Tramp The Dirt Down 2006

Fantastic news over at kottke.org: "Microsoft to retire pile-of-crap web design program FrontPage."

Let's have a poll in the comments - what's the best drink to hoist to celebrate this brightening of the future of web development?

Found! 2006

I just got a call from my old pal and one-time next door neighbor Jun. He'd just gotten a call from someone who found a strange little map book with lots of markings in it and his number among others on the front page (the only blank paper I'd had one time when I was changing mobile phones and needed to document my contact list). My number and "if found, contact..." had been on the inside of the cover which had just come off and been left at home on the fateful day.

Two things found: a old friend and the book. Yay!

Now I just need to meet up with the finder and get the book back to do a little data backup.

Filtering SPAM in Gmail 2006

Am I missing something here? Gmail now puts my email arriving in Gmail now has "***SPAM***" in the subject line of junk mail which makes it very visually identifiable to a human. It seems to be entirely accurate so far in what it marks in that fashion really being crap.

However when I decide to trust it and set up a filter to fling all those messages into my SPAM folder so I never have to look at them, it appears that the asterisks are some sort of wildcard and I can't make a query to identify those messages without grabbing everything that has "spam" in the subject (e.g. "Re: your question about spam filtering").

Was someone at Google just not thinking? Or being too obscurely clever for the rest of us to follow? Tips appreciated.

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Kevin set me straight. (Thanks!) It must be coming from the TextDrive mail handler, so it's a case of incompatibility between their flagging and Gmail's search functions. I'll put in a request for a change for a different typographic treatment when the flag gets added.

Lessons Were Learned 2006

By TypePad:
- If you're asking your users to change the format of something (e.g. from A Record to CNAME addressing), make certain that you know if the continued presence of the old method will prevent the new method from working.
- If it will, be very sure to tell your users to delete the old method as well as telling them to add the new one.
- If you send out alerts requiring your users to take a technical action, users will reply to those emails. Answer those replies. Route them to new support tickets if need be.

By TextDrive:
- If you change support URLs (and systems), make sure that you disable not only the ability to open new calls but also the ability to reopen calls in the old system. (This has now been done, I see).
- Also make sure that any replies to messages in the old system are forwarded to the new system or are being watched by someone.
- Also, black text on the old system's home page with a link to the new system is probably insufficient. Large red letters are more effective. Automatic redirects are better still. (And that last has indeed now been done as well).

By me:
- Vendors make mistakes sometimes or provide incomplete information. Doublecheck the details.
- Even if you don't quite know what they are or how they work, now you know that an A Record trumps CNAME addressing.

Abstracted lesson:
- All kinds of crappy stuff can happen to not only the path to your data, but to the data itself. Do backups. Now. Today. Really. No shit. Now.

Lost 2006

One San Francisco cross-street directory, heavily marked with 3 and a half years of walking routes. Dropped somewhere on Haight Street yesterday.

Reward $20.