I’ve been reading the Juneau Empire less and less since the new website redesign at the end of last month. It’s so ridiculously slow loading and painful to navigate that it must be part of some grand and imperceptible strategy. Perhaps they hope to boost their print circulation by intentionally creating the least accessible website ever?

I don’t know, it remains a mystery.

I thought I would try to figure out some way to fix the site but I didn’t get very far. I tried writing a greasemonkey script to just remove all the offending items but I got frustrated with the slow load times. Greasemonkey does a good job of cleaning things up once they load but, weighing in at over 1.2 Megabytes, the Empire site loads like honey through a straw.

What I’d rather build, and what I know how to build, is a scraper. Something to harvest the data and spit it out in a nice clean format complete with RSS feeds. The problem there is a question of legality since I’d basically be republishing copyrighted works.

I might be missing something obvious but it seems like the best route here has to be a client side solution like a custom Firefox extension or a combination of existing extensions.

I wonder how they navigate their own site? Maybe they use AdBlock and Greasemonkey filters? Do they put up with it because they’re being paid by the hour? What a pain in the ass.

I’m very very pleased to see that Automattic has landed a massive chunk of change and will now be kicking ass with a much firmer foundation beneath them. If I had money, I’d invest in them too because Automattic is the group behind WordPress and BBPress, some of the best open source software available today.

We use WordPress for Orphan Army and several other blogs while BBPress is the awesome Bulliten Board we’ve adopted for our forums. I feel very good about those decisions now knowing that both programs are likely to have a very bright future ahead of them.

Keep up the good work over at Automattic! Here’s hoping the company never gets bought out by AOL or some other big dumb soul crushing giant! Huzzah!

I’m going to have to check Google tomorrow but I suspect today’s XKCD comic is going to send the blogger death count through the roof.

In other news I’ve been keeping fairly busy with the launch of our new television show and the ongoing effort to wind down my last straggling commercial projects.

New films are on the way and I finally got around to posting a comic on the Alaska Robotics site. Hopefully I’ll be able to show a little more dedication this year, I feel like I got sidetracked too much last year and let a lot of things get in the way of making comics and films. Clean slate. Time to kick ass. I love New Years.

In an attempt to win 5000 bucks we created a short film about cookies for a contest a week and a half ago. There were almost no submissions at the time we entered and the quality of the existing videos was quite poor, so we thought our chances to be good. The film is a bit technical, and I think it’s also rather dull, but it got us to the final round (mostly based on the competition). The five finalists were all invited to D.C. to screen our films for industry experts who would then crown a winner.

I didn’t meet dubya in my time at the capital (though I think he may have flown over me), though I did have an opportunity (albeit slight) to influence public policy while I was there. The screening was part of a town hall on behavioral advertising on the web held the the Federal Trade Commision. They are starting to look into what kind of (if any) regulations need to be placed on web advertisers in regards to consumers’ privacy rights. The town hall was remarkably interesting and terrifically boring at the same time. The big names in the industry were there (Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft) and basically opposed any sort of government control. They also promoted the idea that if consumers didn’t trust them, business would dry up and they would disappear overnight so that regulation by the government was unnecessary. Though it made me wonder, does anyone really trust Microsoft? Watchdog groups were also present, but they didn’t really seem to have any plan of their own to promote, or perhaps just had too many… (more…)

I like the idea behind this clever little art/code project called Mutating Pictures. The program generates random mutations of an image and based on user feedback decides which mutations survive and continue to evolve.

Here’s some of the clumsy footage I managed to scrag together from the lunar eclipse last night. Lou took some cool photos that aren’t included here, this series just comes off my little point and shoot camera. I should have duct taped it to a telescope and upped the resolution but it was total amateur night for me up on the rooftop.

At least I didn’t fall off into the alley.

My design for the Miro 1-click competition placed third, thanks to everyone who voted for me!

YouTube launched a new video player that you can use to embed customized playlists or channels. This seems like a potentially useful tool and I’ve embedded it here to display all of our Alaska Robotics YouTube videos in one player.

The border colors are limited for no real good reason and the sizing is funky (I had to modify the code snippet to fit this page) but it’s a new feature and it will probably improve. Now I just wish the video quality were as good looking as what’s on Crackle and AKRobotics.

If you have a YouTube account and want to create and embed a custom playlist somewhere just visit the my players section of the site.