But I don’t really like that solution.

I think I might change my approach and make a new commenting policy rule. A quite simple one at that: Every comment that uses some kind of product name as their “name” will be deleted (also those who were made before today), no questions asked, and I re-establish the DoFollow plugin.

I can always delete the links that lead to sites I don’t want to support afterwards, although I’d of course need to introduce an explicit disclaimer for that as well. (Luckily, my current disclaimer reads “I reserve the right to delete spam as I see fit, even if it’s handcrafted”, so I won’t break any promises if I delete things that are spammier than I like retroactively).

On the other hand, I really love your contributions, and I really don’t want to make contributing with comments harder than it apparently already is…

What do you think? How do you handle that kind of thing in your own blog(s)?

First things first: WordPress themes are GPL, they have to be redistributable under the GNU General Public License. Necessarily, the PHP code (although not the CSS or image elements of a theme) has to be, since it is based on WordPress’ GPL code, GPL. Legal wording:

The PHP elements, taken together, are clearly derivative of WordPress code. The template is loaded via the include() function. Its contents are combined with the WordPress code in memory to be processed by PHP along with (and completely indistinguishable from) the rest of WordPress. The PHP code consists largely of calls to WordPress functions and sparse, minimal logic to control which WordPress functions are accessed and how many times they will be called. They are derivative of WordPress because every part of them is determined by the content of the WordPress functions they call. As works of authorship, they are designed only to be combined with WordPress into a larger work.

Speaking of our specific case of Thesis again, the logic is probably less sparse than in your everyday theme, but every other word except “sparse” fully holds, so I guess it’s not that exceptional in this regard. Or can anybody with legal training assist me, am I wrong there?

The guys at Thesis now go and forbid owners of Thesis to remove the backlink to the Thesis site. I appreciate that such a backlink is a great marketing and SEO measure, but I don’t see the legal grounds for such a thing really. They can certainly sell push-style upgrades, and the images they provide with the theme, and of course their support and forums. But the theme itself seems to be necessarily open source, so the Thesis pricing model seems to need re-evaluation.

Edit 2009-07-19 16:20: Just do clarify, unless I am mistaken they can certainly ask money from people for the theme – there are no limits for monetizing distribution in the GPL. However, they don’t seem to be allowed to restrict people’s rights to redistribute and alter the theme.

Particularly in the Swiss blogosphere, with the recent Thesis craze, I think this is fairly important information. What do you think? Or did I misunderstand some legal background?

Of course they can! Like 20min.ch:

NaN Votes

NaN votes, great stuff Too bad it’s fixed already.

So, he made a blog. From his post about what self-defense actually is:

Self-defense is the ability to come out of violent situations alive and if possible unhurt and with all of your possessions. For most persons, self-defense is learning how to beat someone up (or use any other suitable technique like throws, locks,…). This is the stuff you will learn in most martial-arts or self-defense classes. Unfortunately this is only a part of the whole self-defense business.

Learn more on Ste’s self-defense Blog!

Bye Slug.ch

As a rather important sidenote: There I was, thinking I’d have done a great service for Ste when I told him that the best thing he could do to promote his shiny new blog was sign it up for all those blog directories (link German) we have in Switzerland. I guess the advice wasn’t all bad (despite the fact that this blog here isn’t really old either), after all I do get some visits from those as well…

But today, I looked at one of them, Slug.ch, and was greeted with a short “bye” message. Well, uhm … bye, I guess I wonder if we’ll ever find out what it was that made Benny Rüegg stop?

BloggingTom doesn’t know much more (link German), but he has plenty of nice links for web history nuts (like me), and way more of them can be found at tou.ch.

Update 08-09-19 13:01: Meh, Slug.ch is back online. I agree with BloggingTom when he writes:

Hey, Benny, immer dieses Hin und Her mit Slug. Da kommt man ja kaum noch hinterher!

Unlike him though, I do think that such aggregators do serve an important function in the blogosphere: They allow you to find blogs you might like, they allow new bloggers to introduce their blog to a wider audience, and they allow searches through a particular subset of the global blogosphere.

All of those are important functionalities that hold us all together – so if Slug is not it, because of all those “sell-keep” and “stop-restart” inconsistencies, it’d have to be something else. I guess the fact that nothing else is as technically refined as Slug is then also the reason for the big backlash the too short “bye” message provoked.

I’ll take this opportunity to list all the plugins I found useful in my quest for a highly useable and convenient blogging experience for my readers, search engines, and me.

• Akismet – utterly awesome anti-spam plugin
• All in one SEO pack – for things like meta tags, rewriting titles, specifying which archives robots should search
• Breadcrumb NavXT – because I like breadcrumbs
• Google XML Sitemaps – more candy for search engines
• Lightbox 2 – because lightboxes look nice
• Admin Drop Down Menu – makes life easier for me when doing admin stuff
• Robots Meta – to avoid indexing of unnecessary stuff
• Search Unleashed – because it sucks less (still not perfect though)
• SEO Friendly Images – not sure if that’d still be necessary, but whatever, alt and title are good
• Simple Tags – easier tagging, nice tag cloud
• StatPress – you got me, I’m tracking you…
• Subscribe To Comments – nobody’s using this yet
• WP-PostRatings – those little stars below the posts removed
  
• WP-Syntax – syntax highlighting for my coding posts, really handy
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – aah, more gadgets

That’s it, my extensive collection (I removed the Ajax edit one, it slowed down the site horribly)

Update 08-09-10 12:00: I couldn’t stand having invalid CSS, so I changed some plugin CSS code and adapted the theme a bit further as well. The bad news: Rounded corners for image frames are gone. The good news:

Hooray

Chrome Phone Home

Maybe you heard (I hear it was even on TV?) that Chrome loves E.T. and likes to phone home. Yes, it does, but not that much more so than other browsers: Google’s Matt Cutts has the details. (Yes, I added that link to the other post later on as well).

Selection mine, he has a few more points:

If you’re just surfing around the web and clicking on links, that information does not go to google.com.

If you are typing a search or url in the address bar, Google Chrome will talk to the current search service to try to offer useful query/url suggestions.

Google Chrome checks for automatic updates every 25 hours.

Every 30 minutes, Google Chrome downloads a list of 32-bit url hashes of urls thought to be dangerous (malware or phishing).

Essentially, the same as every other browser. And less than IE, who sends URLs to Microsoft for Malware checks if you opt in (and doesn’t have a malware filter if you don’t). Their Internet Explorer Privacy Statement reads:

If you opt in, addresses not on the legitimate list will be sent to Microsoft and checked against a frequently updated list of websites that have been reported to Microsoft as phishing, suspicious, or legitimate websites.

Terms of Use

Another outcry in the community (details here at TapTheHive) was about Google’s terms of use, in particular the lengthy part 11 which allowed Google to use all data anybody ever entered in Chrome, basically. They’re not the first ones with evil TOS, but the ones that were watched best I guess, with the paranoia that I partially share and all. They changed it, it now reads:

11. Content license from you

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.

The German version didn’t change yet, but the English version works retroactively for people who accepted the old one as well.

More, Way More

I guess everybody wants to see more objective data as to whether Chrome’s speed really is better than that of Firefox (let’s not talk about IE). It is, slightly: Speed tests! But the Firefox team is working on a faster JS engine.

Then, a funny little exploit to crash all of Chrome’s tabs (via der-link.de).

And finally, interoperability: Get the best of Chrome’s features in Firefox via, who’d have thought, plugins (I didn’t know a few of those). And, associative art with the Chrome logo – is there a hidden message somewhere (via Basic Thinking)?

Update 08-09-12 10:59: Yesterday’s news (well, actually, from the 8th), Google now anonymizes the 2% of traffic they log from Google Suggest after only 24 hours. And since this addition will send another trackback to the Google Blog, hello in advance

haslo.ch in Chrome

Google Chrome is what must be the most written-about browser, ever – it’s hard not to write about it in your blog, peer pressure and all. Announced just Monday, and in blogs and big media alike from the moment it started.

It is special though, admittedly, has several unique approaches that make checking it out definitely worthwhile:

• Each tab is a process, instead of each tab or even the whole browser being a thread – meaning, if one tab crashes, the browser doesn’t, and garbage collection when closing tabs is more thorough as well
• Popups are not intrusive, “contained” within the tab until the user actually drags them out
• The JavaScript VM is actually meant for web applications and not tiny scripts, with proper garbage collection and JIT compilation (getting JS closer to Java by the way, while still being distinctly a unique language)
• It’s developed with security in mind from the ground up, including sandboxes for browser tasks and built-in malware scans
• It’s open source! Meaning, anybody can extend it, anybody can use the research Google put into it, and anybody can look at what the browser does under the hood (except Microsoft that is, as they certainly won’t go OS with their IE any time soon)
• With WebKit, it’s powered by a proven, standards compliant and fast rendering engine
• It was introduced with a comic book!

But there are also a few things speaking against Chrome:

• It’s a great competitor not only to the IE, but to Firefox (although their CEO’s reaction was pretty positive, via Basic Thinking in German), Safari and Opera: Tech-savvy people care what browser they use, non-tech-savvy people just use “the internet”, and consequently many tech-savvy people don’t use IE and will try Chrome
• It’s yet another tool for Google to collect more data to turn into profit (link German); the anti-phishing feature sends all your URLs to Google (link German – just like the IE phishing filter by the way), and is opt-out instead of opt-in. Edit: This was actually wrong, not every URL is sent to Google, instead the browser regularly downloads hash lists and then locally compares URLs to those lists. However, for the smart search, everything you type is sent to your search engine, which is by default Google.
• Being new, the browser still lacks the plugin support Firefox has (more on this below)

So, does the positive outweigh the negative? And even more important: Is the browser easy to use, fast and as standards compliant as it was promised to be?

User Experience

The browser really is fast! JavaScript is fast. Page loading is fast. Loading the browser in the first place is fast. Switching tabs (even with processing-intensive tasks) is fast. Kicking tabs is fast.

The speed advantage really is objectively measurable too – in this JavaScript speed test here, my computer lets Chrome rattle through in 200 ms. My Firefox 3 takes around 350 ms (still very fast), while the IE is sitting at over 2500 ms.

The whole browser is very simple and easy to use, with little to no configuration required (or possible) – which has downsides for both users who aren’t happy with the defaults, and for people like me who like fiddling with settings to personalize stuff.

I’m less happy with the browser trying to fill stuff everywhere, whether he knows the site or not. It leads to all kinds of odd behaviour, like the first time I’m trying to log into MyDoodle, the user name shows as “1979″.

All this leads to an odd situation: The browser is a black box, more so than any other, despite being open source. I really have no clue what the browser is doing there when it tries to think for me. I don’t like that.

Anyway, the simplicity and ease of use do work towards making the browser also a competitor to the Internet Explorer, not only geek browsers: It’s easy to install, possible to install (and uninstall) per user without admin rights, doesn’t ask many questions and just works right out of the box. So many non-geek users will find this a viable alternative to the behemoth IE.

Plugins

The plugin thing is a big one for me: I’m using about 20 Firefox plugins right now. Most prominent and essential among them are NoScript and AdBlock Plus, surfing without them is horrible. Of course CustomizeGoogle is a favourite as well.

There’s way more: StumbleUpon and TwitterBar are used very often, too (although I try to cut down on StumbleUpon, it’s horrible – don’t install it if you value your sleep and free time). Developing web applications or even mere websites without the Web Developer Toolbar is unthinkable.

While I’m at it, I’ll also plug the great Download Statusbar, DradDropUpload for Gmail, and Pagerank Status. And of course there’s Gears, which is built into Chrome from the start.

While I’m sure that eventually, plugin support for Chrome will be great (the framework is in place and thought-through after all), right now due to being new the browser simply lacks features that I like and I’m used to.

Conclusion

Well … it’s another new browser. Not bad, very fast, and with several innovative approaches that will revolutionize browsers no matter if Chrome will be successful or not.

As for myself, I’ll keep using Firefox for now. The combination of little added value, no added geek value (Firefox is open source too), and actual missing features make it less than tempting to switch main browser.

(And I may be starting to get a tiny bit paranoid when it comes to Google’s data collection frenzy.)

Edit and post aftermath: The first public Chrome security hole, and I didn’t even realize Google doesn’t support RSS discovery (link German, a feature of Firefox that I love). Finally, Google’s answer to the conspiracy theorists (via tou.ch).

And gee that trackback to the Google blog brought traffic – hi folks

The Problem

A better title for the post would maybe be “Circumventing Google’s Data Collection”.

For one – yes, Google does collect data. It is possible to use alternate search engines, however to date I haven’t found one that comes near Google’s quality and ease of use, nor have I found an Email service (or program I could install on my server) that comes anywhere near close Gmail’s utility. BloggingTom did collect some alternatives some time ago.

The Solution

Another alternative is using Firefox (which you should anyway, but so far most of my visitors do) and profiting from the various available plugins that make circumventing Google’s data collection a breeze. For example, GOOLASH, or the in my opinion much better Customize Google (a better-looking description) that beyond mere cookie anonymization also has a plethora of other options.

Finally, another point in that post was the ubiquity of AdSense and Google Analytics. The easy way out there is NoScript, particularly when coupled with AdBlock Plus. So much for JavaScript-implanted WebBacons.

So in conclusion: Yes, the empire has arrived. But even if we’re profiting from its benefits, succumbing to it or even just watching it grow is not something we have to do.