As a user of Google Reader who many times rises above 1000 unread posts because of more pressing matters I tend to prune my posts by using the following keyboard shortcuts:

• Pressing ‘n’ and ‘p’ for next and previous posts (yeah I know that j, k is the cool way)
• and pressing ‘m’ to mark the post as (keep as unread) when I get to a post that I would like to read later.

This way I don’t have to mess with the star system and remember to clean up my stared items.

The issue comes from the fact that all the pertinent information about the state of the post is at the end, not easily visible (even on a 1920×1080 laptop screen) when just skimming headlines and checking associated pictures to quickly see if the article is one that you would like to read later (or see it’s status).

Perhaps adding either a ‘Mark as read’ Button next to the Previous / Next buttons or moving the status bar to a absolute location at the bottom of the page, like so.

Although the the later gives the user more info it also takes a way a line or two from the post.

I’m not sure this is an issue that needs to be solved but I think I might have the right work flow for what I’m doing.

In the Common Dwarf Starting quests, you meet your sister and mother. The thing that is bugging me..

If you look at the picture above you will notice that my Character is a dark skinned dwarf. and my sister… well she’s a very fair red head. Now the red hair is part of the her story but both her and my mother continued to pull my character out of the story until going above ground to join the cause.

Now thats really a niggling complaint on a game that for the few hours that I have played has been more then enjoyable. But I think back to the start of Fallout 3 where the complexion of your character matches that of your Father.

Anyway I can’t wait to continue down this story and I really hope it performs well on my laptop while I’m away on business.

More and more sites today are using Link Shortening services such as

• is.gd
• bit.ly
• TinyURL
• twurl
• dwarfURL
• snipurl

While all of these services a great for mobile use and sites like Twitter where the character limitation is an issue, they really make it hard for the user to figure out exactly where they are going by clicking on that link.

Take for example a common Twitter Spam tactic; the spammer follows you with a single tweet, with some random phrase suggesting that you follow the nice shortened link.  Almost certainly this is a spam account, but to correctly mark this post as a Spam message, since they really haven’t technically spammed you yet, you need to know where that shortened link goes.

Now any sane person [read: any person that knows whats going on] will just block the spammer and not be bothered about it, but some people [read: most] might click the link to see where it goes. Unfortunately many of the people in the later group might not always keep their OS or browsers patched up and would be completely susceptible to any recent vulnerabilities that the malicious site might hold.

The solution, well unfortunately its real place is in the browser. When a snipped URL is used the browser should take responsibility for letting the user know where that click will take them.

looking at the request we see that the link is 301 Moved to the new location:

The browser should follow the link to the 301 and place the Location: header in the tooltip for the user to see.

This way the user can make a “slightly” more informed decision on weather to click on the link, report it as spam or just ignore it.

Now the drawback of adding this to the browser is the rate of update to keep on top of the shortening services, would be horrable. While Firefoxs add-ons could facilitate this, browsers such as Opera, Safari and to a lesser extent Chrome this could be pain for both the developer and user.

The suggestion. Well for the time being the presenting site should take responsibility until the browsers catch up. While this would cause the presenting site to make an extra connection to catch the 301 the information could be cached to keep the traffic down on popular links.

Though this is not fool proof and does require more maintenance, the service it offers to the user would be transparent an beneficial to many.

Now that’s a better Tooltip.

So with that, the changes.

• First the URL www.downrighttech.com/blog
  While I like the blog there is no need for it to be the first thing people see on my site. I’ll try to keep that more business since my primary usage for this thing is for business.
• Next, The engine.
  I’m making the move from Drupal to WordPress  for the blog. While I’m still using Drupal for a few other things the blogging engine is so much better in wordpress to pass up.
• Finally the topics
  While that’s not changing too much it should be a bit more more well defined. I’m not going to be writing something everyday, or even on the same topic. This is a place for things that I need to write down in a public forum.

Anyway, welcome to the new digs… and lets see how I do this time

H