March, 2011

Sausage is a jQuery plugin for creating pagination in longer pages.

Its look does remind you of a sausage, doesn’t it?

Sausage is very easy to implement, and, although has no documentation, it does have a well-documented source.

Use this plugin for projects with a lot of pages, or for Twitter-like infinite scroll projects.

WordPress keeps every single scrap of information that is fed into it in a MySQL database, whether that be posts, pages, comments, blogroll, the plugin settings… everything.

Say you have hundreds or even thousands of posts all within that database and you need to make site-wide changes. Going through each record, via the admin, and making those changes can be very time-consuming and does open up the possibility of mistakes occurring. So, the only option you have left is to roll up your sleeves and delve directly into the WordPress MySQL database and executing all required queries (changes). This is all done all very quickly while maximizing your productivity.

Speckyboy wrote an interesting article that contains 20 helpful WordPress SQL queries that improve your database and save you a lot of time!

Google are likely to come under intense scrutiny next week in Washington, as they face pressure regarding their antipiracy efforts during a congressional hearing.  Google voluntarily accepted the invitation to appear, making it the first time it has been questioned publicly about its role in Internet piracy.

The hearing is taking place on April 6, as a House subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Competition and the Internet looks into the issue of piracy.  Trade associations representing a number of industries have been putting pressure on the House, including members of the film, music, software, and gaming industries.

Many of these industries have accused Google of enabling Internet piracy for years, for including rogue sites in search results and allowing them to post Google ads in order to monetise their websites.  While Google have not made any public statements yet about this hearing, they will surely be defending themselves vigorously on the day.

The man in the hot seat will most likely be Kent Walker, Google’s General Counsel.  The hearing will be spearheaded by Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.  He is preparing to reintroduce legislation that would allow the government to take down any sites involved in alleged piracy, although this bill is far from a given.  When a similar bill was introduced last year it was held up by Sen. Ron Wyden.

While many people are surprised that Google have agreed to an invitation to appear at the hearing, the situation is not as sugar coated as you might think.  They were criticised heavily for not attending a similar Senate hearing last month, and one senator even threatened the Internet giant with a subpoena if it didn’t voluntarily appear on this occasion.

It will be very interesting to hear the outcome of this hearing, and exactly what allegations are put forward to Google.  While they have created software filters and engaged in licensing agreements with a number of content providers, for many entertainment companies – this is simply not enough.

According to Paul Ohm, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Law School, identity theft through reidentification is a very real and growing problem on the Internet.

Paul Ohm is also a former trial attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, so he should know what he is talking about when it comes to this issue.  According to Ohm, over the last 10 years faster computers, bigger databases, and social networking have made the process of reidentification easier than ever before.

The process of reidentification takes place when the information on one database is cross checked with another database, in order to identify a person from relatively little information.  Ohm says that because humans are unique from one another, you only really have to know a small portion of information in order to identify them online.

Paul Ohm offers this as an example:  “The key is–if I know that someone is in the Netflix database and I know a little bit about the movies that that person likes and dislikes—maybe I read Joe’s blog or I’m his Facebook friend or he was over at my house for dinner—I can identify him. It turns out I don’t need to know much about his movie preferences. If I know three or four movies, I stand a good chance of reidentifying him. If it’s six to eight, I have an excellent chance.”

The US Commerce Department have recently released a green paper that talks about this issue among others, although Ohm says that regulating privacy is getting tougher as we release more information online.  “Real privacy harm will come not from the information they have but the inferences they can draw from the data they have. No law I have ever seen regulates inferences. So maybe in the future we may regulate inferences in a really different way.”

A new report has been released called “The Impact of Social Media on Children, Adolescents, and Families”.  Along with a lot of helpful advice for the parents of young social media users, the report also proposes a new phenomenon called ‘Facebook depression’.

While this report has been getting a lot of attention for its description of depression linked to Facebook use, it also has a lot of good things to say about social media for children and adolescents.  Some of the reported benefits include community engagement, enhancement of creativity, growth of ideas, expansion of connectivity and shared interests, and “fostering of one’s individual identity and unique social skills.”

The report also summarised a number of potential risks for kids involved with social networking, including cyberbullying, online harassment, the influence of advertising, and the loss of privacy.  The evidence on sexually suggestive content is particularly worrying, saying “a recent survey revealed that 20 percent of teens have sent or posted nude or semi-nude photographs and videos of themselves.”

The report also introduced the phenomenon of Facebook depression.  In an excerpt from this report:  “Researchers have proposed a new phenomenon called ‘Facebook depression,’ defined as depression that develops when preteens and teens spend a great deal of time on social media sites, such as Facebook, and then begin to exhibit classic symptoms of depression.”

The report goes on to say that “the intensity of the online world is thought to be a factor that may trigger depression in some adolescents” adding “as with offline depression, pre-adolescents and adolescents who suffer from Facebook depression are at risk for social isolation and sometimes turn to risky Internet sites and blogs for ‘help’ that may promote substance abuse, unsafe sexual practices, or aggressive or self-destructive behaviours.”

However, the evidence of depression linked to Facebook use is very tentative, with at least one opponent, Dr. John Grohol, editor-in-chief of PsychCentral.com, writing a very critical analysis of the AAP report.  Dr Grohol has criticised the authors, saying that they “can’t differentiate between correlation and causation,” and calling this part of the report “shoddy research.”

Vogue is a fantastic NodeJS node with a rather simple cause: to auto-reload CSS stylesheets.

What’s so good about Vogue is that you can work with numerous browsers open as in the screenshot, and they’ll update automatically.

You need NodeJS and npm installed on your server in order to use Vogue, but you should regain the time lost setting them up really easily.