Being Mark Cohen

Just been scanning my rss feeds, and observing how many of the blogs I follow rehash the same stories and usually all link to the original story. Obviously each blogger sees the things they link to as in that blog’s particular area of focus. Wouldn’t it be interesting though, to be able to hit blogs with some form of power-crawler that could actually work out the velocity of the appearance of links to a particular story across all the sites where the story features.

The link to “the world’s best Blonde Joke” on Scoble’s Blog would definitely be the sort of linking that would derail a newsworthiness analyser, but aside from prank posts I think the output could really be useful. A person’s blog reading habits could be analysed by their rss reader. This could then look at the blogs by their neighbourhoods, similar to the way Google places sites in neighbourhoods. The reader could then suggest other articles to read, based on the highest link velocities in each of the relevant neighborhoods.

So, who wants to write another web-based rss reader?

An article ran in The Age today, saying “AUSTRALIA’S intake of skilled migrants with information technology expertise should be reduced to improve the prospects of local IT graduates who are struggling to find jobs, says an immigration analyst.”

The xenophobe who calls himself an immigration analyst goes on to say “… the Australian Computer Society, which accredits the IT qualifications of applicants for permanent residency, should introduce tougher English tests and insist that overseas students spend three years studying IT in Australia, rather than two.”

I don’t know, but this smells of a touch of racism to me, a little bit reminiscent of the old white Australia Policy where immigrants had to be able to read a page in any European language the official chose. I know asking for english fluency is a far cry from that but there are two things to consider here: firstly, I would assume it is the right of an employer to choose suitable candidates, and I am sure that there are many employers who happen to not speak english or who are immigrants and are happy to give immigrants a chance. I know this, I’m an immigrant and someone cut me some slack and gave me my first job. Secondly, people have been known to learn English after immigrating. Often rapidly.

So in celebration of the fine tradition we have of importing IT talent from around the globe, I’ve made a T shirt especially for the occasion. And you could get one just in time for Australia day too And they have marked the black shirts as Beta, so I’m sure there will be a free Service Pack and maybe even a Community Preview too. LOL

I’ve been getting increasingly perplexed trying to resolve an issue we’ve experienced with a poor-quality menu control we were using at work. The European vendors of the asp.net menu control have not been able to resolve the issue we have with their menu control. Astonishingly enough they sell some very good controls. Only I think they are not particularly good at developing controls for highly scalable applications. Even their corporate site is slow.

I found a good solution though, which is looking like a real winner.

After they indicated that they would not be able to deliver a fixed product by the delivery date they had previously suggested, I decided to bite the bullet and just write a control of my own. I spent a bit of time googling and looking at some great pieces of workmanship. If you’re game to spend money and are not locked in by the need for a royalty free redistributable then check out ComponentArt’s Ajax menu control. Wow.

I never had that luxury and I also wanted a menu that would work well for SEO so in the end I settled on this fantastic piece of work: The Simple Website Menu by Brother Cake. This script is good clean css with javascript for the lesser web browsers, and it is incredibly lightweight. The menu is list-based and so if you turn off styles in your browser you will see a tree of nested lists. Plus it’s free and released under one of the GPLs

I wrote an asp.net control that generates the unordered lists for the menu, and modify the css dynamically, when the user changes preferences. This menu reduced a massive intranet page of over 220k to about 50k. That’s going to make a huge difference to page load times for clients in far-away places.

I have a bizarre issue with my gmail. My email address is my first name followed by a dot followed by my last name.

[updated]

Gmail help says that dots are ignored in the username part of a gmail email address.

So fred.basset@gmail will go to the same inbox as fredbasset@gmail.

Now I’m just not sure if they have an account holder with my name without the dot. Not sure how to find that out. Most likely there is a Marc Cohen and his friends and family spell his name wrong.

We’re back in Sydney after what I would really not refer to as a holiday. We went down the coast to a place called Gerringong, which is just past Kiama. I started feeling ill before we even left, by day four there I was in the shellharbour Hospital being tested for meningitis, which included all sorts of fun stuff. Turned out to be viral, and after a week or so, and another trip to the hospital in Sydney, I’m all better now.

This year looks like it’ll be a big one. We have a whole line-up of projects to get out the door for some tier one clients, we have some solutions ready to implement to some of our unresolved product issues from last year, and from tomorrow the whole team is back on site. Silly season is officially over.

Plans for this year include implementing a wiki rendering engine for our CMS, implementing a lightweight “blog” featureset, performance-tuning inlcuding rolling out a new menu control I wrote over Dec / Jan, and looking into next-generation content management. Paraphrasing a player on the Register, We are still on Web 1.5 RC2, we need to upgrade to web 2.0.