Welcome to my new weblog, Alpha Gecko. This blog combines a number of old blogs into one (thus all of the content before the welcome entry). Why combine?

Many (most...maybe all) of my narrowly focused blogs were not updated often enough to live very well on their own.

I can easily create a place fo...
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If you run a web server, you probably have some forms on it, and if you have forms, you probably get spammed through them. Up until yesterday, I used to get 5 or 6 spam messages a day sent to me through my own press room contact form. How dumb are these people? The messages...
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I stumbled on a panel discussing the question of impeaching President Bush on CSPAN today (a replay of a recording from March 2), and it got me thinking about the risk the republican party is running of self destructing. First a little background.

I used to be a republican. It's been quite a few years...
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I won! In Bubble Wrap had a quick contest today to see who could send in the first iBW-themed haiku, the winner getting a copy of The Big Moo. Here's my entry, which turned out to be first:

Sleep awakens my

floating world of ecstasy

bathed in Bubble Wrap

The "floating world", or "ukiyo" in...
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Well, the "sales letter" style homepage I tried out for CaRP last month was no Willy Loman, but a statistical analysis of its conversion ratio (page views to downloads of the free version) showed that it didn't perform as well as the page that I'm using right now, and while I don't have stats to...
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It has again been suggested on the AtomPub mailing list that a link relation of "stylesheet" be used to point to an XSL template that could be used to transform a feed to some other format. This lead back to the question of what the link element was designed for. Unfortunately, we didn't nail the...
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The CSS Trappist Monastery got a few more design submissions yesterday, along with a boat load (think Titanic, but hold the iceberg!) of traffic after it got blogged over at MetaFilter. To those who questioned the seriousness of the site in the comments there, yes, it's completely serious. To those who commented on the crappy...
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A while back, I overhauled my shopping cart system so that it guided the user through the process better. I'll admit that I didn't bother tracking the difference that it made, but my general impression was that the change was for the better. Today, I realized that I could streamline the checkout process further, and...
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AOL and Yahoo! are implementing a new system which will guarantee a free ride past their spam filters for senders who pay something in the neighborhood of a penny for each email they send. As long as they don't alter their spam filters in ways that generate more false positives to try to force people...
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When I first started seeing those "sales letter" webpages, I didn't find them very appealing. They're long, often repetetive, don't contain many (if any) links to more information about the product. But apparently, they're very effective. Well, I've finally taken the plunge and ditched (at least temporarily!) as design I really liked on one of...
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