!

This is how I’d like to see comments work on regular blogs anyway. I guess that’s the point of trackback links.

History

Trey — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 15:41:08 +0000

history|awk '{print $2}'|sort|uniq -c|sort -rn|head

Work computer:

98 gst
66 git
63 st
41 cd
34 gca
32 svn
29 ls
24 gb
16 up
11 mate

Linux staging server in my basement:

142 ls
125 cd
70 sudo
26 cat
19 git
12 mysql
11 exit
10 rm
9 mkdir
8 svn

Explanations:

The top ten commands entered on the command line and the number of times.

gst = git status
st = svn status
gca = git commit -a
gb = git branch
up = svn update

Trey’s Philosophy of Link Design

Trey — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 05:57:53 +0000

Hovering over a link should always emphasize and never de-emphasize the link. Don’t make it harder to read!
A visited link, if it changes, should be de-emphasized, but not so much so that you can no longer tell if it’s a link.
It should be obvious what is and what isn’t a link.

The Problem with Shared Hosting

Trey — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 04:12:54 +0000

There’s been quite a bit of talk in the last few days about the state of shared hosting as it relates to the ever-so-popular world of web frameworks. I’ve struggled with this myself, and I understand that it basically amounts to the fact that this kind of web development is new. Newer than the people who are used to throwing .php files on a server are accustomed (myself included).

James Bennett and DHH both think this is time for the web hosts to start putting in work to make this easier for developers. I agree that it’s in web hosting providers’ best interest to make the process easier. However, I also think this is a great opportunity for code monkeys (I’ll count myself as one) to really understand what goes into making a web server tick. There’s more going on than the world of PHP and shared hosting would have you believe.