MovableType was nice, but for several reasons (license, upkeep etc.) I’m moving to WordPress. Most entries from the old weblog should automatically redirect, and hopefully rss feeds should be updated as well.
In the meantime, pardon the default template and other errors you might encounter. It won’t be much longer before things are back in order.
In OS X if you have a two button mouse (and you should) if you click both mouse buttons at the same time it will bring up a Find dialog in many applications, including the Finder, Firefox (though I recommend enabling Find as you Type), Safari, ecto, TextMate and many others . I found this a couple months ago and it’s a great little time saver.
This offer is too good not to share. If you use the link from the IRS website, you can file your taxes for free through H&R Block. If you’re not an H&R Block fan, don’t worry, the same link leads to about a dozen other places you can file for free.
This comparison has nothing to do with search results, but with the design of the site. The test was done in Firefox 1.0 on OS X, but the results are similar in any browser. Click to enlarge the image.
There are 193 pixels of ads and extraneous information before you get to what you’re looking for (search results) on MSN Search. MSN forces you to spend extra time either scrolling or filtering out garbage in an effort to display ads above search results. What Microsoft fails to see is that while they’re trying increase the chances of you clicking an ad to pay their bills, putting the ads where they get in the way of your goal only drives your business away from the site altogether, reducing the chances of you clicking the ads down to zero. Granted, Google sometimes places ads above search results as well, but their ads take up much less space and they don’t show up on every single search result.
The way Google separates the URL line from the results is much better than what MSN does. Google has a normal line break, then 21 pixels from one entry to the next. MSN has 12 pixels after the description then another 17 pixels after the URL line. This makes it significantly more difficult to quickly separate results. While MSN has a total of 29 pixels between results (5 pixels more than Google) , the whitespace on MSN is much more jagged and search results seem to jumble together at a quick glance.