Well, this is a first for me. This page played a sound clip when I hit it, a guy saying “This column is brought to you by 3M.”

It’s a good thing I have a fast connection, or I would have resented the extra download time. As it is, it was pretty jarring. If this catches on, it is going to create an entirely new form of annoyance on the Internet.

Yecch.

Time to present some more interesting tools for visualizing abstract relationships. I have a feeling tools like this are going to be much more widely used in the future, and much more intuitive. For the time being, a lot of them are way too slow, and somehow too abstruse.

One that is fast and not abstruse — and has a very useful role to fill is They Rule. This lets you explore relationships among movers and shakers. Sort of like a visual Oracle of Bacon, but for the powerful instead of the famous. Very interesting, although not fully fleshed out yet. Requires Flash 5

There are two similar text-corpus mappers, TextArc and Valence (the latter based on Proce55ing). Valence, technically, is more than a text mapper, but that is one of its tricks. For the time being, these two don’t seem to be so much informative as entertaining, but I can see how visual text analysis could be a serious tool in some contexts. Require Java

A confluence of factors have prodded me into spending the whole day nerding about in the Movable Type back-end.

Movable Type recently went through an upgrade. I was reluctant to install the upgrade, since I had made some custom mods to MT, and wasn’t sure how difficult it would be to reproduce these in the new version. But that new version also has some nice bells and whistles that I wanted, like the handy Search field you see here.

Blogger has been having trouble, and that’s where Jenny’s blog lives (or lived, to be precise). I offered to help her move her blog into MT, and after a week of frustration, she accepted this offer. But I figured “I’ll be damned if I import her old blog, just to wind up updating MT at some point in the future.”

So it was time to bite the bullet. I wiped my old installation of MT off the server (keeping the database, thank you) and installed the new one. Went through the process of customizing it again. Imported Jenny’s blog. Rejiggered my templates to work in her blog with her look. Started messing with the new features. Installed John Gruber’s nifty Smarty Pants plugin.

All things considered, the whole process went pretty smoothly, and more quickly than I’d hoped.

Feast your eyes, hungry readers. I’ve blown a few hours that I shouldn’t have redoing this site. The page you see now uses nothing but CSS for layout–no tables, except for the calendar (which is tabular by nature). I still need to re-do some of the static pages, and I may want to rejigger the structure and the appearance a touch, but I’m pretty happy with it. Let me know what you think (if you care).

Although he probably doesn’t know if, I am in debt to Derek Powazek, from whose page I lifted an extremely obscure, but apparently critical modification. Technical details follow:

I had attempted to use XHTML for my page in the past, but was having a hard time getting the date to line up on the left of the main text. There are some positioning tricks you can use to get it to look right, but those depend on knowing the height of the left-hand slab in advance, which is inelegant at the least. In turns out that by switching to HTML 4.01 Transitional, the float: left/float: left trick would work. If anyone can explain why this makes a difference (and if there’s a way to make the trick work in XHTML), I’d love to hear it.

I haven’t seen this yet, but evidently some enterprising scumbags are now inserting spam into people’s blog comments. A detailed discussion of possible techniques to thwart this ensued.

As a side-dish, I discovered a website that will test how well e-mail addresses on web pages have been obscured to foil spambots (this page passed).

I recently started using Net Newswire, an RSS feed reader. What’s that? RSS is a specialized way of presenting information so that it can be digested by machines, rather than people. The little orange XML icon on my site points to an RSS version of my front page. You can think of an RSS reader as a very specialized web browser for presenting specialized files in a streamlined form.

Anyhow, you get an RSS reader, subscribe to “feeds” that interest you, and the reader sucks in that RSS document and presents it as a menu of stories. You can then quickly browse through a lot of article excerpts. It’s changing the way I read stuff online.

There are a bunch of different RSS readers out there, in the form of websites or specialized apps (even for the Newton!), but OS X readers seem disproportionately well represented.

There are also a lot of RSS feeds out there.

Update: The Guardian just published an article on newsfeed readers.

Disturbing Search Requests has introduced lots of people to the sport of analyzing their server logs for strange referrers. Just for grins, I spent a little time analyzing mine today. Following are some of the phrases typed into Google that somehow brought crossroads.net up as a search result, and (more importantly) that the searcher decided to click on.

pajama pocket speed

dildo shoes

masturbation and air stewardess

smell fear?? maybe you have a leaky nose n not able to smell

good towel head bad towel head photo

creampuff adult video

child pantyhose head

makeovers involving piercing

There were also a bunch of requests that were so specific and spot-on it seemed as if the searcher must have already known they’d find that they wanted here.

Many of you have probably heard the now-old chestnut from John Gilmore that “the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

I’m wondering if we won’t see something similar happen with Internet Radio. As far as I can tell, if a webcaster moved operations offshore, he would pretty much be exempt from the recent CARP ruling unless the new host nation passed similar legislation. Right now I’m listening to Radio Liechtenstein, which I suspect has been unaffected. Perhaps some of the other webcasters I have enjoyed but have now been silenced can take advantage of this. There’s an opportunity here.

So I’ve been thinking. Spam is evil. So are e-mail viruses like the klez worm. As are, of course, the people that perpetrate both. Now, one of a spammer’s main burdens is getting the spam out–running software to pump it out. It surprises me a little that no spammer has (yet) used e-mail viruses as a means of distribution. It would make them harder to track down, and alleviate their computing burden (putting it on everyone else, of course, which is the spammer’s stock in trade anyhow).

Of course, viruses are illegal and spam isn’t (yet), which might create a disincentive to use that method. But if it starts happening, well, you read about it here first.

File this one under “web pages that suck.”

I accidentally surfed to the website of a company called IMJ and was blown away at the ingeniously awful navigation bar. It’s flash-based and the items move around under your mouse when you try to click something.