Mike Davidson

Great read. I have fond memories of all the tricks we used to amaze visitors and fellow developers. Like using fonts that weren't installed on the visitors' computer using sIFR. https://mikeindustries.com/blog/sifr

This is the best commentary I've seen about the Twitter situation, from someone who worked there for four years at a senior level (but isn't there now so is free to share their thoughts): https://mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2022/04/anchors-away The short version: Twitter's challenges are not hard technology problems, they're hard social and community problems. These are not areas Elon has shown any interest in understanding or respecting.

Edit: I have not seen anything coming from the economic literature about remote work. Sadly economists are focused on bigCorps and VCs who are not remote-friendly. Some of the best articles from remote workers i saw recently: https://a.wholelottanothing.org/2019/08/09/tips-from-16-years-of-worki… https://mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2019/08/a-year-of-working-remo… More links like this here: https://reworkin.com/

Ritarius, Here's a good post, if a bit old, on best ways to grab domains. It's changed a bit as domain sipping is no longer allowed. But it'll give you a good idea of one guy's attempt. http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2005/03/how-to-snatch-an-ex…

I recommend the Non-Designer's Design Book as well. However, there are a few little hacks that seemed to work well for some sites I had to put up. 1. A nice compelling photograph is a little easy on the eye and seems to make up for a lack of content on the front page. 2. Use sIFR (http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/sifr/) to add fantastic typography to your site, and make it more visually appealing. 3. Using wordpress as a frontend for your website (even if you don't have a weblog) allows you to swap in one of thousands of fantastic themes. Whenever a friend asks me to put together a website, I just ask him/her to pick a theme, and host wordpress with static pages. It's a lot more easier to maintain and has more choices as far as visual content is concerned. [edit: formatting]

It actually looks like a nice take on feed aggregation - and sports is a great niche to start with. If you're planning on taking the look & feel further in the direction of print news, check out sIFR and consider making it an interface option. You have a lot to gain by improving the quality of the page. (sIFR is here: http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/sifr/) In your place, I would also play with placement and formatting of certain stories with respect to the others. It would probably require backend work, but determining which of those stories is most important and then displaying them as such would be pretty cool.

See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5856, the most-dup'ed JS bug in bugzilla.mozilla.org. Or this fun blog post from 2004 that blames Apple ("Apple Flunks First Grade Math"): http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2004/08/apple-calculator Finite binary floating point representations do not handle powers of five well. It takes much greater precision (bignums under the hood) to round the last digit properly when converting from binary to decimal (see the David M. Gay and Guy Steele paper and code for dtoa.c). Without hints from the JS hacker (Number.prototype.toFixed) the bad rounding shows up -- try javascript:alert(.1 + .2). bignums (among alternative solutions) fix this bug. bignums also are not necessarily a whole lot slower than doubles, since you can optimize to fixnums for common cases. JITs can do pretty well. It's not as if double is so fast, even with SSE4, that int doesn't still win. But the main bug to fix is the rounding or powers-of-five inexpressiveness issue. It's a real usability problem.

This reminds me of one of my former ESPN co-workers - Mike Davidson[1] - who founded of one of the first community news sites (Newsvine[2]) back in 2006. Newsvine had comments and upvotes and link submissions and posts - it was very reddit-esque except it was focused around the news. The team had to have a way to deal with spammers and trolls. They found the most effective way was to flag a user as a troll on the Newsvine backend. If the troll flag was set to true, Newsvine would add a random 10-60 second delay to every page load for the troll's account. IIRC it solved the problem pretty effectively. 1- http://mikeindustries.com/blog/ 2- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsvine

There are two different privacy issues at play. 1. You consent to being tracked in exchange for services consumed (Google Maps Navigation, for example). 2. You don't consent to it but you're still being tracked. Not only that, the data is then sold to any and every buyer. For example: https://mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2019/07/superhuman-is-spying-o… OP has problems with #2. > Copyright, on the other hand, is much easier. Sure, no reason why privacy can't be too. Here's a simple framework to think about Privacy online: Provide an opt-out for tracking, selling / sharing data etc etc.

Thanks for the reminder about newsvine - I enjoyed that service back in the day. I found a recent blog post by the founder: https://mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2017/10/an-epitaph-for-newsvin…

I will soon be in similar situation and I am truly concerned since godaddy seems to be doing lots of money on putting other people's expired domains on auction! I do not agree they belong to godaddy to make profit of it! It will take up to 41 days if you are lucky and nobody buys that domain. Read here: https://uk.godaddy.com/help/what-happens-after-domain-names-expire-670… --- edit This seems an interesting article too: https://mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2005/03/how-to-snatch-an-expir… As well as this one: http://www.scottphillips.com/2011/01/buying-an-expiring-domain-name/

Because font choice can communicate a lot. Font choice can establish a brand, font choice can create a mood. Web fonts are better than the stuff people did to do this in the old days. Crazy abominations like siFR [1] or rendering out a gif of your text and using that instead of just delivering some ASCII text that screenreaders can deal with? Web fonts aren't perfect, especially on slow connections, but they're the least horrible solution we have for people who would like to control the finer aesthetic details of how their sites look. [1] https://mikeindustries.com/blog/sifr

At Newsvine, we capitalized on an opportunity when John McCain and his campaign people hijacked some graphics from my MySpace design tutorial without permission. He referenced/hotlinked images hosted on my server on his own MySpace page so one day I "hacked" his site by changing the graphics. The prank got us on TechCrunch immediately (no surprise), the local news in Seattle (kind of a surprise), and then featured on The Daily Show (huge f'ing surprise and still a career highlight!). Here is the coverage: TechCrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2007/03/27/john-mccains-myspace-page-hacked/ Local News: http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2007/03/king-5-covers-mccai… The Daily Show: http://www.mikeindustries.com/scratch/dailyshow.mp4

I just did this about a month ago. I'm pretty sure the timeframe outlined in Mike Davidson's post (http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2005/03/how-to-snatch-an-ex… was right on. So, 75 days. If it's helpful, I didn't use any name dropping service. I just waited until the right day, kept checking the whois service (you probably know this, but from the command line, just type in "whois nameyouwant.com"), and then bid on it as soon as I could. It worked out well, and didn't cost anything.

Here is some interesing read about how to snatch an expiring domain : http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2005/03/how-to-snatch-an-ex…

I find this hard to believe. A google answers query from 2005 puts Flash penetration at 98.2% (http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/561724.html) The article introducing the groundbreaking sIFR library from 2004 cites the reasoning for using Flash as high penetration (http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2004/08/sifr). Macromedia in the year 2000 puts their penetration rate at ~90% (http://web.archive.org/web/20001109224100/http://www.macromedia.com/so… There is simply no evidence that points to video causing Flash to become a standard plugin.

Unreadable is 'sIFR' http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/sifr/

This is interesting, but I'm not sure how well it will work when there is already a method (SFIR http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/sifr/) that works around this licensing issue completely. I suppose it will really come down to pricing, but they're going to really need to cut into those expected royalties if this is going to fly. It'll be interesting to see if font designers are as pig headed as music labels, or if they can understand that a lessor percentage of a larger total is the better deal.

Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) is an open source JavaScript and Adobe Flash based technology that enables the replacement of text elements on HTML web pages with Flash equivalents. It was initially developed by Shaun Inman and improved by Mike Davidson and Mark Wubben. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Inman_Flash_Replacement http://www.mikeindustries.com/sifr http://wiki.novemberborn.net/sifr/

For limited use of varied typography you can use flash very selectively by using Sifr (http://www.mikeindustries.com/sifr)