iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

Shortening URLs like bit.ly/warningwarning are a bad idea, filling real need, that seems like it’s not going to just go away.

URLs like mattclare.ca/blog/2010/03/18/warning-about-url-shortening are descriptive, help service like Google but they are way too hard to remember and take a long time to type into a web browser. Services like tinyurl.com , snipurl.com, bit.ly , ow.ly and others provide a short URL that will re-direct users to the longer version.

Google even created their own shortener at goo.gl which, according to the official Google blog:

Google URL shortener is not a stand-alone service; you can’t use it to shorten links directly. Currently, Google URL Shortener is only available from the Google Toolbar and FeedBurner. If the service proves useful, we may eventually make it available for a wider audience in the future.

This was handy a few years ago, and once Twitter took off with its 140 character limit URL shortners took off with it. Most of these services now offer stats on how many clicks a URL has received — perfect for the follower count obsessed Twitterati (I mean that in a positive way – I promise).

The Danger!

The danger with URL shortners is you don’t know where you’re going to end up. With a URL like cbc.ca or mattclare.ca/blog/2010/03/18/warning-about-url-shortening or en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_shortening you have some idea of the reputation of that URL before you follow it. You can identify the domain, see if you know it, some times you can determine if you’re going to arrive at a web page, an image or a PDF document, etc. URL shortners obscure all of that.

This problem of this opaqueness was best demonstrated by the phenomenon of rickrolling. A (debate-ably) worse outcome is individuals clicking the short URL could be redirected to a malware/spyware site. While web browsers like Internet Explorer can be compromised just by visiting URLs this is a bad idea!
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I want to invite everyone with any interest in Formula 1 to sign-up for Mitch & Brooke’s Fantasy Racing League.

It makes the races that much more fun to watch and gives you five drivers to cheer for.

My siblings and I all had our own teams last year. The inside tip is my sister’s strategy that proved to be the best of three of us was choosing drivers by hotness.

This is why I want to encourage you to sign-up this year. It’s a far better experience when you know the “owner” of the other teams racing against you because the excitement of the race doesn’t end with the chequered flag, but when you find out how your fantasy team did — well in my case, that’s when it ended. You may do well!

Mitch & Brooke’s Fantasy Racing League just opened up registration for this year. If you can look past the web 0.9 appearance of the site I promise you’ll enjoy the experience: www.fantasyautoracers.com/f1_01/

In 2007 I created a web site to designed to help everyone, principally me, track your luck with the Tim Horton’s™ roll-up promotion and let users share their experience with others.

Today Rim Count has been shut down. The site required a little bit of work to update the content for 2010, but more than that, it needed a way for people to access the site beyond the web and e-mail; perhaps a mobile app or Facebook app. Most of all, it was to be a success, it needs more than zero marketing.

That’s not going to happen.

It was a good way to learn the Drupal platform, and I recommend it to anyone building a site with content that’s more than reverse chronological posts. Mission accomplished. Now it’s time to close up shop.

Unless you’re reading this posting via Facebook, you may have noticed that you now have to sign in to add comments to my blog postings.

I tried to resist as long as possible, but the signal to noise ratio was getting too high for me whenever I had to approve comments.

I could have add a CAPTCHA, which is a contrived acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” But I find their squiggles to be fundamentally inaccessible, even the audio or reCAPTCHA ones, and I didn’t want to further promote the technology.  My admiration for Alan Turing aside.

So I’m now asking commentators to sign in via Facebook Connect or OpenID.  Both technologies never disclose your password to my site, and warn you about what they are disclosing and in this case it’s not much more than your name/handle.

You may not know it, but you may already have an OpenID! Google, Flickr, MySpace, Wordpress and others all provide the service to their users.

This also means that comments are no longer being closed after 90 days.  Feel free to comment on all the postings going back to 2004.

Thanks for your time and patience.

I changed the URL of my blog!

It all started with mattclare.ca/wordpress because that’s the software I chose to use to use back when I wanted to try this blogging thing out in 2004.  Shortly after that I regretted the choice (or lack there of) of the url mattclare.ca/wordpress.  A much better choice would have been mattclare.ca/blog

It took a lot of work to get the pretty URLs working, plus there’s the issue of visitors to my blog and search engines still having the old URLs.  Because of this I was hesitant to change the URL, but today after a lot of research and modelling, I finally switched the URL.  I had been testing redirecting /blog to /wordpress since I re-did the main page of my website, but  today I took the big plunge.

The most important thing was to setup the redirect via the Apache web server I use in a way that preserved my Google ranking.  The trick (according to Google) is to send the 301 header with the redirect.

The “httpd.conf” config line was

RewriteRule /wordpress(.*) /blog$1 [R=301,NC,L]

Please let me know if you see anything that doesn’t work anymore!

Way to organize the worlds information Google!

Meet the street view snowmobile. Deployed at the Whistler site of the Vancouver Olympics.

I think the next step is to strap one to the top of a curling rock! The only way they can get street view inside the house without a lawsuit.

The Fantacura (my 2001 Acura 1.7 EL) went in to the shop for a check-up, complaining about no heater heat at idle, and was told to get it’s affairs in order and make peace with those around it.

It’s not in a bad way, like my Saturn was when it was traded in (sorry Acura in Markham), but it is time to start looking around.

It’s got a few dings, including losing its front Acura A, and the leather driver’s seat has been re-stitched by me with fishing line.

The most recent ailment has forced me to realize that 235,000 Km is about all it’s worth. 170,000 Km was with me behind the wheel, and I think most of that was on the QEW between the Burlington Skyway and St. Catharines.

So now I’m scouring the province for a (manual transmission-ed) slightly used Acura CSX, Mazda3 Sport – or maybe an immaculate Acura EL?

Gina Trapani of smarterware.org / lifehacker.com now has a new series of weekly videos and blog posts at FastCompany.com called “Work Smart”. If you’re STILL one of those people who feel positively overwhelmed by your E-Mail inbox, or you feel that your iPhone/BlackBerry has made you worse at acting on E-Mails, not better, Gina has some simple advice for you.

Here’s her actual article over at http://www.fastcompany.com/article/work-smart-conquering-your-e-mail-inbox

On January 3 2010, with much excitement, I ordered three tickets to the Formula 1 race in Montreal this June. I gave www.circuitgillesvilleneuve.ca / www.admission.com my billing information and bought three seats (and a program). My friends and I were excited that we got great seats in grandstand 34 in middle of Montreal’s best corner “the hairpin”.

Twenty-five days later I get an E-Mail from Pamela Rodriguez of admission.com that reads

“.. you filled an order form for seats in grandstand 34 or 11 in regard of this year’s F1 race in Montreal.
At the time we treated your request, there was nothing left in those grandstands either because your order got in late or because the seats you requested never were available during presale.”

I filled out a web page, it only took me about a minute, I’m pretty sure they didn’t run out of seats in that minute. The E-Mail confirmation they sent me seemed pretty sure that there weren’t any problems.

I’m left curious when in those 25 days did they run out of seats? Did it happen sometime in the next 24 hours and it took them 24 days to contact me, or realize that they ran out? Did they run out today and it took them 24 days to process my order?

I called within 15 minutes of getting the unconfirmation E-Mail and made sure that my Master Card had yet to be billed for the rescinded tickets and then bought a “new” set of tickets at grandstand 34 – where we’ve been before – but I can’t help but feel misled and disappointed.

If you are thinking of buying tickets to for the F1 race in Montreal I’d recommend dealing with a broker or just watching the race from home. It’s the only way you can predict where you’ll be this June.
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Hate Sakai? Do I have a “bumper sticker” for you:

Love Sakai? Amplicate.com has a “bumper sticker” for that too:

I just find the whole idea of a web site that aggregates opinionated tweets and provides bumper stickers about opinions expressed on Twitter to be a novelty.