aaron

How to Let Google Power OpenSearch on Your Website

OpenSearch is a collection of simple formats for the sharing of search results. One of the formats allows your browser to add your site to its list of search engines, which Firefox displays in the top right corner, and Chrome uses in the address bar. Adding a small link and XML document allows your site to be added to a browser. Many CMSs such as MediaWiki already support this natively so you might...

aaron

Enabling SSH on the Seagate BlackArmor NAS 220

I recently acquired a 6 TB Seagate NAS drive which I am using for nightly backups of my servers, as well as snapshots of several Dropbox accounts. While the web interface on the device isn’t too bad, I wanted a little more control over it, as well as the ability to monitor the device’s health with some custom munin graphs. Here’s how to enable SSH without wiping the drive and installing...

aaron

Writing contracts is like programming

Writing contracts feels a little bit like programming. There is an expected syntax and structure, there are certain key words that have special meaning (i.e. functions, keywords), and removing certain clauses make the entire contract invalid (i.e. runtime error). However, contracts are executed over a much longer timeline.

aaron

Analyzing the iPhone Location Log File

Today at Where 2.0, two data scientists announced a discovery that iPhones are recording GPS positions into a hidden file on the device. I’ll save a summary for an update of this post, but go read the original article for now. I downloaded the logs from Amber Case‘s iPhone, and have been looking through them to see what’s there. Turns out it’s a lot more than just the cell tower...

aaron

Soft Signup: Lower the barrier to entry

Nobody wants to be presented with a signup form when trying out a new web service. Even though in recent years many websites have trimmed down their signup forms to make them easier to complete, I think we can do better. A typical signup form these days consists of asking for your email address and creating a password. Some will also request you create a username, or ask for your real name. People will...

aaron

Shortlink Design for Syndicating to Twitter

Tantek Çelik has been using his Falcon project to create short-form and long-form content on his site, and syndicate it out to Twitter. Falcon is a personal publishing (tweeting, blogging, realtime syndicating) web application created in the true spirit of the Indie Web. When syndicating content to other sites, a good practice is to include a link back to the original content. This has the effect of...

aaron

URL Shortener as a Search Interface

cyborganthropology.com is quickly becoming the default online resource for everything relating to Cyborg Anthropology. With over 800 articles and growing daily, it’s possible to find nearly anything you can think of. We recently registered the domain “anth.ro” to use as a URL shortener to articles on cyborganthropology.com. I suggested creating a business card such as this, which would...