Jordy Blog

Walled Gardens and Open Source

I posted the other day about how universal wishlists are one of the ways the walls of traditional marketing are coming down. In a broader sense, this trend is going on all over the place: the walls of the walled gardens are coming down as big companies realize that customers don’t like to be corralled. Even the quintessentially walled AOL is allowing users to access their Yahoo mail through AOL. They’re still a long way from not sucking, but they’re making steps.

Still remarkably walled: Apple. I understand that uniformity is a big part of their branding, but I predict some of the those walls will come down. Competition from open platforms (like Rockbox for the iPod and Android as an answer to the iPhone SDK) practically ensures it.

And the greatest enemy to walled gardens (at least in the software world): open source. It’s big enough now that even regular folks should start figuring out what it’s all about. Open source is the reason Firefox kicks IE’s butt in terms of useabilty.

Read Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar for an excellent treatise on the way open source is changing the software world.

Photo credit: historyanorak

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Wanted: Firefox Plugin Dump and Reload

OS reinstallation would be much easier with a plugin that could dump your entire list of Firefox plugins and reload them later.

Does anybody know of a plugin like that?  I’ve used screenshots to remember which plugins I’d installed, then reinstalled them one at a time, but that’s a remarkably sucky way to go.

What do you use to avoid having to find and reinstall your favorite plugins one at a time? Anything?

Just When I Thought Google Hated Me

I don’t know about you, but my PR was showing as a 1 forever. Not that it really matters since I’m not really selling anything here, but it was kind of annoying. Why wouldn’t Google satisfy my ego like it does for everyone else? (Actually, it was more like, “I don’t suck that bad.”) The crazy thing is that my blog feed page had been showing up at a PR 3 all along, but that made no sense to me, unless Google was using my Google Analytics traffic to determine which of my pages were important –which is very possible. I get a lot more hits on my feed than my regular pages: probably a combination of having savvy readers and a really ugly pic. :)

Still, I suspected (since my content is so darn good) that if I was not unconsciously breaking some cardinal rules, then Google must be was just toying with me using cached data from different data centers. Since I’ve now instantly jumped from a 1 to a 5 doing hardly anything, I think it was the latter; but there’s no way to be sure –it’s just too much of a black box. Being a little opaque plays to Google advantage since it keeps blackhatters from gaming the system. I like that because it makes search result more relevant. But I’ve determined that Google’s antics are enough to drive anybody crazy if they’re trying to use PageRank as any sort of validation measure. Here at home, I’m still showing up at a 1.

So I wish I’d seen this Future PageRank Tool a little sooner. I don’t know how long my PageRank was limboing in Google purgatory, but my big jump tells me it was a while. The Future PageRank Tool basically queries a whole bunch of Google data centers for you, so it’s like the Google Toolbar, only reliable. Had I used it a few months ago, I may had saved myself some counseling. :)

By the way, for those of you who don’t use the SearchStatus plugin for SEO, it’s basically the Google and Alexa toolbars combined and on steroids. If you’re still wallowing in IE sadness, the SearchStatus plugin is yet another reason to use Firefox (YAR2UFF) . Perhaps I’ll highlight the many merits of SearchStatus in some future post, but for now you’ll just have to take my word for it.

So wanna know if Google loves you after all? Check out Future PageRank. If it turns out that Google really does hate you, then take comfort in the fact that “Future PageRank Tool” is somewhat of a misnomer; it really only sees the present. There’s still hope for you and Google in the future, and even there weren’t, MSN isn’t that bad… Lots of people like butterflies… We call them “lepidopterologists”, or more comonly, “weirdos”.

Custom Search Engines for Firefox

I created a little Firefox search engine add-on for LDSMedia (a company with which I am affiliated with through Provo Labs). (LDSMedia is a search engine site with tons of indexed LDS content –wonderful for doing LDS research, study, lesson preparation, etc.)

Anyway, now you can search LDS content right from your Firefox browser by installing this little plugin. It’s super easy. After following my link, just click on the “LDSMedia” link (note the CAPS), click “OK”, then find the new option in your list of search engines in Firefox.

So now great LDS content is searchable without needing to go to the site first. Cool, right? I use this type of search engine plugin a lot when I want to look up a word on Wikipedia. Why should you make one for your site?  It saves a step, it’s convenient for your readers, and it’s good way to increase exposure for your company –or in this case LDS content in general. I imagine we’ll be creating plugins for each of our search engines.

I thought that creating the plugin would be kind of tricky, but it’s really just a small script, and the Mozilla Search Plugin Documentation is really quite thorough. So I just followed the instructions in the quick start; it was mostly copy-and-paste with a few values changed.

So there you have it, Firefox search plugins for fun and profit!

Spread Firefox Plugin for WordPress

Those of you who are visiting my site in IE will notice my new alert, generated by the Spread Firefox Plugin for WordPress. Quoth the alert: “Internet Explorer sucks. Jordy recommends Firefox (a free open-source alternative) so your browsing will suck no more forever. Click here to learn more or download.”

It’s a little spammy but it gets my point across. Besides, IE users love spam.

I really do love the Firefox browser and wish more people used it. It’ll be fun to track whether my free advertising helps out any. In some future post I’ll mention why I love Firefox instead of pontificating. Until then, just try it out. It’s free and doesn’t suck. :)