dekay.org

Reading this article about a failing hard drive as well as this note Ⅰ realized that it would be pretty neat if Ⅰ had an available backup solution off-site (like somewhere on the net) for free – just to store really essential files/folders, maybe a total of 100 MB. There would be the possibility of .mac (which is quite easy and useful but not free); then there is my storage at GMX – accessible via WebDAV, but horribly slow; my webhoster (with too few space), and then there is gmail – free, 2 GB space, searchable, accessible from anywhere with a web connection. And happily all you ever need to store stuff is just a fast connection to your webserver. And a script that does the job for you – maybe with a Cocoa-GUI where you can drag & drop certain files & folders – and whoopie, they get sent to your backup gmail address daily. You can always delete stuff from gmail if necessary – or just create another backup account!.

Has anyone seen this little script/tool for OSX yet?

Tipsy Tipsy Tumble Turn is a new dancesport blog by Liz (see sidebar). Ⅰ hope she finds enough time to blog about her dancing

Dr Dave’s Referrer Karma is about the most useful anti-referrer spam tool Ⅰ have seen so far. No more fiddling with .htaccess, no more redirecting spammers to their own pages. This simple php script keeps blacklists and whitelists, bans spammers when they are hitting your page too often, it also checks the reffererring URL for some indication of your site’s URL or even if it exists. For me it has reduced the referrer Spam Ⅰ am getting to almost nothing at all – down from up to hundreds per day.

If you are looking for one simple solution – this is it. You only need MySQL as well as PHP – and off you go. Wrongfully detected „real surfers“ are not blocked out but just sent to a page where they are told about the problem and then can access the site after a mouseclick.

Rating: 10⁄10.

My last post spawned some ideas for a better, much more integrated addressbook:

1. Grouping of Contacts: Make a better interface, less a browser but more iconish, where you can drag people around, „duplicate group memberships“, show group overlaps, show which groups a contact belongs to; make it easy to change, add or move. Make it not too easy to accidentally delete a contact completely.

2. Communication When Ⅰ open the addressbook there are many reasons why Ⅰ do it – but the most important one is: communication: either Ⅰ want to call someone, send them a letter or… no more. Possible. But why stop there, why stop at just displaying that kind of info? Make a button or some other interactive way to communicate with people – like press the „communicate“ button and a list of options comes up: any instant messaging capabilities that are available – like:

   • is that person online in AIM, ICQ, Skype? Show those options!
   • do you have an email address of that person? Show a button to send an email!
   • do you have a mobile number and some way to send SMS? Show a button to do so! This requires some forms of plugin technology which should not be a problem with Cocoa and a well documented bundle interface/API. Just let the communication service providers write the plugins! One could even extend that feature even more: Ⅰ often want to send a file to someone… why not add the ability to drag a file to a contact and then get some options on how to transfer that file – if the contact is online and has some messenger service enabled – send it that way. If there is an email address that can receive a file this big – send it that way. And if there is a too big file or no way – mount that persons server (afp, smb or ftp… even the drop box on any mounted computer or a password protected folder on a .mac account!) or burn a CD. All possibilities start at that one place: drag the file to the contact! Make it really easy and obvious!

3. Integrate Webservices

   • does the contact have a blog → show some excerpts from the RSS feed
   • homepage?
   • a del.icio.us account? (via RSS)
   • flickr?
   • add friendster
   • add white pages – to „auto-complete“ contact info

4. Addressbook and/or contact sharing. Just like iTunes, iCal sharing or whatever you like.

5. MacOSX technologies are great: add the ability to link any item on the computer to a contact. Like a folder that contains project files related to that contact; like tasks and appointments/calendar events that are related to that contact. We are living in a world of networks, of data that is connected. Let us make these connections on the Mac, too! Make it really simple to create links, to „follow the threads of the network“. Show spotlight’s power by giving access to anything related to a contact right there in the addressbook! Emails, Files received, chat logs, web pages/articles, Notes/Agendas…

6. Make it easy to publish your own data. Auto-update contact info from RSS feeds, attached VCF files.

7. Publish an RSS feed for any changes to addressbook data! Make it easy to create RSS feeds with certain criteria – completely customizable.

8. Make the whole system extensible – similar to spotlight where every developer can open their data to indexing. Enable other developers to provide contact related info/data/services – see above for some examples. Ⅰ can only start dreaming of possibilities: Subethaedit, Delicious Library, all Chat apps, P2P, Photo/Movie sharing, Genealogy, Friendster, multiple recommendation systems, dating websites. Create or use a public, extensible open source protocol for interoperability

9. Integrate all iApps into this feature! Make it easy to leverage the power of this interconnectivity and of relations between data on your mac!

10. Access the data of users on the network, on the current machine. Use rendezvous and any directory services that are there to provide „hints of data“.

11. Make it easy to add pictures to yoir contacts, use any iSights that are there to scan business cards as well as make pictures. Capture pics of video chats ort from mobile phones.

12. Any more ideas? Who is going to do it?

Ⅰ just found Jim Roepcke’s notes on the 2003 O’reilly conference keynote by Tim O’Reilly – and even though it is hard to actually just read someone’s notes – one thing that strikes me as especially interesting is Tim’s great analysis of apple’s iApps and their problems. Ⅰ have written a rant about what Ⅰ do not like about the current iPhoto – but Tim’s rant was almost two years before that – and his visions are true today – if not even more so.

And (this is quite annyoing) – his points are still valid and most of his criticism is something Ⅰ totally agree with. Yes.

Now where is the developer who vamps up OSX’s address book with some integration of friendster, del.icio.us, etc.? The data is there, on an OS level – all other apps have acces to it! There are soo many things one could do… Ⅰ wish someone would give me enough money for half a year to live on – Ⅰ would code it. And much more.