But officer, it was the All Star Game!
I was recently shopping around for car insurance quotes. State Farm declared me "uninsurable" because of two tickets on my record. Even so, they still decided to send me a birthday card.
Thanks, I guess?
Cory Watilo
Sent from my iPhone
I was chatting with a friend tonight and we came upon the subject of Posterous. She proceeded to share this with me:
I read your blog religiously. You want to know my dedication to your site? I was actually laptopless for 7 months, but I made sure I had your site as a bookmark on my Blackberry so that I wouldn't miss anything.
If only more people had this kind of dedication to reading my blog, the world would be a much better place.
I'm not going to even bother dissecting this hideousness. It would take me too long. The people at Chase should be ashamed of themselves.
Also, according to the Wayback Machine, the website hasn't changed since 2006, which equates to about 28 internet years - a very long time.
And somebody even created a Chrome Extension to modify the design of the Chase account portal when using Chrome. Once people start using their own CSS to improve the functionality of your website, it might be a good indicator that it's time to start over.
Just a quick note to let you know about a side project I've been working on recently.
It's called FolioHD, and it's a great way to showcase your portfolio of digital work, like photography and even website design. Here's what a portfolio site can look like, without any technical setup or hassle: http://gooley.foliohd.com
I have a lot of friends who are getting into photography, and as a result, want a way to show off their work online. I used to always set them up with a Wordpress blog, installing Wordpress manually on my server each time. Then we'd install a Wordpress theme that would work for their needs. This was a tedious process, so I wanted to come up with a solution - something they could do on their own from start to finish.
Enter: FolioHDHere's a screenshot of the user interface:
I teamed up with a buddy of mine, developer and photographer Christopher Gooley and soon after I shared the idea with him, we had a working prototype. We've been busy adding features ever since. Here's some of the things FolioHD can do:
- A homepage rotator of your best work
- Full theming support
- A contact form
- Google Analytics integration
- Domain binding (use yourwebsite.com rather than yourname.foliohd.com)
- Your own email alias on your own domain
And this is just the start. We've got lots more coming, like cool themes that will really make your work pop.
So if you know anyone who is looking for a way to easily get their portfolio online, tell them to check out http://foliohd.com. They'll be up and running in seconds; it's the quickest and easiest way to get a professional-looking portfolio.
I'm not one to freak out my personal information getting "leaked" from my mostly private Facebook profile, mainly because I don't publish things that I don't want people to know, but this is another story. This is a REAL Facebook privacy issue. I Googled my email address (as I occasionally do) to see if it was indexed anywhere, because I like to keep it off the grid as much as I can. As it turns out, Facebook is the ONLY website that publishes my address, and the thing is...I don't even use that address on Facebook. So what's happening here? Well, Facebook's "Opt out of emails from Facebook" page is getting indexed by Google. I'm assuming (based on critical thinking and moderate fact checking) addresses appear on this page if the following criteria are met:
- Email address is not tied to an account on Facebook
- Email address has been submitted by a friend using the "Find a friend" feature
What makes this a big problem is the fact that you can find THOUSANDS of email addresses by doing a simple Google search like:
One obvious problem is that spammers can easily scrape this data and add easily legitimate address to their lists, many of whom might not give their addresses to Facebook for a reason. I actually remember seeing this problem a while back (maybe 6 months to a year ago), but forgot about it. I'm a little surprised that this one has slipped through the cracks for this long.
Follow me on Twitter and I'll let you know how this thing turns out.
Update: Sachin Agarwal pointed out on Hacker News that a lot of addresses getting indexed are secret addresses that people use to post to blogs (ie: Blogger). Yikes.
Update: It looks like Facebook has fixed the issue by preventing search engines from indexing that page. A big thanks to Blake Ross from Facebook for joining the thread on Hacker News to find the root of the problem and get it fixed. My email address is safe, once again!
Nah. There's room for a few more. =]
