DRM - Daniel’s Random Mutterings

I’ve just been dugg for the very first time:

Okay — so that’s what that looks like. Now I know:

Thanks for stopping by, Digg users. Hope to see some of you again

I just added Flash-based (FLV) video blogging support to my Django-powered travel portal site, trogger.de. The whole process is surprisingly simple and straightforward and can be done entirely with free (FLOSS) tools.

The video publishing workflow consists of the following parts:

• A Django model to store our video and associated information
• An upload form where the user can upload a video
• Converting the video into a format usable on the Web
• Extracting additional details
• Playing the video in the Web browser
• Making the player a bit friendlier
• Advanced features

Following this simple workflow, trogger.de allows users to write and submit a blog post. Once that’s submitted, the user can add one (!) video file to it. When later viewing the blog entry, the attached video is shown in the browser.
(more…)

[Warning: Bad language and Grammar Nazi rant coming up]

Pet Peeves In Grammar, #34: Not knowing the difference between “to allow” and “to allow for“.

Guilty party: Rita Mulcahy, in: PMP Exam Prep, fifth edition.
This book is full of sentences such as this one: “Using one-time estimates also allows for a quick calculation and proof that you understand those concepts.” No, it bloody well does not! It allows quick calculations, it does not allow for them. There’s a sentence like this on almost every page. This absolutely drives me up the wall!

If I allow something, then I permit it; it is part of the functionality, or at least I do not prevent it from happening. The word processor application allows changing the page layout. If I allow for something, then I make provisions for a certain event occurring and I take this into account. If I go for a long walk, I should allow for some rain.

Granted — when you buy a book by an American author, you should allow for some linguistic incompetency (’He looked out he window.’ WTF?). But bloody hell! This is the fifth edition of this book. Don’t you people have proofreaders in the States?

OpenBC is a German community site, similar to LinkedIn or Orkut. It appears that they recently decided their Web site wasn’t up to snuff. So what do they do? They kick off a relaunch effort. And that, apparently, is where it all goes pear-shaped.
Today, they sent an email to *all* their members (OpenBC has quite a lot of them), asking everybody to participate in “openDesign” the openBC redesign effort.
In the email they sent a link to their redesign Web site, along with an invitation to participate and the promise of EUR 10.000 (plus a chance of a job) for the chosen design.
It appears that these mails were actually sent out to all OpenBC subscribers at the same time; not to a focus group, or in a segmented fashion (a couple hundred each day). No — all at once. When everybody (including me) clicked on the link in the mail, this is what we got:

The message is “Sorry buddy, you’re one of quite a few people….”. Sorry, buddy?? Can a Web error message be any more condescending and misworded? Short of “Piss off, you’re killing our server”, I can’t think how.
Now — they’re German, I’m German. So I think I kind of sorta know what they meant to say. But ’sorry buddy’? Did they buy one of Monty Python’s rude phrasebooks? Or was today casual day and they took their inspiration from their office attire? Isn’t this supposed to be a professional community and networking site?
In the meantime, their server seems to have imploded or molten down and the redesign site is still offline. So I don’t know what their spiffy new design looks like.
But frankly, buddies, I can’t be arsed to check any more.

I found these Web site optimization tips very useful and extremely sensible: 16 Elements You Must Include in Your Site Design, by Herman Drost.
One tip that I applied immediately is the tip about avoiding duplicate content by making search-engine-friendly redirects when a site is available under multiple URLs (e.g. http://www.trogger.de as well as http://trogger.de ). I was very much aware that duplicate content is a problem in the Google PageRank algorithm. I just never found a clear and short explanation what to do about it.
One good thing about most “white-hat” search-engine optimization approaches is that they automatically also make your site more accessible and understandable to the user. Things like checking your links, using ALT and TITLE tags, avoiding too much Flash, having links that can actually be found and followed — all these are good and sensible ideas for any Web site.