*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

Like most people I use Google for various tasks such as searching, finding local businesses, viewing maps, satellite images etc. However, as Google adds more and more services I find myself getting more and more discouraged trying to remember is the service a sub domain or is it a sub directory when typing the URL into a browser. Here are some sample URLs from the Google page that lists their offerings:

Alerts – http://www.google.com/alerts
Blog Search – http://blogsearch.google.com/
Directory – http://www.google.com/dirhp
Finance – http://finance.google.com/finance
Picasa – http://www.picasa.com/index.php?tid=Y2NpZD0zNzQ4
Talk – http://www.google.com/talk

 These are just a few samples to show the inconsistency. As you can see some are sub domains while others are sub directories from their primary domain. I don’t get it. Come up with a pattern guys and stick with it! Another thing that drives me really crazy with their URLs is I use http://news.google.com quite a bit. Especially if I am traveling and don’t have access to a news reader. Why can’t I just type in http://news.google.com/scitech for example to get to the Sci/Tech section? It would be incredibly simply to add a URL rewrite for each category.  To read Sci/Tech news the way it is today I have to type in this:

http://news.google.com/?ned=us&topic=t

Are you kidding me? Aren’t we in 2006? Is it just me or is this utterly stupid? Almost all web sites spend some amount of time trying to make their URLs user friendly. In complete contrast to Google’s approach to URL madness I can type in http://something.yahoo.com and get to the service I want. Note to Google, wake up, and stop wasting my time typing &’s, and ?’s. It is 2006 and you have billions of dollars. Maybe your employees should take their “one day a week” and fix the URLs to make them easier to remember and more consistent.

I’ve got to catch up on a few blog entries from a few sessions today but I want to take a little extra time to write up a little nicer article on them.  Until then I thought I would throw out a few IE 7 tips that Dave Massey spoke to us about.  Here is the first one up.

I’ve been using IE 7 for a few months and I really like the tab browsing.  But that’s not the only reason users are going to like IE 7.  However, I’m a keyboard hot key nut.  One of the features I like is the tab browsing preview.  Let’s say you have 6 tabs open and you want to go to a certain tab, but you can’t remember which one it is in.  The best way to accomplish this is to use the quick view.  Here’s a screen shot:

(hotkey – CTRL-Q)

Once you hit CTRL-Q you can view all the tabs you have open and then use arrow keys to navigate.  Another useful feature is one Jason mentioned earlier whereby you can type in something like “apple” and then press ctrl-enter and it will add http://www.  and .com to the end giving you http://www.apple.com. 

Dave also turned us onto a quick reference guide on the IE7 blog where they have a quick reference that lists a lot of the hot keys.  Some other ones that are worthy of mentioning are ALT-ENTER which opens a search in a new window.  IE 7 also allows you to add your own search engine into IE 7 really easy.  Go here to look at companies that are already adopting this.  Kinda interesting because if you add this HTML into your page, IE 7 will auto detect your site’s search and allow users to add it to their browser.

<link rel=”search” type=”application/opensearchdescription+xml” title=”Ebay” href=http://yourdomain.com/file.xml />

Here is a sample Ebay xml file from the list of sites:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ ?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns=”http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/“>
<ShortName>eBay</ShortName>
<Description>Search Online Auctions</Description>
<Url type=”text/html“ template=”http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?satitle={searchTerms}“ />
</OpenSearchDescription>

For more information about how to use the Open Search definition see this url:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/browser/external/overview/ie7_opensearch_ext.asp

I’ve had three or four people try to find me on MSN Messgenger in the past week.  Unless I told you exactly what to use, you would never find me.  Being that I am a junkie of said technology I decided to change my handle so people could better / more easily “guess” my handle.  I do this all the time.  For example I’ll get someone’s business card or I’ll be reading their blog and I will want to chat.  I’ll take their email address and try it in MSGR.  More times than not it works and I have an instant connection with someone.

Don’t worry for those that are on my list, all two of you,  I’ll be messaging you to remind you. Just accept my new handle and be happy.  For those that are dying to know, it will be my email address at this domain which is:

keith at dot net pimps .net
(the above string is an email address obfuscated for spam engines)

For the past several months, maybe even longer, I’ve been the victim of various spam engines or viruses sending out massive quantities of email on behalf of me. If you’ve never had this happen it is a serious problem. Imagine how much email a spammer sends, then imagine ALL the bounced emails coming into your inbox. I thought I knew enough about procmail and mail filtering server side to be able to stop this from getting out of hand but my efforts have failed. Last week I was out of the office at Tech Ed and each time I checked my email via my phone, I would get 500 new emails. Have you ever tried deleting 500 emails from a phone? Or even from SquirrelMail? It is extremely painful. What is email spoofing? Email spoofing is something that can be fun if you want to send emails internally at the office, but when a spammer sends an email on your behalf and then sends millions, not so fun. In order to spoof the email the spammer picks an email address say… “spammerssuckdonkeyeggs@spammers.suck.com“. He sets this email as the “Return-Path:” header in the email. The return path header as outlined in RFC 2821 is a special type of header that defines where bounced emails go if they can’t be delivered. That’s right, anyone can put anything in the return-path header they want. What is SPF? SPF stands for “Sender Policy Framework”. SPF allows system administrator’s to modify their DNS zone records and add a special rule which outlines where email should originate from. Think of it like a reverse lookup for emails. When mail servers receive an email from someone they see that the email is coming from somedomain.com. The receiving mail server then queries back to somedomain.com’s DNS server to make sure the mail server sending the email to the receiving mail server is authorized to do so and that things match up. If not, the email get’s rejected. Note: If there is no SPF record in the DNS, the mail goes through. For more information on how SPF works, visit http://new.openspf.org/Introduction So far, so good After adding the following rule to my DNS zone things stopped coming in. It has only been a few hours since I added this to the zone file, but I would have received at least 30-50 bounced emails within that time frame normally. zorka.com. IN TXT “v=spf1 a mx mx:mail.zorka.com ~all” So far so good it seems. Either the spammers are taking a break or SPF is working. Has anyone else has tried this? How have your results been?

Channel 9 has been around awhile and is one of the things I spend time in the evening watching if there are new videos.  There’s always good content on channel 9 and its great to hear the people that built a lot of the technology we use talk about it.  Channel 9 is where they interview developers at Microsoft on how things were written or work.  Channel 10 is a new site built upon Asp.Net 2.0, SQL Server 2005 and Ajax.  The site’s mission is to provide content for the other side, the people that are using the technology.  There are lots of cool features in the site.  The team spent a lot of time building some very thought provoking UI into the site.  Watch the video on Channel 9 about how the site was built if you are curious.  Anyway, one of their features is you can put their video content inside of your blog.  I thought I would try it and see how it went but I can’t get it to work.  It seems my blogging software strips it out.  Cool idea though.

You can check out the new site  launch at http://on10.net .