Anybody who knows about usability, this hopping back and forth between the mouse and keyboard slows a person down no matter how fast they think they are. Staying on one device will be faster. One of the things you can do to speed up your bookmarklet speed is to give them keywords. Depending on your browser, determines how you do it.

• Firefox – v 3.5.5 – After putting the button/bookmarklet in your toolbar, right click it, and choose properties. You should see a field labeled keyword, put whatever word/phrase you please and hit ok.
• Internet Explorer – 7 & 8 – There is a shortcut key field after getting into the bookmark properties like described for Firefox. I recommend that you do not use this tip in IE because setting a shortcut key only just launches a new window/tab in your default browser using that link.
• Opera – v 9.5+ – Once in the properties window, there willl be a nickname field. Input whatever nickname you desire.

Now since you have a keyword/nickname/whatever, you can just type that into the address bar and automatically be sent there. The most speed that will be gained is when people use URL shortners, over things like blog pings. I have tried a handful of shorteners, and the best so far is: is.gd. The way I have mine set up is I have the is.gd keyword set to is. So I browse to a long URL site, press <CTRL> + <L> and it jumps to is.gd’s shortened version. Since is.gd puts the new url into a text input box with the text selected, I can copy the url without pressing anymore than the copy hotkey. Then I am set to go.

A lot of people like the bit.ly service. I don’t exactly want to use that as my update platform. Since bit.ly is designed to be namely a status updater with links, their shortened url is in an HTML textarea element. So you have to highlight it if you are not planning to use it in a status update.

Why am I so harsh?

Well, I instinctively put in my site. One of the “potential problems” reported is the following”

Tabular information may be missing table markup.

Well I am sorry to say, nothing on the page in question has a table, nor data of any kind that makes it look like a table. So if you try this checker, I wouldn’t take the results to heart quite yet.

With that being said, it has some hopes. The information is quite complete, with samples of valid code. I would however make the code in question highlighted somehow (color, a border, background color) within the code block. Currently it gives a full source code sample, which is a bit tedious to skim through if you don’t know what exactly is wrong.

I also have been terribly busy with school. I am currently trying to write a policy review on something from the Social Security Administration. It is really hard to track down stuff beside the laymen level explanations. I am slowly getting there.

President Obama’s first press conference, courtesy of C-SPAN. Mainly about the economic stimulus package. I am not 100% on his ideas. I believe that while it is good that he is wanting to give money to the people. However, I think that it is important that citizens should begin saving again… It is a long video, but is worth the watch.

Technorati Tags: press conference, obama, president

One way I can tell is the default notification on where you are at if via keyboard navigation, is gone. I personally rely on this quite heavily. If I know I need to hit Tab 10 times to get somewhere, I am forced to count now, versus watching visually. Another thing is since I have the wp.com stat plugin activated, the cursor is by default is placed in the login box for that. While it is cool that I can login with just hitting enter, since that password is saved, but my focus is now halfway down the page. Where will I be located after a few tabs? Who really knows.

The sad thing about this is, I was asked my opinion if WordPress would be a good option for a blind user. At the time, I was still running 2.6.* and said it’s ok, not the best thing to use. I added that if the said user was considered a power user, they could make it work. I don’t think this will be the case anymore. Like I said, this is sad, so many people are using WordPress not only for bloggin but things like a CMS! It is shame that the dev team doesn’t adhere to standards. Going off that, it says they have no interest is accessibility. You can stretch that out to include usability even.

My birthday is coming up, it is actually this Saturday. Yes, the 14^th. My mom, her boyfriend, and my sister are coming up most likely for lunch or dinner. Mom wants to do something at Pike Place Market, but considering it was snowing a little bit ago, we’ll see what happen.:)

Anyhow, I saw that at Sat Feb 14 01:31:30 EET 2009, the Unix time for the given date is: 1234567890, unfortunately that’s only 3 in the afternoon on Friday (Fri Feb 13 15:31:30 PST 2009) here in Seattle. I was so close!

Hi Ryan,

We have investigated the issue that you describe, and have determined that this error is caused by the firewall on your computer. Sometimes computer software will block sites that are important for Facebook to operate. If you temporarily disable your firewall before making profile changes, this should resolve the issue.

Let me know if you continue to experience problems after attempting this solution.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

xxxxx
User Operations
Facebook

I wrote back to them saying how utterly ridiculous such a solution is. I said that if you hovered over the link, the link pointed home.php, and no firewall can intelligently redirect a link unless I had hand-coded it. I also informed him that for a firewall to block a firewall, the link would have to be something along the lines of: http://iam.goingto.spamyou.com/, then your firewall would nullify the link OR give you some warning message.

Of course I didn’t stop there, I asked why Facebook was telling people to disable their firewall to use their product. Doesn’t sound right to me. Thoughts?

I was going through my bag, and pulled out my usb drive case, and there it was. The usb plug and the chip had came off from the casing, and looked like it had been like that for a while. I went ahead and plugged it in to see what would happen.

The drive was found by XP, but all the files were corrupted. On top of that, in the minute it was plugged in, it got hotter than I could imagine. If I was in dire need, I could probably reformat the drive and use some super glue.

I just updated my Twitter account, and saw that it was hacked via a TechCrunch tweet. I replied to the post, and I said the following.

Sorry but this made me laugh to be honest… Yeah it sucks that they got hacked. But seriously who cares who got hacked, what is the different between a Barack account vs mine vs Joe Smoe vs a friend of mine who isn’t technical at all? I would surely hope that ‘nothing’ would be the answer. Hopefully the Twitter team gets it dealt with.

To step on the Barack’s account being hacked, I just have to laugh. I am hoping most people know that it isn’t actually Mr Obama updating Twitter. I know 5 or so people who worked on his campaign and knew where Obama was within a few hour block.

To continue on, I would need some kind of proof from Mr. Obama saying that he, himself updates his twitter. This should be in the form of a video. However, how could we know it is legit? Most people know president’s and the like have professional speech writers. Ok so that won’t work. Oh! We could have a video of Obama logging in and makiing a tweet. Nope, that won’t work as well. We wouldn’t be able to tell if he was given the instructions 5 minutes before.

Throwing that aside, and there is some way that shows Obama updates his Twitter account himself, it would be quite saddening. During his campaign I recall him saying that being the president is an around the clock job, and he’s willing to work all 24 hours. Taking time to update Twitter is not an acceptable use of time in my mind.

Technorati Tags: twitter, obama, social networking, hack

The class I had the final on was U.S.-China Relations. To most, this seems like a horrifying topic area, but it wasn’t too bad. Only one of the guys, showed up to the Monday morning session. I think the others wanted it to be a literal last minute cram. Since I took the exam before other people, I don’t know if the other two-three showed up. While I spent 8-10 hours on Sunday studying, I was still a bit anxious/nervous 20-30 minutes before the exam, even though I could inter-connect the terms that could be, which was all but two or three.

When I got the exam in front of me, I had a wave of relief came over me. for most parts. The exam had three parts: questions regarding articles in the New York Times, a few terms that had to be defined, then an essay. In the study group, we had covered all the terms and essay prompts pretty in depth. I had gotten up around 5:45 Monday morning. I had just started to review the NYT stuff when I went to have the morning session. Figuring out what articles are important since late October is a bit hard to do. On the terms, I think I did all right, I would have preferred to do some of the others, but what can you do, eh? The essay was the part I was the most nervous about, and that is the part I was the most confident about at the end. I ended up typing a page and a quarter, just about 700 words. The thing I felt great about is that I didn’t BS at all, I guess the conclusion could be a smidge better.

Now back to studying. –Ryan