Jon Heller

Usually, it is fairly straightforward to use a .htaccess file to redirect an old website to a new one. Yet for some reason, I was having the hardest time getting this to work for my wife’s old blog. There was a link that came up when you Googled her name, and I was using that link to test the redirection.

The problem was that it would not only redirect to the new domain, but include the full URL. And since her old blog used a different folder structure, people who clicked this link would receive a 404 error.

The specific issue was there was a question mark in the URL, which made the URL into a query string, which is handled differently than normal forwarding requests in an .htaccess file. The solution?

Put a question mark at the end of the RewriteRule. So in this specific case, the file now looks like:

Adding that question mark to the end seems to overwrite any previous query string requests, and will send any requests from the old domain to the root of the new one.

Last Friday, I was browsing Twitter when I came across someone who mentioned how excited they were to be going to An Event Apart in a few days. An Event Apart? As in, A List Apart, the most treasured of all sites on web design?

Turns out they not only had a seminar, but it was in Boston - in two days. I sheepishly went up to my boss and asked if it was alright if I was out Monday and Tuesday to attend this, apologizing for the late notice. She said go for it, so I registered that night, and the following Monday made the nightmarish rush hour commute down to the Marriott at Copley Square.

Overall, the event was fantastic. At first I was a bit hesitant to find that this was a one-track conference, meaning you couldn’t choose which presentation to go to. However I can now see the benefits of that, as each and every speaker was talented and put a lot of work into their presentations.

The seven sessions each day were a really good mix of practicality and conceptual ideas. Striking this balance can be very difficult, but I was pleased to come away with both specific notes (down to exact lines of CSS I wanted to try) as well as general ideas I wanted to implement.

I also should mention that some of these people really, really know how to use Keynote. Ethan Marcotte did an especially good job with this on a presentation he did entitled Comps and Code: Couples’ Therapy, on how designers and developers should work with each other.

My absolute favorite speaker was Andy Budd. I have never been so engrossed in a speech on web design. He had a perfect mix of storytelling, humor, and solid advice. I literally had trouble holding my applause back until the end of his presentation.

Of course, I wasn’t as big of a fan of every one of the other presentations. One focused a bit too much on style, art, and fashion, though I’m sure those people more focused on design appreciated it. There was also a speech on standards in the enterprise that I didn’t follow closely, simply because I don’t work in anything close to an enterprise environment. It also didn’t help that the speech was right before lunch and running fifteen minutes over!

Still, I look at my notes from the conference and can see how many great ideas I came away with. I am very much looking forward to attending this again next year.

I had a client once that insisted on having a splash page on their site. So when visiting the site, you were greeted by the company’s name and logo, and that was it. You would have to click, again, before entering the site. I expressed as best I could the reasons not to do this, but the client wanted it, so I obliged.

Google realizes how little benefit the pages add as well, and now offers a way to circumvent those pages. Good for them! This is a great example of a company taking an extra step to make its customers happy, while at the same time doing a favor for those websites.

One of the reasons I love the internet is that when you consider the fact that it is limitless (well, that is, unless you take into account the dwindling number of IPv4 addresses), there is a whole lot of room for all types of ideas - even if those ideas take completely different approaches towards the same goal.

So let’s take Today’s Big Thing and Alltop as examples. They both have a similar goal: To find the most popular, recent content. Except they take exact opposite approaches to it.

The great thing is that there is room for both. I personally visit both every day. Today’s Big Thing takes about 3 minutes (depending on the length of the video), while I can spend hours at AllTop if I’m not careful. I love Today’s Big Thing for its simplicity and the way it gets me something entertaining to watch the second I arrive. I love AllTop for the ridiculous wealth of information there, and how I usually end up with twenty Firefox tabs - and that’s only for one category.

Great post this Monday by Jennifer Laycock entitled How Social Media (Didn’t) Change Business. At first I thought it might be a rant (albeit a well-deserved rant) about how many businesses have failed miserably at monetizing social media. Instead it was a very well thought out piece that explained how social media wasn’t a new business model, but instead was a return to the way business was carried out decades ago.

And in a lot of ways, I think that is true. You won’t be able to place ads on Facebook and make millions of dollars, but you might be able to integrate your company into facebook in a way that gives you millions of hits.

I feel as though Twitter, of all social networking sites, is leading the way in terms of providing a model on how businesses can promote good will while providing customer service. When I read the first story about this, I just thought it was a fluke. Then I read about how even Comcast was solving customer issues via Twitter, and I knew it was real, because honestly - Comcast?

Still, I feel as though this is only the tip of the iceberg - and in a bad way. I am all for this use of Twitter. But I am sure that if the news of this successful foray into social media by businesses reaches the CEO offices of the Forbes 500, we are in for some embarrassing and expensive attempts to monetize social media.

I’ve been reading today about Qore, a new service offered for Playstation 3 users that brings them game previews, behind the scenes interviews, demos, and other tidbits.

My initial reaction is: Does this really offer new information that isn’t out there already? Well, it’s quite possible, since the service is officially sponsored by Sony, who I’m sure is more willing to open up its doors. That sponsorship can also be a negative in that the content might be influenced by Sony; as in, super exciting previews about games that most people expect to be a dud.

My big question, though, is why charge $2.99 a month for the service? And I don’t mean why charge for it - that I could understand - but why charge such a measly amount? Tens or hundreds of purchases for that amount could add up, sure, but that’s usually an amount I see for a freeware software developer or one of those “buy me a beer” donation links on blogs. It seems like an unnecessary hurdle in getting a larger audience, especially when you have advertisers that rely on a large audience!

Last week, I went to a presentation sponsored by the North Shore Technology Council about social media. I wasn’t sure what to expect, as I got the impression this group was a bit more into traditional markets, so the presentation on social media might have been a bit too high level for me.

While my impressions about the group were right (pretty much no one had heard of twitter, and only two people had blogs, including myself), I was very impressed by the presentation, which did an excellent job of balancing introducing this subject to the group but also explaining its usefulness.

One of the presenters was Chris Brogan, so I added him on Twitter and Google Reader and have been enjoying his updates. His most recent one was on personal branding, and a part of it advises creating accounts on the big social networks.

What he hasn’t touched on yet, though, is making sure you manage your reputation on those networks. Here’s what I mean: If you are trying to brand yourself on the web as a professional and (dare I say) respectable resource, you might want to think twice before Digging or favoriting a some people might consider in bad taste.

Personally, I have a fairly thick skin, so I find quite a lot of the top items on Digg humorous. But I am very careful about digging a story that could offend others, simply because I know not everyone shares the same sense of humor as I do.