When I talk about websites with my local clients, the discussion often turns to “most desired response” or MDR. I ask how they’d like to be contacted by a site visitor which usually involves two options, telephone or email. Typically it’s a 50/50 split as I’m dealing with small local business that aren’t very tech savvy.

What struck me when I read the comments about Twitter by Google CEO Eric Schmidt was that I no longer look to email as my most desired response. When I was building the new theme for this blog, I realized that I was more interested in funneling people to my Twitter, RSS, and Facebook, feeds/profiles than I was to email. In fact, in you look at the footer you’ll see ‘email’ is there, but it leads to a contact page where I spell out a few other ways of contacting me in addition to email (and I’m thinking of dropping my actual address and putting in a contact form).

Don’t get me wrong, I still rely on email for communication with 100% of my clients and send at least a dozen emails each day. However on this site, email is the last way I’d like to make a new social connection. I’d much rather engage new people on these more modern, more public mediums which unlike email, allow me to communicate with all my connections in a simple, reliable and unobtrusive way.

When things get serious they always end up back in email, but services like Twitter allow you to begin a public, casual social relationship with almost anyone.

I don’t think this issue is about SPAM, I think it’s about the type of social connection, and the way in which email is seen as a mostly private, serious-business communication tool. Much the same way that MySpace, Twitter and Facebook evolved the concept of ‘blogging’, these same services are affecting email in a way that makes it look like a long form format.

This does not mean the MDR on COLEwebdev is Twitter. In fact it’s still email and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. Now if someone wants to casually start following me, RSS and Twitter step in.

Eric Schmidt comparing Twitter to email makes him seem like a dinosaur. However he’s just trying to mold his response like Bill Gates would, so high up in the clouds that he’s comparing small technology shifts to decades old technology which is supposed to make him seem above small trivial issues that Twitter presents. It doesn’t work for Eric just like it never worked for Bill.

Note: This is a now ancient (and rambling) article I had started and never finished making it almost silly to publish now. Although when I picked it back up to edit and publish today I couldn’t let it go to waste.

I stumbled across the ALARMd.com Internet Alarm Clock a few months back, possibly via del.icio.us or Stumble Upon. I think the idea is great, and very well executed. With a large red font, and all black backdrop, the Internet Alarm clock is the perfect web based clock application I have found. The “Naken” mode makes it even better, eliminating the already minimal options and titles. For people that live with their computer, and try to eliminate all other necessities (like a cheap alarm clock) this clock is perfect.

The coolest feature I saw was the Alarm sound customization (pick an alarm), which allows you to open Pandora in a new window, which for most people with stored cookies should start playing your favorite music right away.

I don’t know if you’ve been to Yahoo! Shopping lately, but it’s a complete disaster of a shopping portal and Yahoo should be ashamed … ASHAMED! of having that atrocity in their mature web portfolio.

First some history …

I happened across Shopping.Yahoo.com not because I was ’shopping’ but rather I was following the story on Woot! about a new “partnership” they rolled out with Y! Shopping (anyone else find it weird that Woot! and Yahoo! both end! with! exclamations?! Jason Toon is hilarious by the way, and his blog announcement of the “selling out” is a good read.\

Getting back to Y! Shopping, if anyone hasn’t seen the home page, it’s a disaster of banner ads, links that look like banner ads, and poorly structured navigation and changing page layouts … it’s that bad.

Here’s a screenshot, see the large version at Flickr.

Here’s a screenshot with my commentary, and the larger version at Flickr.

The Problems as I See Them:

1. The main store navigation looks like a poorly disguised ad placement, more commonly seen on spammy landing pages setup by domain prospectors.
2. There are ads, everywhere. Too many ads and not enough product highlights and shopping tools. Amazon makes Yahoo! Shopping look downright silly.
3. Wasted space. Not only do the ads take up valuable real estate, the spacing is bad and Yahoo uses an entire section to tell me I’m not logged in that could be devoted to … selling? (what a concept)
4. Woot! Their best feature is halfway down this depressing page, and offers the only glimmer of hope (and slim chance that someone still has a pulse) over at Yahoo! Shopping.

Look, I’m sure Yahoo! makes an assload of money from this portal, and probably sells a crap load of ads and makes a tidy profit. But it’s just downright horrible, and they could make a lot more if they’d devote a little attention (and some expensive Stanford PHD brain time) on devising a better shopping experience, and in turn better ROI for their advertisers.

If you manage and edit your own website or run a blog with it’s own domain then you are probably aware of a type of file called the .htaccess file. You may or may not know what this file actually does, or how to create and edit one but fret not, I’m here to help.

Josiah Cole dot com runs a slightly out of date WordPress 2.1 install (the horror I know), and a fairly standard one at that, with a couple select plugins like Askimet and wp-cache to help me possibly survive another Digging. The one item that is not lacking is a complete and robust .htaccess file that sufficiently protects and aids my site in handling traffic and visitors.

This quick tutorial will provide you with an htaccess file that does the following:

1. Protects itself (security)
2. Turns the digital signature off (security)
3. Limits upload size (security)
4. Protects wp-config.php (security)
5. Gives access permission to all visitors with exceptions (security, usability)
6. Specifies custom error documents (usability)
7. Disables directory browsing (security)
8. Redirect old pages to new (optional)
9. Disables image hotlinking (bandwidth)
10. Enables PHP compression (bandwidth)
11. Sets the canonical or “standard” url for your site (seo, usability)

1. Step 1, create a blank .htaccess file. This can be done in Notepad or a comparable simple text editor of your choice (no MS Word does not count although it’s possible). Open Notepad and Click Save, name this file htaccess.txt. If you’re using Windows XP the OS won’t allow you to name a file e .htaccess but don’t worry, you can rename it once it’s been uploaded to your server (no idea how Linux, Vista or OSX handle this).

2. Add content to htaccess.txt. Now that you have htaccess.txt saved, you can start to edit the file and use it to better manage your site without relying on complex PHP or bloated JavaScript code.

The example htaccess file below is one that can be used for a website like this one (running WordPress and nothing else), simply un-comment the sections you’d like to use by removing the # at the beginning of the line and copy+paste the contents into your own .htaccess file.

3. Upload htaccess.txt. Once you’ve created your master piece of an .htaccess file upload the htaccess.txt file to your web server via ftp (in ASCII mode) and rename the file to .htaccess. Once it’s been renamed change the file permissions of the .htaccess file to 644 to further protect it from malicious hacker types.

4. Test, Test, Test. Go to your site, is it still up? Good, now check to see if you can access files you protected, or try and see a directory listing. Not all variables are testable but do your best to make sure your file is working.

Lastly Josiah Cole dot com is now running a variation of the htaccess file above with no hotlink protection (I only host a couple images) and no redirects or custom errors docs (yet). No problems *yet* but I’m still running tests to make sure there are no problems. Maybe my visitors can help me do this by commenting? If I like it I’ll add your suggestion to the article and give you some URL lovin’.

Note: If you are already using a custom permalink structure to format page names, you’ll need to keep that code in the htaccess file in order for that to continue functioning. To see your htaccess file in WordPress click Manage>Files>.htaccess (for rewrite rules).