(I couldn’t resist, while I am on a roll I thought I’d post again….)
It would appear, and rightly so, that Google has remembered its informal corporate motto, “Don’t be evil.” – well with a little help from the blogspere at least. It seems that someone’s 20% turned into helping us all with tips (read prime advertising) at the top of certain search results on Google. Specifically targeting searches for software or services that Google has a competing product they handily suggested their software above the number 1 search result.
I am not too convinced about how long I am gonna carry on doing this but I am finding PhishTank mildly addictive! PhishTank is the new website that is trying to fight back as a community against unscrupulous sites that are involved in phishing.
PhishTank is a collaborative clearing house for data and information about phishing on the Internet. Also, PhishTank provides an open API for developers and researchers to integrate anti-phishing data into their applications at no charge.
What will be very interesting to see will be how the community grows and how their API is utilized. A wordpress plugin anyone?
Crazy Egg has finally opened its doors to the public after what feels like a long closed beta session. I had the good fortune to unofficially test the product probably 3 or 4 months back now and was impressed by service as a whole though, at the time, performance was less than real time. For those that don’t know, Crazy Egg offers some great usability testing of your site, allowing you to see how people react to different layouts and styles for example. By monitoring people’s interactions with your site, it logs statistics on hotspots that can be displayed on great looking heat maps helping you to analise the usage of your site. Previously this sort of testing and monitoring would consume large resources or be sourced out to independent usablilty specialists but now can be implemented very quickly and easily by dropping in some JavaScript into your (x)html.
Box.net has temporarily closed their doors for a feature update and bug fix, much to my inconvenience!! Just kidding, though I will find it helpful if they release some of the features they have talked about here. The ability to edit documents online with the ‘web-based document editor’ will come in very handy indeed…. here’s hoping!
Update: It appears it was a mistake and traffic was routed to a maintenance page by mistake.
Shuttle, the much needed ‘beautification of the WordPress Administration Panel’, is slowly becoming a reality it seems though the most movement appears to be unofficially from Mark over at the Sidejob. As Khaled, one of the original designers, highlights, ‘ WordPress is a community EFFORT.‘ and Mark seems to be doing a great job of implementing it on his own install.
While still a long way from finished, you can keep track on Marks blog of his interpretation of what will become the official dashboard of Wordpress in the future. Kudos for his initiative who knows he may just be involved in implementing this long overdue overhaul of the admin panel.
