May, 18, 2005 archives

movalog is a blog about moveable type that has an online store that is apparently just dynamically-generated using the amazon api. this makes it really obnoxious when it shows up in google and a9 searches. just like the zillions of other useless amazon affiliates and shopping comparison sites out there.

according to the definition of search engine spam from tim mayer of yahoo, what movalog is doing is clearly search engine spam. it is redundant with amazon’s own pages that provide exactly the same information.

it is this sort of nonsense that makes it damn near impossible to find actual product reviews with a general-purpose search engine.

the thing i was researching before getting sidetracked on search engine spam was a usb headset to use with skype and perhaps the work voip system. the plantronics dsp-100 seems like the most likely candidate right now.

brandon hutchinson notes how to fix x11 forwarding errors with ssh, and this made things work better for me now that i’ve upgraded to tiger.

dashboard is pretty neat, but it is a pretty raw development environment. i banged together a semi-functional blo.gs widget, and one thing that becomes clear very quickly is that apple should have packaged together a bunch of common stuff into an includable library.

a few points of frustration: grabbing values out of xml (rss in this case) using the dom is annoyingly verbose, the javascript date object is surprisingly limited (and apple didn’t have the smarts to make it easy to get localized date strings), and doing flexible layouts involves lots of tedious hand-coding.

those are just initial impressions, though. it’s possible that it is all much easier once you’ve got a widget or three under your belt.