Tech
ESPN Changes Inside Pages
ESPN.com has changed some of the inside pages of their site, as seen here.
It looks pretty good IMO. A nice, clean layout. The biggest difference is the menu move from the left to the top of the page, a la Fox Sports and Sportsline.
When you have a menu with as many options as ESPN.com does, it’s probably a good move. It brings more visibility to the options towards the end, and with the dropdown menus you have more choices available in just one click (by having the submenus available for each sport on all pages).
What’s interesting is that the NHL is #4 on the list when ordering from left to right (same as Sportsline and Fox Sports) - probably a permanent spot (I hope). ESPN generally moved around their menu orders depending on season. I hope they stick with the non-moving menu.
Ordering for those interested:
ESPN - NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL
Sportsline - NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL
Fox Sports - NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL
What a new format like this does, besides being able to give you easier menu access and looking a little better, is that it gives you more screen space to work with for the content itself. They can use the space for anything, including stats, pictures - and possibly some different ad formats.
Besides the articles on the inside, the scores for the NBA are also in the newer format. I’d assume more of the site is expected to change over soon. Perhaps Reemer, ESPN.com employee, can fill us in more.
AP Feeds Are Here
So I found the AP RSS feeds yesterday from the RSS Compendium Blog.
Tom at the Media Drop wonders about the direction of news on the web:
New way: News came out on the wire, and various news sites / outlets picked it up. You, the blogger, have a subscription to the feed, and your reader automatically snags any article that has to do with a topic that you cover on your blog. You click on the link through the RSS feed, are directed to the AP.org website, and go from there. Blogger Y links to the AP.org website, therefore removing “News Station X” from the equation, readership declines for “News Station X” (as much as can be argued that bloggers deliver traffic), and advertising rates do not increase over time.
Now perhaps I’m being overly simplistic, but consider mass-trafficked blogs such as an Instapundit or a website like Drudge Report. I’m sure MyWay.com or Yahoo! News is more than happy to take the 1,000,000 visitors that Drudge sent them for the article about the three headed love child of some government official. But that might not be the case forever, if this continues as it seems like it could.
He could be right, but it’s certainly jumping ahead. The AP currently offers “only” 17 feeds (not much when you think of the number of topics the AP covers), and it’s only in RSS .92. It’s poorly formatted and it seems like they’re not serving the right header response either (it’s being served as text/plain instead of application/rss+xml or text/xml even).
I’m not so sure any website gets much of a benefit by using the AP feeds from the AP itself instead of using a source like Yahoo, who probably gets the same AP story at just about the same time (and has more categories and is RSS2, although not heavily detailed, there’s still more there); unless they simply don’t want to use Yahoo - but there are alternatives for almost every content topic nowadays.
So it’s a start, but I can’t see how it’ll make an impact until they beef it up some more.
Update: Thanks to rexblog I see the AP is already planning on having tons of feeds based on keywords, and a variety of ways to grab them. There we go, impact territory.
Paris Hilton’s Info Put on Public Display
Paris Hilton had her Sidekick hacked not too long ago. Now - all of her Sidekick info has been put on display. I link to Engadget because that’s where I first read about it, and I’m pretty sure people will keep putting mirrors up for you in the comments section.
FirstAdopter.com doesn’t like any of this one bit, letting everyone know it’s just tabloid journalism to spread this around and it’s an invasion of privacy. While we may not be sure that it’s an attack on Paris’ privacy, as she has virtually none in the first place - it is a complete invasion on any of the other celebrities listed in her notes or address book, as much of the contact information has been confirmed by Drudge and others.
FirstAdopter.com is not alone in thinking this is irresponsible, just read Engadget’s comments and look for some by Christopher MacManus.
But many point to something else: her pictures and the quality of the shots. Not the quality of the camera itself, but the pics that were in there. Perhaps these were filtered? Planted? Could this all be another publicity stunt at the expense of others’ privacy? It’s a possibility, no doubt. Do keep in mind that a model’s cell phone pics do have a good chance of looking better than most cell phone pics out there, especially when said model is in some of these pics naked, and making out with another girl. While some point to the flattering pics, others also point out that the website that sells her sex tape is in her notes.
So while Paris’ “invasion of privacy” remains in question, the other celebrities certainly had to turn off their cells or abandon their email accounts. If this was planted, Paris may be forefront and center in the public eye once more, but she’s certainly burnt a few bridges, intentionally or not.
T-Mobile, Sidekick’s carrier, should expect a good number of lawsuits from this. This will probably make many hesitant about keeping online contact lists. I’m sure you’ve gotten a few emails with invitations to those before, and I’m sure many will think twice about responding to them the next time they receive one. Of course, few people out there have so many others wanting to call them to say hello (or prank), but that won’t stop anyone from thinking about the “what ifs”, even if the “if” doesn’t exist.
Oh Those Search Results
Here’s one of the fun ones for the day: go to Yahoo!, search the web for “idiot”.
Scan results, what I’m laughing at comes in at #7 right now.
This message brought to you by the party that’s not aligning with a party, just laughing at the search engines. Thank you.
ForecastFox Weather Extension
From ForecastFox: ForecastFox is an extension that brings international weather from The Weather Chanel® to your Firefox web browser.
I just found it today, and I have to say it’s a nice little add-on for your browser. It is indeed “lightweight” and it’s very customizable. Knowing it’s spyware-free helps a good amount too.
Video Search Semi-wanted
Google’s made some news lately, this time by introducing Google Video, a tv search engine. Google searches TV shows, mostly broadcast shows with closed-captioning text. Neat idea, useful to some I’m sure.
There are other video searches on the net though: here’s one from Yahoo and one from AOL’s Singing Fish.
Yahoo links to the page with the video. Singing Fish links to the main website, and then directly to the video.
While these two may be nice for the average user, I can’t see many webmasters being thrilled about this - especially about Singing Fish, who are basically helping suck the bandwidth (currently, still a huge cost) from websites. This may not matter to some corporate types, or people who are just hosting on free accounts; but the common webmaster running a small to medium-size website with just one popular video clip may eventually suffer if Singing Fish ever became popular.
There are methods to prevent hotlinking, but nothing’s currently foolproof. Luckily, these services are currently all from big corporations and all are properly recognizing robots.txt files. Yahoo, Singing Fish. Believe it or not, not all webmasters are aware of how to properly write a robots.txt file, so some may not discover this solution until after they receive a large bill from their host. I’m sure whenever Google moves away from just TV and starts including web video searches they’ll do the same in regards to a robots.txt file. The problem will come when another not-so-respectable engine emerges, and it’d be foolish to think it won’t happen.
Vaporware Awards
Wired has published the annual Vaporware awards - a countdown of the top products that never came to be over the course of the past year.
Toshiba Satellite Review: First Thoughts
First thoughts: I received my Toshiba Satellite today. I ordered the massive P30 with most options upped. Huge, beautiful screen. The machine itself is a bit larger than I expected, but it’s not quite as heavy as I thought, quieter than I thought and I haven’t had it on long enough to let you know how hot it gets.
New machines are great. They always feel empty, but are fast and waiting to be filled and used. A nice, fresh start, or so I thought…
When I ordered it I called up by phone instead of ordering online for one major reason: I don’t want anything pre-installed on it. So I asked, “can nothing be installed on this machine?” “Nothing?”, the rep replied. “Just the operating system [XP Pro], that’s all I want. Can this be done?”
“I’m not sure, I’ll mark down the request.” Ok, no guarantees here, and I still expected some factory stuff, but not nearly as much as I received.
I understand that they probably have a series of pre-loaded images to slap onto a machine when someone orders it - but I know I’m not the only one who wants “nothing” - why can’t they just have one barebones image ready to use? I don’t care how many sponsors you have, this machine is still too much money to have my desktop pre-loaded with “special offers”.
I spent some time removing a good deal of crap from the machine in hopes that some of my pre-bloated registry can be cleaned up and it can load a bit faster (after I get rid of that annoying “Start Navigation” click-sound).
I then flipped on the wireless connection (has a neat little on/off switch on the side). I searched for my wireless network. 23 wireless networks found, most insecure. Fun stuff, but I logged onto my own and went straight to Internet Explorer for a Windows Update.
Windows Update found five critical updates I needed. Not bad, but from the time I ordered this to when I received it they all didn’t come out. Toshiba should either update their image or update these machines before they send them out. It’s irresponsible nowadays to send out a computer that’s not updated.
So now I use IE to download FireFox. Get a little more secure here.
Out of sheer curiousity I go download SpyBot - Search & Destroy. I update the definitions right away and do a scan.
Besides a cookie or two, it finds 5 reg entries for the DSO Exploit. Nice. I guess that’s another nice pre-loaded special offer for me.
So this got me thinking - what else is on here? Time to head over to Trend Micro for a free virus scan. So you might be thinking - with all those pre-installed programs, one has to be a virus scan, right? Yup, it’s got an evaluation of Norton, which I don’t feel like starting right now. Luckily Trend Micro says it’s virus-free.
So now I’ll continue cleaning this machine. Shame I have to clean a brand new machine that I just paid a good amount for.
A few other thoughts about it:
- I wish they did have a picture of it relative to something else on the website. It’s a big, big machine. I probably would have gotten it anyway, as this is will mainly be used at home, but I wouldn’t have been so shocked when I first saw it.
- The touchpad buttons aren’t responding all too well. Maybe they just need to be broken in, but I’d hate to have to send this thing back. I’ll give it a few days to see how it goes.
- While it’s big, it certainly uses all that room, this thing has almost everything built-in. I guess this would be more of a “desktop replacement” than a laptop. Maybe more like “a desktop that’s easy to move”.
- The sound is very nice on it.
Time to continue setup…
Edit: Yes, I realize formatting is an option, and still one I’m thinking about.
Update: Too much wasted time. Formatting.
No more BitTorrent Links on SuprNova.org
In a follow-up to: MPAA Wants BitTorrent Sites Shut Down, I point you towards The Register, which is carrying a story about SuprNova.org ending, at least in the way we know it now.
Update: the Unofficial SuprNova.org Closure FAQ
Trillian 3.0 Released
Trillian 3.0, a multi-service instant messaging client (works with AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, ICQ, etc…), has been released today. It’s made by Cerulean Studios and is Windows-only.
It appears they’ve already released an updated build after making 3.0 final. They fixed many bugs during beta testing, but things slip, so no biggie. Still, if you don’t want to possibly upgrade soon after installing/upgrading now, you may want to wait a week or so, as I’d most likely suggest with any piece of software that was just released. I plan on installing it on my laptop “fresh” in a few days, looking forward to it. I’ve been a fan of ver 2, and some of the plugins available for it.
If you’re looking for some in-depth nerdy feedback on it, here’s the Trillian 3.0 Released Slashdot thread .