Can you access a URL querystring with Javascript?
Yes. Just refer to location.search.
Why would you want to reference the URL querystring with Javascript?
A couple reasons come to mind. Continue reading Parsing a URL Querystring with Javascript
Why I’m Not Friends with My Bank on Facebook
I received a request today from my financial institution asking me to follow them on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube.
Aside from the fact that I doubt that their updates on these various services will enrich my life, there is another very good reason not to follow them:
Security.
It’s easy to trace your connections online. Most of this information, for most users, is public. If you follow Bank A, it stands to reason that you have an account at Bank A–something a malicious person would not have known before. Even if your online persona isn’t directly connected to your name, you might be surprised at how easy it is to connect the two with a Google search.
- Want to know 9000 people with Citibank accounts? Check http://www.facebook.com/citibank
- Want to know 6000 people with Wells Fargo accounts? Check http://twitter.com/#!/Ask_WellsFargo/followers
- Want to know 5 people with Bank of American accounts? Check http://www.youtube.com/user/bankofamerica/
(That last item says a lot, I think.)
Any bank that suggests you follow them on social media must be pretty confident of their security! Or, more likely, their marketing teams and their security teams don’t talk to each other.
You wouldn’t stand on a street-corner handing out cards that say, “My name is Bob Billiards and I have an account at Bank A” would you? Then don’t follow your bank on a social media site.
Generating puzzles for a Four-by-Four Word Game
A few years ago, I made a crossword-like game wherein users fill out a 4×4 grid of letters to spell 8 words (4 across and 4 down): http://osric.com/chris/wordgame/
However, over the course of several days, I was able to develop only 20 puzzles by hand. Trying all the various combinations is clearly a task better suited to computers than humans. Such a grid has 16 slots, each of which can contain one of 26 letters–so there are 2616 total permutations to check. That’s about 43,000,000,000,000,000,000,000–which could take a very long time, even for a computer. One key to speeding things up is to ignore permutations that don’t contain words.
Continue reading Generating puzzles for a Four-by-Four Word Game
Creating a Javascript Game (LetterLock)
I recently created a simple word game using Javascript, which presented certain challenges. The game displays 3 random letters to the player, who must then attempt to create a dictionary word in as few moves as possible by shifting the letters up or down in the alphabet.
There were several programming decisions or challenges that came up during the game’s creation, for which I was able to apply some of the things I learned in my recent computer science classes.
Testing for multiple versions of Internet Explorer
Only one version of Internet Explorer (IE) can exist on a single windows installation by default. I had previously used Multiple IE as a way of testing web pages on older versions of IE. This allows you to have IE3, IE4, IE5, IE5.5, and IE6 installed alongside your existing IE7 or IE8 install. You can even run them concurrently.
I don’t test pages on anything earlier than IE6 anymore, but IE6 still accounts for more than 5% of my site traffic. Multiple IE basically helps me test both IE6 and IE8 from the same machine. However, there is still the IE7 gap, plus Multiple IE, which is no longer being updated or maintained, can produce some glitchy behavior.
It turns out, though, Microsoft offers some tools to help test their legacy browsers.
Continue reading Testing for multiple versions of Internet Explorer
Hunt the Wumpus
I am taking a course in discrete mathematics this semester, and the professor suggested we take a look at a game called Hunt the Wumpus.
Hunt the Wumpus was originally created in the 1970s, and unfortunately, most of the versions you can find on the web today are easier and less interesting that the original. The original eschewed a square grid for the game board and instead used a “squashed” dodecahedron, where each game space was one of the vertices.
It is also noteworthy for introducing the superbat, a feature of other games (including Zork) that followed Hunt the Wumpus, and for the humorous feedback (e.g. “ZAP–Superbat Snatch! Elsewhereville for you!”) that many of my favorite games adopted.
At any rate, I decided to recreate a version of the easier and less interesting grid-based game in Javascript:
Hunt the Wumpus
Online Advertisements and Statistical Analysis
Quite a few years ago, I was in the online advertising business. My team and I created banner ads to run alongside web site content, to entice viewers to click on ads and find out more about advertiser offers. We scheduled ads to run alongside specific content. We targeted ads towards users in specific geographic regions, thanks to a browser cookie that told us their ZIP code. And we constantly managed inventory.
Although we made animated ads, we avoided anything that blinked. There were no monkeys to punch.
Click-Through Rate (or Click-Thru Rate or CTR) was a key measurement of an ad’s success. Although at first we would sometimes see click CTRs between 1-2% (meaning that an ad was clicked between 10 and 20 out of every 1000 views, or impressions), as online advertising proliferated, and as our systems got better at filtering out false impressions and clicks from various robots, crawlers, and spiders, CTRs trended much lower: 0.25% suddenly looked good, and 0.10% was not uncommon in some cases. That’s 1 click for every 1000 impressions.
That’s why we were insanely interested in a blog post we found, now presumably lost to the ages, that ran a set of 6 banner ads, which varied only slightly, and analyzed the results to determine what aspects of the ads could improve CTRs. Did including the phrase “click here” really help? If the words “click here” were in blue and underlined, like a typical web link, would that improve the CTR?
Continue reading Online Advertisements and Statistical Analysis
Typography on the Web
In spite of my fondness for typography, I have always been fairly antagonistic towards web typography “solutions” like sIFR. Sure, it’s a better idea than using a GIF file for every headline, but is it really necessary?
I’m skeptical. What is it buying you, and at what cost? What’s the return on investment? Is it improving conversions, improving customer/reader loyalty?
To me, content is king. I’ve visited, bookmarked, and returned to many web sites that are no-frills black-text-on-a-white-background. I remember fondly the days of Gopher, shortly before the rise of the World-Wide Web: all information, and no waste.
Let’s say there are 3 kinds of people in the world:
- Graphic Designers
- Computer Programmers
- Everyone Else
Let’s look at these groups from the bottom-up:
Continue reading Typography on the Web
WordPress Security Tips
I attended the WordCamp Birmingham conference this past weekend to find out more about all things WordPress. WordPress is an open source blog engine/lightweight Content Management System (CMS) that has a huge community of users and developers, and an enormous repository of plugins to extend its functionality.
One of the presentations I attended, Mitch Canter‘s session on WordPress Security, had 6 good tips for making your WordPress-based site more secure:
Continue reading WordPress Security Tips
Mistakes I Made When Setting Up My WinXP/OSX Intel-Based Mac
I really like my little Intel-based (Core 2 Duo) Mac Mini. It has a small footprint, low power draw, and it has wifi (so I don’t need a Cat 5 cable snaking through my apartment). Surprisingly, after comparing it to other small-footprint systems with comparable specs, the Mac was about the same price and came with the added option of running OSX. I set it up as a dual-boot WinXP and OSX system so that I can continue to run all my Windows software, as well as checking out some of the nifty Mac software (like the night we sat around making humorous commercials for the Chevy Volt using Garage Band and iMovie).
Aside from just using Apple’s Boot Camp to select which OS I wanted to use the next time I started the computer, I also installed rEFIt, a boot-loader that will let me select which OS I want as I start the system, and VMWare Fusion, so that I can run WinXP from within OSX.
From my experience with with a dual-boot WinXP and Ubuntu Linux laptop, I wasn’t looking forward to sharing files between the 2 systems by setting up an antediluvian FAT32 partition. However, one of my friends recommended MacDrive, a program that allows Windows to read from and write to an HFS+ volume. Magic, right?
Everything was looking rosy, until I decided to be stingy and give Windows XP a 10 GB partition.
Continue reading Mistakes I Made When Setting Up My WinXP/OSX Intel-Based Mac