Introducing IsThereAGiantsGameToday.com

Single serving sites have always been a fascination of mine. You know - the ones that only do one thing really well in the best cases with a twist of humor involved?

Take Mat Honan's clever "Barack Obama is your new bicycle" and "Should I be worried about swine flu?" 

Or the myriad of Mozilla related sites like "Are we we fast/mobile/pretty/slim/small/first yet?   

Simple does one thing well.

That's why when I took a "Intro to HTML" class here at Mozilla I was inspired to use my new-found skills to better mankind, one small problem at a time. 

 (Above: A studious Mary, William, and Laura hard at work. Laura throws out the universal hand-sign for html bracket)

To solve the sort of pint-sized problems that can plague thousands, if not millions of people. 

To answer such profound questions that can make or break someones day...

...questions like: 

Will my CalTrain car be full of drunk people? 

Will I be able to find parking in SOMA tonight?

Will I be able to get into 21st Amendment or [your favorite SOMA restaurant here]?

And more. 

 

That's why I teamed up with the amazing William Reynolds to create a new website: www.isthereagiantsgametoday.com. A San Francisco Giants schedule for the rest of us.

And we're launching today. Check it out! Bookmark it. Fork it. Save it to your phone's homescreen. Share it with your friends! Moreover use it to make your life a little easier those 9 months out of the year when baseball season is "Game On!".

Update: Here's William's technical overview of Is There A Giants Game Today.

Mozilla Website SOPA/PIPA Efforts

This morning my alarm went off at 4:30am so I could hop online to help launch Mozilla's anti-SOPA efforts. 

Although the scenarios are of different degrees of significance, I couldn't help but think of a story I once heard about how Steven Garrity, a long-time contributor, launched the original Firefox download page live for the first time early one morning from bed over 8 years ago. 

Once I finally made it into work it was a delight to see our main SOPA landing page on the cover of the New York Times amongst our peers at Wikipedia, Reddit, and more. 

There are many other bits and pieces to our SOPA campaign, but here is a overview of what we did on our main web facing properties. 

Site Blackout

We blacked out our main download landing pages by having them redirect to the SOPA landing page below (www.mozilla.org/sopa). 

That means that everyone wanting to download Firefox today or anyone who came to our main website through the normal front doors saw this page instead. Those numbers are well into the multi-million. We make the "deep" content available since we want people to be able to get support, and upgrade their browser for security reasons.

A few details:

- We launched using redirects that would not harm our SEO efforts by following guidelines from posts like this people put together exactly for this reason. 

-We also chose to keep a way for visitors to download Firefox - you can see it at the bottom of the screenshot above. This was a bit tricky since we didn't want to come across as "commercial" or trying to take advantage of this event to get more downloads but as Alex Fowler so aptly stated we give visitors the download option in order to: "...continue to support our mission, ensure users have access to support, as well as the ability to find and update to safer and securer versions of Firefox." 

Start Page Blackout

Even more significantly we dramatically changed the look and feel of our default "Start" page, meaning, the page you see when you type "about:home" into your browser. 

We made it black. We added relevant info.  We put a censorship slash through the fox. Everyone on the English build of the browser should see this page today if this is their default homepage. Those numbers are in the tens of millions. 

This launch with very Mozilla-esque  - willing participants huddling together in chaos trying to throw something together to make a difference for the future of the web. 

For example: here's the main etherpad we used to draft out our actions.  Nothing short of mayhem!

We'll see what results from these efforts as the day unfolds. 

In the mean-time it's been a very exciting day.

The Future of This Blog

Thinking of shifting the focus of this blog from a casual personal blog to a place where I share my thoughts on topics that dominate my mind like: technology, marketing, finance, and lifehacks. I'd like to have a place where I can flesh out my ideas on "paper" to share with the world.

What would that look like? Well, there would be more posts like this and less like this...see the difference?

Let me know your thoughts.

A Good Thing—Craig'sList Tool I’m In Love With

Yes, I’m into the genre of blogs and books on optimizing productivity aka: “Productivity Porn”. I recently came across a cool tip I’d like to share with you. I think I’ve either been hiding under a rock, or I’m one of the millions of people who haven’t noticed the tiny little “RSS” link now at the bottom of every search done on Craig’s List. I finally noticed, and started using it the other day, and WOW, it’s a powerful little tool!

It’s a simple site enhancement to the wonderfully basic Craig’s List, until you start thinking about how to use it. What I’ve done is tied multiple searches to my Bloglines feed to be monitored daily.

Example: I’m looking to buy a cheap computer chair. I don’t want to get in my car, drive to Target, and buy a new chair for $50 + tax + gas + assembly, hell no. A basic black computer chair is one of those commodity items people moving out end up wanting to unload quickly for twenty bucks. So I set up a search on “computer chair” under Furniture for Sale in SF. Now I can sit back, wait for the results to come in, and monitor the prospects from a place I hang out anyways--my bloglines feed. This is a perfect example of the information I want from the web coming to me instead of me seeking it out again and again manually.

My computer chair is a simple example, but let’s think about more significant uses. Say you’re looking to move to a certain appealing block in San Francisco, say, “The Great Highway”. You can simple set a search under apartments for ALL mentions of that block and be amongst the first to hop on a vacancy. Want to eventually buy a house in a certain neighborhood, say, Noe Valley? Simply add that search to your RSS feed and monitor that market and wait for a under market offering like the stealth cheetah you are. Looking to buy a rarely re-sold high-end piece of furniture? Go ahead, store a search for that “Eames Lounge Chair” for under $500 you’ve been lusting over, sit back, wait for that Pac Heights housewife to list hers at a price break, and let the results come to you.

Feeds I've Set:

DS Light (by Nintendo so I can play that Brain Age game)

Liberty Hill (neighborhood I'd like to eventually live in)

Computer Chair

Sapien Bookcase (a DWR bookcase I'm lusting over)

Ikea Besta (a bookshelf I want--second-hand ikea is a good 1/2 off)