I’ve delivered simple, clear and easy-to-use services for 20 years, for startups, scaleups and government. I write about the nerdy bits here.
— @joahua
I’ve been having a play with this service tonight. This stuff is inestimably powerful, but strangely simple — for the A-B testing at least it’d be pretty trivial to roll your own. The Google Website Optimiser blog is worth a gander if you’re new to this stuff.
Traveled over to Shanghai Scrap today (h/t Danwei) to a post entitled “Plywood Infernal“, written following a visit to a large factory in a northern Chinese city. The author, Adam, writes: “I don’t know much about the plywood industry, and not much more about what drives a young person from a village to a deadly factory in a town without a future.”
Essentially, the manufacturing processes continue to use a carcinogenic chemical in quantities and with exposure to workers such that, if what Adam was told by other residents in this village is true, employees in this factory can expect they have less than three years to live before contracting a terminal illness.
Ours is a messed up world.
As per a posting I made to the WSG list earlier this afternoon:
We have a problem! Outlook 2010, according to Campaign Monitor, is going to continue to use the crippled MS Word layout engine. They adopted this as the status quo for Outlook 2007 and promptly set rich email with CSS, etc., back a number of years, and are showing no great sign of diverging from this path. However, there is hope! Campaign Monitor have started a website in conjunction with their “Email Standards Project” — essentially a standards advocacy website. They need your support now more than ever.
FixOutlook.org aims to collate the community’s discontent with this decision using Twitter to change Microsoft’s policy decision on this one before it’s too late and we’re stuck with yet another five-ten years of inferior email authoring!
If you’re a Twitter user, it’ll take two seconds to retweet and show your support.
Thanks!
Josh
This is a really important issue for anyone involved in email marketing, and well worth taking the effort to make some noise about. Essentially, if we don’t get off this track it’ll be years until it is possible to drop support for these inferior clients (as is the case with IE6, now) and we’ll all be dealing with sub-par mailing authoring, cross-compatibility, and display issues for a while to come.
Get tweeting! :)
I stumbled across this document, Two Old English Elegies from the Exeter Book: The Wanderer and The Ruin (PDF) when hunting for a public-domain English translation of another Old English poem, Vainglory. The author of the linked document has also translated this, but unfortunately it doesn’t look like it made the cut for any of his courses published online.
For reference, there is a translation of the poem, it’s just not the one I was looking for. R.M.Liuzza’s Beowulf: a new verse translation (2000) has a pretty mammoth series of appendices including a translation of Vainglory on page 209-211.
I just finished adding tags to each of the 1200+ posts on this blog. Needless to say, I enlisted help.
Calais Archive Tagger, a free WordPress plugin, did most of the heavy lifting for me. It connects to a web service called OpenCalais, run by ThomsonReuters (so nothing dodgy is going on with your data, they’re a pretty big publishing conglomerate!) The biggest problem with it is that, given the particular emphasis of OpenCalais towards establishing commonalities between different data sets, it paid a disproportionate amount of attention to proper nouns, and when product names were incomplete (for example, my old Pentax SP500 camera that I often just referred to as “SP500″) it would match tags to other products that had a more complete title. Which would be excellent if that were, in fact, what I was talking about.
I ended up sifting through the maybe 2500+ tags it created and deleting about 400 of those, and consolidating others.
I’m nowhere near HAPPY with the tags as representative of the content of each post, but, from the ones I’ve scanned, it’s most definitely better than nothing at all. Clearly categories are decreasingly relevant as stronger search capabilities have emerged over the past couple of years, so tags are a great way of enhancing searchable content — it’s not just about relating similar information, it’s about creating a mesh or network of content. This has SEO benefits, but can also function as a barometer of the type and nature of content being discussed. For the record, I don’t think it’s a fantastic barometer for this blog just yet!
One other unexpected thing it did was expose some spam that had found its way into a handful of posts through old WordPress vulnerabilities (I presume pre-2.8 era)… there were only three, with probably negligible Page Rank effects for anyone.