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Archive for June, 2009

GHOSTS!!!

Author: Joel Nagy

23 Jun

The Ghostwire (DSiWare) game looks great and reminds me a lot of Fatal Frame.

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  • Filed under: Links

    • Is that a real Twitter Trending Topic or just Spam?

    Author: Joel Nagy

    23 Jun

    Twitter Trending Topics are a very cool thing and it is interesting to see how information spreads through Twitter.  An example that’s relevant today is the #IranElection.  But if you look at the current results (and since Twitter search is real time you may or may not see it) there are quite a number of ReTweets very often.

    So It makes me think about how much is something really a “trend”.  So that means you need to define trend or at least define it for yourself or the twitterverse.  For me I’m more interested in seeing real content that is relevant to me.  So that means true conversations and discussion of a topic.  And a retweet as helpful and nice as they are, are not nessecarily real content when they reach a mass large enough to be a trend.  So I would like to see an option to the Trending Topic search that removes retweeting from the results.

    Since retweets are not standard I’m sure it wouldn’t be perfect but I figure that by removing tweet results that start with “RT ” or “retweet ” or ones that have ” via @” near the tail of the tweet could constitute a retweet.  I’m sure there are a few others as odd apps like to come up with their stnadards (like “RT:”)  So another means either in conjunction or by itself is to remove tweets that are 95% similar to other tweets.  If you said the same thing as someone else then that data is not nessecarily as important in most cases.

    Now I don’t propose that this option be a default unless it’s perfected but that like I’ve said that it is at least an option to help weed out the results to get decent content.  Since in the end the real reason to search is to find.

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  • Filed under: Thoughts

    • Flash 3D Home Layout

    Author: Joel Nagy

    21 Jun

    FloorPlanner is an interesting bit of software built in Flash that allows you design your home in 2D and view in 3D.

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  • Filed under: Links

    • Tracking Invalid Hits: Accuracy is Quite Important

    Author: Joel Nagy

    21 Jun

    Why do tracking/analytics companies want their code placed at the top of the page (meaning below the opening tag) to be properly tracked? If a user exits quickly they should not be tracked.  It seems quite duplicitous to track a user that has exited a page before it has even finished loading.   Granted if you have a site that takes a bit to load you shouldn’t wait till everything on the page loads, otherwise you’d never realize that your page load time results in lost visitors.  But if a user exits a page or clicks away very quickly that visit doesn’t really count.  It would be like Nielsen tracking every channel I skip when I surf TV using the channel up button.

    I also simply can not believe it when a tracking company claims that their code will not be guaranteed to work if placed in the <head> of the document or if the code is wrapped inside a generic tracking function.  If your code can’t be wrapped or placed in the <head> what did you do wrong in the first place, or what kind of tricks are you trying to pull? I don’t like to always use the exact code provided by these companies when working on a client website.  Your client’s needs for analytics may result in them changing tracking companies and then the developer would be forced to make widespread changes across a site to deal with such change.  Granted this type of change is not all that frequent, but it does happen and being prepared is far easier than redoing work.

    I’m also not convinced that the analytics provided by many companies is accurate enough.  I’ve seen on many occasions that raw stats provide disparaging numbers when put against 3rd party companies and even between multiple 3rd party tracking companies when used together on the same page.  When the numbers of hits you receive on your site is the means for convincing ad placement or other financing I think that accuracy is quite important.

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  • Filed under: Thoughts

    • CSS: Getting Floating Content to be Wrapped Up Nicely

    Author: Joel Nagy

    4 Jun

    There’s a basic issue with placing floating <div>s or any floating element for that matter in a parent <div>, the parent looses all sense of height and becomes essentially invisible.  The parent can now no longer have a background, border or any defining style that would show up behind and around the children elements.  But with a bit of CSS you can remedy that situation. Look at how the Example After heading is pushed around because the <div> isn’t cooperating nicely.

    HTML:

    <div id="Footer">
	<a href="/blog/">Home</a>
	<a href="/blog/contact/">Contact</a>
</div>

    CSS:

    #Footer {
	background: yellow;
	border: 1px solid blue;
}
#Footer A {
	float: left;
	width: 100px;
}
#Footer:after {
	content: "";
	display: block;
	height: 100%;
	clear: both;
}

    Example Before:

    Example After:

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  • Filed under: Code

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