It’s a good reminder that verification of facts should always trump speed.

The General’s Lament (Chris Busse)

Each day’s entry is a list of links to Wikipedia articles about interesting events that happened on that day as well as notable births and deaths.

If you’re looking for a new home page, or just another site to add to your daily reading, check it out.

You can try it out here:

Today in Wikipedia

To set it as your home page:

Firefox:

• Go to the “Tools” menu and choose “Options”
• Click the “General” tab
• Under “Home Page” enter http://todayinwikipedia.com
• Make sure “When Firefox starts” is set to “Show my home page”

Internet Explorer:

• Go to the “Tools” men and choose “Internet Options”
• In the “Home Page” box enter http://todayinwikipedia.com

To bookmark it (if you don’t want it as your home page):

• In Firefox, right-click this link – Today in Wikipedia – and choose “Bookmark This Link.”
• In Internet Explorer, right-click this link – Today in Wikipedia – and choose “Add to Favorites.”

How it works

I made Today in Wikipedia using a simple bit of Javascript to retrieve the current date, create a URL based on that date and redirect you to it.

It works because the date is in the Wikipedia article URL. Example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_1

Here is the relevant code:

today = new Date();

day = today.getDate();

month = today.getMonth();

if (month==0) x=("January");
 else if (month==1) x=("February");
 else if (month==2) x=("March");
 else if (month==3) x=("April");
 else if (month==4) x=("May");
 else if (month==5) x=("June");
 else if (month==6) x=("July");
 else if (month==7) x=("August");
 else if (month==8) x=("September");
 else if (month==9) x=("October");
 else if (month==10) x=("November");
 else x=("December");

window.location = "http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/" + x + "_" + day;

That’s all there is to it. If you have any questions, please leave a comment or contact me!

Duck Duck Go is a search engine created by “serial entrepreneur” Gabriel Weinberg. It’s at http://duckduckgo.com or http://dukgo.com.

Its search results are drawn from a combination of sources, including its own crawler, Bing and crowdsourced sites like Wikipedia.

I started using it May 11. Here are a few notes on my initial impressions in no particular order.

Pros

• Duck Duck Go is fast. Very fast. As the Web editor of several news sites, much of my searching is done on a tight breaking-news deadline. I have no patience for slow-loading search results.

• Duck Duck Go has a fantastic privacy policy. This is a big deal. It’s one of the main reasons its creator encourages people to use it.

  Google, the current king of search engines, gets a lot of press for its data aggregation used to tailor ads to users’ interests. Essentially they are scanning your searches, Gmail, online documents, etc. to find out information about you and sell you things. Even though they claim some data is anonymized, such as data gathered through its Chrome browser, we know that when such data is collected at all it is rarely truly anonymous.

  Duck Duck Go’s privacy policy states it doesn’t collect any information about you and doesn’t use cookies unless you save certain settings about the site, like fonts. And you can use URL parameters for those instead.

  Duck Duck Go does log search queries and apparently there’s no time limit at the moment, but the site’s creator says he doesn’t know where they are coming from and they are not linked together by an ID number.

  Compare that to Google, which not only logs your IP address and other information about your computer but also uses cookies with unique numbers for each computer and ties your web search history to your Google account.

  Additionally, some services, such as Google Toolbar’s PageRank, send all the URLs you visit to Google. Google’s search suggestions (on Google.com and in the Chrome browser) send your searches as you type them to Google even before you hit Search.

  HTTP referrers — If I search for “how to bury a body” on Google, and click a result to YouTube (for example), the HTTP referrer tells YouTube that I got to it by searching for that term, along with my IP address. Duck Duck Go (and, to be fair, Google’s new SSL search) hides the referrer.

• In Duck Duck Go, the entire search result is clickable, not just the title. This is a small user-interface detail that makes a big difference.
• Duck Duck Go auto-loads the next page of results. For Google you need a Firefox add-on to do this.
• The Zero Click info boxes are very handy (click here and check out the box of information at the top). Sometimes you just need a little bit of info, a general question answered. These are great for that.
• Customizing fonts is cool. Unnecessary for me personally, because the defaults are just fine (and I like them being bigger than you usually see, by the way), but it’s nice to have the option.
• The favicons next to search results are a nice touch, but sometimes they look messed up (example). That could be the site’s fault, though, for all I know.
• Bang search keywords are interesting. I haven’t used them much but I see potential there.
• Disambiguation pages, a la Wikipedia, are very nice.
• Duck Duck Go supports calculations, phone numbers, ZIP codes, ISBNs, etc.

Cons

• I still have to trust someone. Weinberg says he doesn’t record my personal information, but how do I know for sure? He could be lying. I doubt it, of course, because he seems to have a solid online reputation. If he were an unknown faceless developer I would not trust the site.
• I’m not really sure what the “Information” sites encompass. If this was a little more clear, that would be helpful.
• Duck Duck Go requires Javascript. Google doesn’t. This probably doesn’t affect many people, but some people on strict corporate networks, or fans of NoScript, might have problems.
• There’s no News section like Google’s. Not a big deal, but when I search for something on Google, I often flip over to the news section for more results.

Questions:

• When it comes right down to it, are the search results as good as Google’s? They seem to be so far. But it’s possible I’ll hit a snag where Duck Duck Go can’t find something for me and Google will. It’s hard to say. I still find myself using Google out of habit when I’m moving quickly, but maybe over time that habit will change.

• What’s the business model? There are no sidebar ads, even when I search for something that screams “sell to me”. Weinberg says he’s not making money on DDG right now but might put a few ads up. A previous business of his sold for $10 million, so maybe he is not concerned about making money yet.

  You may say this is none of my business, but it’s relevant because many times when money enters the picture, privacy goes out the window. See also: Facebook. Weinberg will need to have the integrity to resist this.

Summary

Duck Duck Go is fast, it appears to have an ironclad privacy policy and it delivers fantastic search results. I’m going to keep using it and may post a follow-up in a few months once I’ve had enough experience to give a more well-informed opinion.

More info

Weinberg, under the username “yegg,” answers questions on Reddit.

Here’s how you can get it:

1. Install Chromifox Basic.

OK, this part is totally optional. I just like the blue look. You can skip this step, so I guess this guide is really six steps.

2. Get rid of unnecessary buttons.

Right-click in the toolbar area and choose “Customize.” Drag everything you don’t want into the box that pops up to get rid of it. I even got rid of my Home button, although not everyone will want to.

3. Install Stylish and the Combine Stop/Reload Buttons style.

This will make Stop and Reload one button to further reduce the number of buttons.

4. Install Fission.

This turns your address bar into a progress bar.

5. Install URL Tooltip.

This lets you see URLs of links by hovering over them.

Once you have this and Fission, you no longer need the Status bar. Hide it by unchecking it under the “View” menu.

6. Set up Firefox to quickly search the Web from the address bar.

On the dropdown menu of your search box, choose Manage Search Engines.

Here you can assign a keyword to each search engine. For example, if you assign the keyword “g” to Google, you simply have to type “g [your search term]” in the address bar to search Google.

Since there’s no more need for a search box, you can get rid of it just like you got rid of your other buttons in step No. 2.

7. Ditch all the toolbars except the navigation bar.

Right-click in the toolbar area and uncheck everything except “Navigation Toolbar.”

If you need the menu bar, you can hit the “Alt” key to temporarily show it again. You won’t need the bookmarks menu because you can simply search for your bookmarks in the address bar, also called the Awesome Bar.

That’s it!

If you need a bookmark or a Web history entry, start typing it into the Awesome Bar and let Firefox find it for you. If you need the menu bar, just press Alt.

Clean and uncluttered.

In a nutshell, WSJ.com has some articles where you can only read the first few paragraphs for free before being prompted to subscribe.

However, you can read these same articles for free by coming to them via Google or Google News. I’ve made a Web browser bookmarklet that speeds up the process a bit.

The normal process without the bookmarklet involves a few steps:

• Go to the article and see that it’s restricted to subscribers
• Copy the headline
• Go to Google.com
• Enter the headline (and a site:wsj.com for good measure)
• Search
• Click the resulting link

Firefox users can simplify it somewhat:

• Go to the article
• Highlight the headline
• Right-click the headline and choose “Search Google for…”
• Click the resulting link

However, when you do this, WSJ.com isn’t always the first result (I keep getting Yahoo! News results), hence the benefit of a WSJ.com-specific search.

In the spirit of being really lazy efficiency, I have made a Javascript bookmarklet that shaves a few steps off.

It’s not perfect though. Ideally, you could go to the WSJ article, click the bookmarklet and go straight to the full version.

This bookmarklet is a step removed:

• Go to the article
• Click the bookmarklet, which pulls up a WSJ.com-specific Google search for the headline
• Click the resulting link

It works by using Javascript to extract the article’s headline from its h1 tag and perform a WSJ.com-specific Google search for that headline.

This should ensure that the first search result is the article in question, although it might not be perfect.

(In fact, if the article is not yet indexed in Google, it won’t work at all. So there’s that.)

If anyone knows how to make it go that final step of essentially clicking through to the Google search result using Javascript, please let me know. I am not sure it’s possible, however; I think WSJ.com might check the HTTP referrer to see if you are coming from Google, and I don’t think you can spoof that with Javascript (though you can get Firefox add-ons that do it).

So what’s the point of all this? It was mainly a Javascript bookmarklet exercise for me, and if it does save someone a little bit of hassle by removing a few steps from the process of reading WSJ, that’s very good. It’s not stealing from the WSJ; after all, the paper’s Web site allows readers coming from Google to read for free. This just expedites the process.

Anyway, here is the bookmarklet.

Firefox users, drag the button below to your browser’s Bookmarks toolbar. Internet Explorer users, right-click it and choose “Add to Favorites.”

Then go to a Wall Street Journal article and click the button.

[WSJ->Google]

Questions? Comments? Leave me a comment!

You give it a set of Web pages to watch and tell it how often to check them, and it notifies you when they change.

It’s ideal for keeping up with Web sites that don’t offer RSS feeds, or checking changes on just a single page of a large Web site (for example, a company’s listing of open jobs).

You can also use it to see exactly how a news story changes as it evolves online.

Here’s an example: I set Update Scanner to watch a page that showed an Associated Press story about President Barack Obama planning to call for tighter restrictions on banks.

Update Scanner has options, as you can see in the screen shot below, including setting how often it checks the page (as often as every five minutes, though it gives you a warning if you choose this).

Another option is to highlight changes to the text.

If Update Scanner checks a page and sees a change, it alerts you with a small box in the lower right corner of your Firefox window.

Clicking on the link in the alert takes you to the page. Update Scanner highlights the changes (if you’ve chosen that option) and offers you a chance to see both the old version of the page before the change and the new version.

As you can see, this is useful for learning which parts of a news story change from one update to the next.

The changes to the news story above are relatively minor, but on fast-paced breaking news stories you may get frequent updates bathed in yellow highlighting. Such is the nature of online news!

Update Scanner only uses highlighting for changes, not strike-through text, so it appears it won’t show you when text is eliminated.

However, you can see for yourself where text has been eliminated by looking at the older version of the page (via the “Old Page” link) and comparing it to the newer version.

Do you find this useful? Do you know another good use for Update Scanner? Leave a comment below!

I believe electronic devices can almost always be taken beyond their out-of-the-box limits.

In that spirit, here are some links to tutorials on various modifications and tips for the Flip video camera.

I haven’t personally tried any of these on my Flip video camera; if you have, I’d love to hear how they turned out.

How To Take Apart the Flip Video Ultra

How to hack any Flip Video Camera with a Wide Angle Lens

Flip camera microscope and macro lenses

Using the Flip Mino HD with Windows Home Server

Another wide-angle lens guide plus an easy way to frame your viewing window for 16:9 shooting

If you click an article headline while browsing WSJ.com, you may get the first few paragraphs and a note asking you to subscribe (this is what Murdoch calls a paywall “not right to the ceiling”).

But if you come to an article via Google, you can read the whole thing for free.

So if you find an article you like, just search for the headline in Google and, for good measure, add “site:wsj.com” to restrict it to the Wall Street Journal site.

Click the headline in the search result and — hey! no paywall.

You can make the process even easier by bookmarking this link – It’s a Google News page filtered to show stories from the Wall Street Journal.

Oh, and this isn’t new. It’s been an open secret since at least March 2008.

Check out the list here.

The goal is to include everyone who lives or works in or around Lynchburg, Virginia, including Amherst County, Appomattox County, Bedford County, Campbell County, etc.

If you are not on the list but should be, or you know someone who should be on the list, please let me know through this site or find me on Twitter.

Let’s bring all the Twitter users in Lynchburg, Virginia together!

Click the image below to see the full-size background.

It was a fun process and I thought I would share some tips on Twitter background design.

1. Identify your goals

Different people have different goals when designing a Twitter background. Some people want to wow visitors with stunning visuals; others simply want to convey information.

Regardless of what your goals are, you should at least have some. A Twitter background can make a big impression, especially when someone is seeing your profile for the first time.

The three main goals in designing the @newsadvance background were, in order of importance:

1. Provide additional contact information for our organization: This was satisfied by an info box on the left side that lists an e-mail address, two phone numbers and two physical addresses (one for visiting, one for mail).
2. Keep the file size small for fast loading: Using Photoshop to optimize the image, I struck a balance between picture quality and file size. It’s about 95 kb, far lower than the maximum Twitter allows.
3. Be visually appealing: A variety of free images from Stock.XCHNG helped here.

2. Emphasize the upper left

Twitter backgrounds are anchored at the upper left corner. No matter what your screen resolution, you will always see at least some of the upper left.

That’s why the infobox and graphic items are all there on the @newsadvance background.

The layer of less important graphic items – the binary code and the white streaks -  extends farther out until it fades into a solid color background.

3. Design for multiple screen sizes

The @newsadvance background is designed so that even people with smaller 1024×768 screen resolutions can see the info box, the minimum requirement for this background.

Those with larger screens can see more of the background image.

Additionally, the bottom of the info box is only about 420 pixels from the top of the image, so it can be seen even on smaller netbooks.

An invaluable tool for making sure a Twitter background design works for 1024×768, 1280×1024 and other screen resolutions is Chris Spooner’s Twitter background template, which has layers that show you how much of your design is visible at various resolutions.

I found Spooner’s template while reading his excellent blog post, “Twitter Background Design How-To and Best Practices.”

4. Use your visuals to send a message

It’s great to have a visually appealing Twitter background, but it should also mean something.

One of The News & Advance’s missions is to provide news and information to readers regardless of their choice of platform: print, computer, mobile device, etc.

On the Twitter background, the presence of the printed newspaper, the computer mouse and the cell phone are intended to suggest that philosophy.

5. Don’t repeat yourself

When designing the info box, I thought about including the logo, the name (either “The News & Advance” or “Newsadvance.com”) and/or the Web URL.

However, these items are all, in one way or another, already a part of the Twitter sidebar information.

So why clutter up the background design with extra information?

Including those redundant elements may have increased the height of the info box to the point where it would have been cut off on some netbooks, some of which have screen heights smaller than 600 pixels.

As a bonus, the newspaper logo is partially visible anyway because of the paper’s positioning in the corner.

That’s about it. Have any other tips you’d like to share? Leave a comment!