Alan Gutierrez

Thinking about what makes The Blogometer worth reading. I’ve noted that I’m big on small posts, but I write long posts. I’m going to work on making my Blogometer posts shorter, punchier.

I’m going to keep up my shtick of adding a portrait to most of the posts, but that the portraits are one heck of a time consuming chore. Maybe a Flickr Pro account will help, or maybe I need to write a script that will size images, and upload them for me.

This means more volume. Less fuss over each post. I’ll bet my writing will improve if write more, if I throw more pots. It is an attempt to be more conversational.

Maitri in the comments of Finding The Perfect Blog Length

And I’m saying that even length can have meaning. Storytelling, to get to a point, is highly underrated these days. A nice readership is attracted by the intimacy of such storytelling, too.

It’s funny that you say this - my online diary has much shorter posts than VatulBlog and contain as much meaning.

Quality != f(quantity)

My actions are tempered by this bit of blogging wisdom. My longer posts have tradiontionally been the one that get the most response, but I’d like to see more outbound linking and conversation in my blogging. Must practice what I preach.

Proposal

My modest proposal to implement tagging in Thunderbird. This is a proposal I said I’d write in response to a discussion at fredericiana in the comments of a post entitled Thunderbird Tagging Extension.

This is a feature that would put Thunderbird over the top, in my book, in comparsion to Apple Mail. I use Thunderbird now to read and search mail on my OS X Powerbook. I’ve found that Apple Mail is too slow when searching IMAP folders. Furthermore, I’m finding that the constant indexing performed in Tiger means that I can no longer watch DVDs on my Powerbook without performance blips. I’ve turned Spotlight off to regain usage of my CPU and harddrive.

Thunderbird uses the search capabilities of my IMAP server. It is much faster than Apple Mail. I’m able to read my e-mail from difference computers, since it’s stored in IMAP, and I can use Thunderbird on those different computers, since it is cross-platform.

Since I’d like to stick with Thunderbird, I’d like to have a tagging extension. There already exists a project called Tag the Bird, which may be a good jumping off point, but I thought I’d start with a clean slate discussion of what a tagging extension should be.

Use Cases

Let’s start with the ability to create tag based folders. It is not easy to gather a list of all tags. Not acorss IMAP at least. The only way I can think of, offhand, is an exhaustive search. Perhaps, Thunderbird can keep of list of tags seen in the client, but it would not be authortative. If not, then a person will have to specify which tag based folders they would like to see in their folder pane explicitly.

People will want to tag quickly as they go. I’ve read article about how people are using the five built in categories in Thunderbird as an implementation of Getting Things Done. I’d like to keep similar functionality. I’d like to have hot keyed tags that people could apply to messages in an e-mail triage system.

I’d also like to have hot keyed tag removal, so that someone could sort through a tag based folder, one tagged “deferred” for example, removing the tag for the folder and applying more meaningful tags.

The tagging panel can appear above or below the header window in the message pane. This is where the information about spam and blocked images appears. It would be a simple text box for the addition of tags, with a tag cloud beneath it.

The user will be able to read her mail using the space bar. Tagging is initiated by pressing a hot key to open the tagging panel or to focus on the tagging panel. Tags are entered as space or comma separated tags. When enter is pressed focus returns to the message pane so that the user can continue to browse e-mail using the space bar.

There will be mouse actions as well, but I imagine that many people will want to keep their hands on the keyboard while tagging.

Implementation

Tags are applied to an e-mail message by adding one or more X-Tag headers to the message.

Search is performed using the existing search engine in Thunderbird or through IMAP by searching for an exact match against the value of an X-Tag header. Multiple tags are sought using an boolean and. Ideally searches are case insensitive, which may mean that tags are stored after conversion to lowercase, if the search engines to not support case insenstive matching.

Tag folders are implemented as saved searches, with an interface that creates the folders by specifying the tags to match as a space or comma delimited list.

Questions

I’m not sure which sort of list delimiter I prefer. Space separated tag lists mean no spaces in the tag. This is the format used by del.icio.us. I like del.icio.us and when I use it, I don’t miss whitespace. Comma delimited tag lists allow for spaces in tag names.

Case sentitivity may not be an issue, but I need to know one way or another.

In the comments on Fred’s blog, Alexandre Lemieux has already voiced support for the X-Tag concept. Paul Alexandrow the author of Tag the Bird, has noted that his extension allows for the addition of user tags and that he’s wanted to add IMAP support, which is why I’m going to start out by reading through his source code.

Further thoughts?

Note: Thunderbird Tagging is my original post on this subject, and I’m linking to it to create a trackback.

Speaking in Tongues

Last night at the French Quarter Town Hall, after the meeting, during the mingling, I was speaking with people in the crowd about Think New Orleans.

At some point, a woman made a statement about search engine optimization, and I found myself in another world, this world, the blogosphere.

Who is the woman and why is she speaking of SEO?

I said something skeptical about search engine optimization. She said that it must be important since someone had convinced her to spend money on it.

Why is it necessary, I wonder?

I asked her her name. It happens to be F Brinley Bruton, a peculiar name. I asked if she held the URL for her name. She said yes.

Then there’s nothing to it. All you need is for someone to link to you, you’ll be at the top of Google in a couple days. In fact, I’ll write a blog entry and link to you.

She seemed dismissive of my dismissiveness, but said she’d buy me a drink if I linked to her. Thus, this is my first paid endorsement, or rather, link, since it’s not really an endorsement. Ugh. Okay. I’ll read an article. Yup. Endorsement. Maybe it’s two drinks now? But, her coverage of women in Afghanistan is compelling.

F Brinley Bruton

Let me introduce you to the web site (not blog) of F Brinley Bruton. She is a London based freelance journalist with experience in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Make sure you add the www before her domain, because without it, you get a placeholder site.

If you start getting spam comments with F Brinley Bruton in the body, it is because she’s unwittingly hired someone to rub us all the wrong way.

The same folks who have posted all of her example articles as image based PDFs, perhaps? In doing so, the’ve made sure that the search engines cannot read the articles, they cannot be indexed, and they cannot be searched. To Google, they do not exist.

Of course, no one has anything text based to which they can link. There is no reason to link to the site. Time for a link to the two immutable laws of blogging, which applies to all web content.

If the articles were available as HTML, I could link to them from this blog entry. A PDFs, I’m not so inclined, and the search engines have no idea what I’m linking to anyway. Not to mention that the articles are hard to read. Too hard for me to read. So I read her articles elsewhere.

If you do want to read Brinley’s work, try reading this article, The Women of Afghanistan Find a Leader.

Joya, a women’s literacy and health worker, says that soon after arriving she began to chafe at the “undemocratic attitude” of those running the meeting. She asked for permission to speak.

“I criticise my countrymen for allowing the legitimacy and legality of this Loya Jirga to be questioned by the presence of those criminals who brought our country to this state,” read the transcripts of what she said. “It is a mistake to test those who have already been tested. They should be taken to the world court.”

Uproar ensued and Joya’s microphone was turned off. Some participants leapt from their seats and the call of “Allahu akbar” resounded through the tent. Those in charge demanded that Joya be expelled and punished, or at least that she apologise. She remained, did not apologise, and was called an infidel, a rude little girl and a communist.

Westerners might find it hard to understand how courageous her speech was. Without mentioning names, Joya had taken aim at the most powerful class of Loya Jirga participants: mujahedin and “holy warriors” revered for fighting and expelling the Soviets.

SnakE Oil

Search engine optimization is to contemporary web development what paint sealant is to auto sales. How cheeky that someone should first sell her an almost text free web site and then go on to sell her search engine optimization.

If you Google her name with misspellings, Google corrects. Google knows that its Bruton, not Burton.

Google knows who she is, but just like me, Google knows that her site is not the best place to go if you want to read her work.

Update: My Work Here Is Done

When I wrote this article, F Brinley Bruton’s new web site did not appear in the Google search results for her name, F Brinley Bruton. Now she appears as the first result. What’s more, when you search for Brinley Bruton, you’ll find her site is first, and this blog entry about her site is second.

She was told she’d have to comission these results. I am hoping she’ll now run from the charlians. SEO is silly. It makes us all unhappy. Google puts it plainly in their message about SEO to webmasters.

One of the commentors, real name unknown, referenced his recent post on this matter, which I’ll quote as a supporting voice. billoday.net in A Message to Those Who Push SEOs

Here it is: Have interesting, unique, and applicable content that will make people return and link to you. That’s it. But, you have to understand that while Google is multilingual, its primary language is the link. The link determines how important you are. Not only that, but the level of importance the linker has determines how important you are.The way to win is to be the most popular kid in your field. Do that by spending time on your actual web content, not just improving your Google rank. It may start a little slower, but in the end the payoff will be even bigger. And everyone benefits from that.

To my mind, the most effective form of currency these days is not the link, it’s the quote. Not because search engines will follow the quote to the source, but people will. The pull quote is way to get a person reading. I do want you to read Brinley’s piece on Jaya in Afganistan. It’s fascinating. Thus, I quote it.

You need people to read you first. Meaningful links come come only after a real person invests the time to read you. It has to be worth their while.

Hugh MacLeod quoted me, what he felt was the crux, in Human Condition 101. Oddly, this quip that caught his fancy “…must be important…”, is the one gauled me into saying that she’d get more mileage out of a sincere link from a blogger. I went on to say that I would be that blogger.

Ultimately, however, it’s not one or another well placed link that determines authority. It will the merit of Brinley’s writing, and the depth of her experience. I do hope she makes more of her work more accessible.

Update: Blogging’s ROI

At long last I’ve gotten around to updating this post with photographs of the payout.

F Brinley Bruton was good to her word. A drink for a link. Langiappe, too.

Two Manhattans at Oswald’s. As a journalist, F Brinley Bruton has this annoying habit of disarming a person and then interviewing them. We talked about me, until I arrested myself. I’d ask her questions, but then we’d be talking about me again.

After listening to Harry Anderson’s latest take on the French Quarter, and watching a little bit of magic, we went to Coop’s for a burgers and Abitas.

I made a fortune off this blog entry. Thank you F Brinley Bruton.

Not last night, but the night before last, I’d come from Chris Rose’s book signing, at the R Bar, with Jimmy Delery and guest, to Mona’s on Frenchman. As I enter, a familiar face exits. Quick spin of the Rolodex of the mind, and sure enough, it’s Cindy. “I know you.” I say, with the emphisis on know.

Cindy responds with, “I’m Cindy Sheehan”.

I’m struck dumb for a bit. I fair poorly in the presence of celebrity. Fortunately, for once, it occurs to me to ask, “Can I get a picture with you?” as I search for John’s Cannon Sure Shot.

“Sure”, she says. The camera is handed off to a woman that was on the way out with her. A photo is taken. I look at it. It is, as always, simply awful.

Okay. I can take a better photo than that, but I can’t warm up. I have to get comfy with the camera fast, focus. Oh, and I have to screw up the courage to ask Cindy for another photo, “Oh, I look awful. Here, please, let’s take one more, we can do better!” Arm in arm, Sure Shot at arm’s length, and snap.

That was easy.

It was easy because I’d stood around for about an hour screwing up the courage to ask Chris Rose to amend the message in the book he signed for Kristin. I thought it so rude to ask him to add anything to his “Thanks for all your support.”, but I thought she needed something upbeat in her message. It was Jimmy who said that Chris wouldn’t care, and that it made no difference to buy him a beer, because he’s drinking for free.

I asked for an encouraging addendum. Chris added “New Orleans, New New Orleans Forever! This is our story!”

It was perfect. He was, as they are here, totally cool about it, and I had screwed up courage to spare.

Thus, I got a pretty decent arm’s length snap with Cindy Sheehan, and we’re both looking rather fab.

Dave reflects on the nature of Detroit in the spotlight, in his post The Morning After. He muses on how Detroit behaves like an ugly narcissist when the media comes to town.

Suds & Soliloquies: The Morning After

Detroit is the most insecure city on the planet.

If you’ve lived around here your whole life — as I have, more or less — you know the drill. Whenever something big like the Super Bowl happens in the city, the local media run story after story about the national media’s coverage. The word “image” is used incessantly, as in “What will this do for Detroit’s image?” The “this” may refer to the event itself, or else to the latest murder or arson or other high-profile crime that inevitably accompanies the event.

Dave didn’t note how, in the 80’s, Detroit would celebrate a sporting victory with assorted property damange and violence. The Tigers in ‘84 spawned a riot. The Pistons in ‘89 were followed by 8 murders. The big news story when we reached the penultimate game was as much about the pending mayhem as it was about the pending victory.

The days of Hockeytown were comparatively peaceful.

Think the story has played itself out. It might be time for the Detroit media outlets to write a new script. People are still astounded by the width and bredth of the blight when the visit Detroit, but I don’t think they pay attention to the plight.

I’m hacking on the mod_proxy module in Apache 2.2. I’ve got a pushlet application that for reasons of consistancy must be proxied through Apache. Unfortunately, mod_proxy does not work correctly when the chunked transfer encoding is used in a pushlet fashion.

Apache wants to buffer the upstream request, at least enough to fill an 8k packet. When it gets a chunk it writes it to an 8k buffer. If the buffer is not filled, it will wait until the next chunk arrives before flushing the buffer.

When a pushlet application is sending small chunks, in my case a couple dozen bytes, then the client, which is expecting these chunks as they are generated, is going to recieve the chunks as a much bigger chunk. My application generates its chunks intermitantly, so the client will not see a data except, oh, every other day.

There’s a fix already in place. It doesn’t fix my application. According to the bugzilla entry, it will read the upstream with a non-blocking read, and if the read returns EAGAIN, indicating that the read would block, the 8k buffer is flushed.

It’s broken in two ways. First, somewhere the code path, from the proxy call, to some logging calls, to the raw socket read, a condition swallows the EAGAIN and returns success.

More importantly, the headers, when read, are always read with a blocking read. The non-blocking mode is only used for the body. Since my application sends full chunks, it is the read of the headers that will block, and the mod_proxy code waits and waits.

I’ve gone and added a kludge to send packets as is. The 8k buffering is bad news for my application, since if I want to send a larger chunk, I’ll do that from my pushlet server code. I’ve already considered the chunk size when the chunk was formed. I don’t want mod_proxy to muck with it.

Perhaps I should read the HTTP 1.1 protocol to determine if I can make such petulant demands.

What is spatial annotation? It’s when you leave a marker in the real world that associates a place or thing with a resource on the Internet. The projects that pop to mind are Yellow Arrow and Grafedia. (The latter is icky because it involves grafiti.)

Through a blog called Elastic Space, I found this comprehensive list of existing spatial annotation projects. Far to many to survey at once, though the two that seem most applicable to the French Quarter appear to be the Blue Plaque Project and Talking Street. The former uses historical the historical markers that already adorn London, the latter includes spiffy content with celebrity voice talent.

This idea was hatched by John Gregory of the Quarter Crawl, by the way. He’s got a database of places and events that he built when he published his printed “What’s Open?” business directory. Now that everything is pretty much open, he’s thinking about new applications. We’ve been talking about how New Orleanians use technology, and the cell phone is the client of choice.

What would a person hear through their cell phone? How would they interact?

• Immediate recommendations on which venues to visit, where to eat, etc.
• Posting photographs of events or venues, creating a group photo blog for each venue.
• Tour material, information describing an annotated building or landmark.

As I’ve noted in the past. New Orleans really has no need for social networking software. They already have excellent social networking hardware. The meetings, restauraunts, cafes, bars, and corkboards do for New Orleans what blogging, Google and Craig’s List do for ex-urbia.

Effective social networking software for New Orleans would recognize the value that this hardware provides, and find a way to greate a digital parallel.

Any links or insights into using mobile technology for social networking are greatly appreciated.

Update: Phone Connected

It works. I’m going out to Cosomo’s to meet with John. He just gave me a number to call, and there was the Quarter Crawl, for the evening, in telephony. I’d share the number with you, but it doubles as John’s fax line. He’ll have a new line in the coming week.

We’re going to brainstorm on the menu design, and I’m hoping that I’ll get to hack out the gecoding and directions, a routing solution for walking. It appears as through some clever Postgres hacks can produce a routing solution, but I’m out the door now.

Update: Lat/Long Lookup

Now I need to figure out how to find a latitude and longitude using a telephone. The trick is to ask the person for one of four things. A business name, an intersection, or a street name and number. The remaining option is to ask if they’ve proceeded to the last place recommended, if they are following some sort of tour.

I’m going to try to knock this out with Postgres, as a REST based web service.

Update: Telephonizer

Here’s a Java class that turns an American English string into a string of digits that matches the pattern one would key into a US telephone to represent that string. Wha? It takes a word and matches it as best it can to a telephone keypad.

• Telephonizer.java
• TelephonizerTestCase.java

This links to source control, so you’ll always have the latest.

Laura from Ypsi~Dixit encouraged me to submit one of the comments in her blog to a humor magazine. Considering that she’s one of my personal A-Listers, this is a flattery compounded. Funny how we write our best blog entries in the comments of other blogs, though.

Yours Truly in the comments of ypsi~dixit: Men’s Studies Conference in Ypsi

When I was last in Ann Arbor, it struck me that this penchant for gender studies had something to do with how difficult it is to meet members of the appropriate sex.

The dating scene is as harsh as it is boring. It seems the only way to be alluring is to be aloof, to run hot and cold. Driving times factor into every encounter.

Gender studies in Michigan are more a product of two many lonely nights driving home from Clutch Cargos than any real pursuit of knowledge or understanding. A slow and meticulous licking of wounds.

It made Laura laugh. That makes me happy.

While you’re there, add Laura to your feed reader. You’ll love her blog if you live in Michigan, or if are an enormous geek, or simply a communications geek, or want a civic blogger to study.

Laura, like AAIO, has a gift for getting the ball rolling, half the content is in the comments, that last link, the civic blogger link, being an example of how she can start a discussion with a less than ten words.

XO Ypsi~Dixit. You’re on my A-List. Everyone should read you!