Category: Websites

Categories
Review Websites

Autotrader.ca, Please Fix Your Search.

Autotrader.ca your search is not very good!

I just did a search for “all cars newer than 2000, between $2500 and $5000 excluding damaged vehicles, in descending order by Kms.” Sounds pretty complex when you write it out in English, but that should be a fairly straight-forward SQL query. Came across a couple of pretty serious problems there.

Your premium listings do not obey my sort selections, they simple appear in whatever position the advertiser has paid for. This would be somewhat forgiveable if the premium listings where displayed separately, a la Google ad words. Even though they are on a yellow background, as a first time visitor I had not yet scrolled down to notice that the regular listings are on a white background. So I assumed that your sort feature was broken, in fact I probably wasted a minute clicking the sort link until finally giving up and scrolling down. It was then that I realized exactly what was going on. I don’t know if there’s a good way to fix this from a user interface standpoint, you may just want to increase the size of the “Premium Listings” header text and/or do something else to make it stand out more clearly. In my opinion selling premium listings is pretty lame, your profit margins online have got to be much higher than in print. At the very least, drop the ordering of the premium listings, so that I’m able to apply a sort to those listings as well.

Secondly, I came across something much worse.

This 2003 Hyundai Tiburon came up in my search even though I specifically excluded vehicles with damage. I’m sure that your search engine code is fine. I’m sure the problem is a lack of data. The seller of that car probably did not provide you with data about it’s “damaged” status. But you see, thing is, if such an obviously damaged car shows up in my search, then how can I be sure than all of the other results that appear fine don’t have some less obvious damage? This oversight makes your search engine completely untrustworthy! I know how had it can be to get good data from users, but seriously, have you data entry monkeys flag adverts with photos like these.

P.S. ASP sucks, drop your Microsoft licenses and you’ll make more than enough money to drop those lame premium listings.

P.S.S. Trasparent divs with background images is a lame way to block hotlinking of images. Just block access to your image files from off-site referers in … oh wait, that’s not possible with IIS. See previous PS.

Categories
Apps Review Websites

OpenDNS For A Week

In case you haven’t heard, OpenDNS (wikipedia) is a free DNS service designed to improve your surfing experience, or as their PR blur puts it:

…is a safer, faster, smarter and more reliable way to navigate the Internet.

I decided to try it out for a week, replacing my ISP’s default DNS servers. All-in-all I got just about what I expected.

Setup
The set up process was probably the most painful part of the experience, but that is more my router’s fault than anything else. For whatever reason my router – the usualy reliable linksys WTR54G – decided to crap out after I changed the DNS setting. I had to do hard reboot before I was good to go.

Faster?
I was a little skeptical about their claim to be faster. I mean, DNS is one of the most lightweight services one the internet, it’s not terribly slow to begin with. Plus my ISP’s DNS servers are only a few hops away, how could a centralized/internet wide service be faster. I don’t know how they do it, but I was pleasantly surprised! Noticed faster DNS resolution immediately!

Safer?
The safer claim refers to the massive blacklists OpenDNS taps into. They give you the ability to block phishing sites and various levels of adult content (from ‘tasteless’ to full on porn sites). I decided to turn on the lowest level of adult blocking (only porn sites) and leave the phishing blocking on. I don’t often find myself on sites these filters would block, I was basically testing for false positives. If the service is able to precisely block the content I ask it to, then it’s a good blocking service. I only came across one false positive over the past week, indietits.com a web comic featuring 2 tits. Since OpenDNS allows you to easily whitelist any domain this was only a minor inconvience. There’s no mechanism to report a false positive directly, so I’m assuming their system learns based on the whitelist data.

Smarter?
OpenDNS is supposedly smarter because it has the ability to fix misspelled domain names. At the end of the day this is a pretty useless feature. The problem is, OpenDNS only kicks in when a) the domain name is common enough that it can figure out the actual address youre trying to get to and b) the domain name you tried to access does not exist. Since almost all misspellings of common domains are taken by squatters you’ll barely ever stumble across a misspelling that isn’t attached to a server. I suppose this feature is designed for people who mangle the top level domain name, blah.cmo will never resolve and it does a good job of redirecting these to the proper TLD. But I always use firefox’s keyboard shortcuts to add the .com or .net. So again, I wasn’t really affected by this feature.

Geeking out.
The OpenDNS control panel has two features that are clearly designed to appeal to the nerds. One more useful than the other.
The control panel gives you the ability to create a “shortcut,” allowing you to assign a short name to any resolvable address. For example, you could link “wiki” to “wikipedia.org” or link something like “wsearch” to wikipedia’s search page.
The second less useful nerd feature are the stats. OpenDNS provides a wide range of charts and graphs about your DNS resolution history. These might actually be somewhat interesting if they weren’t in GMT.
Again, I didn’t find myself using either of these features very much.

What’s the catch?
“How do they make money?” you might ask. Well it’s pretty simple, whenever you stumble across a non-resolving domain, OpenDNS will present you with a (revenue generating) search application and related text ads. This is fairly non-obtrusive. The only thing I find kind of weird is that this is identical to verisign’s site-finder. When that launched in 2003 it caused such a shitstorm that they were only allowed to keep it online for 19 days! (read the wikipedia article linked above) I guess the main difference with OpenDNS is that it’s completely opt-in.

Conclusion
At the end of the day, it’s a pretty neat service. I’ll probably keep it configured, since it doesn’t really negatively affect my internet experience, and I do get a bit of a speed boost.
I can see the service being quite a bit more useful to someone who manages are small network, especially if they need to filter the internet.
For Personal use, it’s usefulness is a little more dubious.

After one week of use, I give OpenDNS a rating of : *shrug*

Categories
Tips & How To's Websites

WhyFireFoxIsBlocked is wrong! Adblock Plus is 100% Detectable!

whyfirefoxisblocked.com does not know what they’re talking about. Ad Block Plus is 100% lame and 100% detectable.

The following code detects ad block plus:

index.html:
<script language="javascript"> var disabled = false; </script>
<script src="something.js?thisistotrickyou=http://a.as-us.falkag.net/...
dat/njf/41/domain.com/ros_pop_tag.js"></script>
<script language="javascript">
if(!disabled){
// DO SOMETHING HERE, like a redirect
alert("You Are Using Ad Block Plus or some other blocking software! Please don\'t, our site operates on ad revenue."); }
</script>

something.js:
disabled = true;

Proof of concept

Categories
Design Review Websites

Notcot.org: Novel Design

I stumbled across notcot.org this morning via a post on freshome. Notcot describes itself as “…a place to collect and share fascinating images/links.” In theory it’s a digg for images, in practice most of the images are of unique product or website designs. The result is a site that’s much more interesting than what an image section on digg would produce.

The first thing that actually struck me about the site this morning was the layout. The site features a 3×16 grid of 250x250px images surrounded by a polaroid picture type square that contains the post’s description, link, voting buttons, etc. Pretty cool, can’t say I’ve ever seen anything quite like it.

PS. They’ve got a similar site for food images, tastespotting.

Categories
Review Websites

Is Reddit better than Digg?

This week has been a bit of a revival in terms of my computer usage, I’ve found a great photoshop alternative and now I think I may have found a Digg replacement. A few weeks ago my good buddy notian mentioned that he had started reading the social news site reddit, I’d heard of the site before and never gave it much thought. But, I decided it was time to give Reddit a chance, I added the main RSS feed to my netvibes News tab at the end of last week. As I checked the feed more frequently I started to see a lot of stories that weren’t popping up on my digg widget, my slashdot feed or any of the other main news feeds I read. I started checking out the site a few times durning my work day, created an account so I could vote and I’ve barely checked digg since.

For several months now I’ve found Digg a little frustrating to actually use. With 6 main categories – each with numerous sub-categories, a video section and (a useless) podcast directory there is just way too much content to be able to follow casually. The customizable topics feature helps a little, but with such a large userbase the front page content changes really quickly. I always feel like I miss tonnes of good stories. Digg’s comment system has never been great, but the new threaded/fetch on request comment system is borderline terrible – I don’t understand how they cannot afford enough servers to push out their comments properly. I was a pretty big fan of Digg’s last redesign when they first launched it, but when you compare it to reddit’s simplicity, Digg looks like the 40lb gorrilla it really is.

Reddit’s design is far more functional/utilitarian than digg; it has good navigation, a lack of ads and it’s just plain usable. Reddit’s story placement algorithm is far superior to digg, they seem to use a formula based on votes over time, possibly taking into account click-thrus and comments over time as well. I’m finding that stories stay on top of the list much longer – up to a day or more – and new stories generally rise to the top a lot more slowly; this has the net result of giving me more time to look at a story. I know that if I don’t read the story right away it will still be there later – Reddit also has a ‘saved’ stories feature that I just noticed, again making it easier for me to read a story later. The actual content of the stories appearing on the front page seems to be quite diverse, stories related to a given subject seem to move up and down the list in an organic wave. Reddit seems to be a bit more of a Zietgiest. It’s hard to say whether or not their algorithm would scale well to meet the Digg’s traffic, I suspected it would.

If you don’t really care about getting the latest news right away and/or you don’t have the time to wade through a thousand stories an hour, give Reddit a try. You’ll still be getting your news way faster than your non nerd friends anyways.