Joe Murphy

What the heck: the still-relevant links I tweeted on @joemurph in 2010

2012-01-17T16:50:15Z

I kept on going last night, and put together the better links I tweeted in 2010:

See 2011′s list of links here.

The best of the links I tweeted on @joemurph in 2011

2012-01-17T16:49:31Z

These are the best (read: my favorite) links and things I tweeted on @joemurph last year:

See 2010′s list of @joemurph links here.

One of my favorite headline rewrites (done by the New York Times)

2011-12-13T03:48:39Z

This article was published in 2010. When it first came online (and ran in print), the headline read:

Study: Real News Comes From Newspapers

The next day, the headline read:

Study Finds That Papers Lead in Providing New Information

A little bit about the Read Ranker and turning reading articles into a game

2011-05-11T22:07:16Z

This is the email I sent to coworkers introducing the Read Ranker.

You may know about this project I’m working on called Read Ranker — it’s a piece of functionality that turns reading denverpost.com articles into a game — a game where you compete against all the other readers on the site to see who has read the most.

It keeps track of the number of articles (in this draft it’s just articles in the sports section) you’ve read, and lets you know how you compare to the other people on the site right now. As in, there’s a chunk on the website that says “You’ve read 23% of today’s sports articles, which ranks you 782 out of today’s 1,500 readers.”

I’m pushing this live to everyone Thursday. Then, next week, if it goes well, I’ll move it from the sports section into every section.

If you want to take a look at it today here’s the special link that will activate it for you.

-Joe

p.s. If you’ve got better ideas for a name than “Read Ranker,” send it my way.

Greeley Tribune experiments with turning off article comments

2011-05-03T17:44:53Z

Sunday, the Greeley Tribune turned off article comments on their story for a few weeks:

We’re beginning a test today that will “pause” the reader commenting function on our website. All comments previously posted will be erased and nobody will have the ability to post new comments on stories.

I’m all for experimentation. Telling your loyal commenters that you’ve erased all their previous comments is a sure way to erase that loyalty, however. I don’t know if the Greeley Tribune really did erase all old comments, or, should the Tribune re-activate article comments, if those previous comments would return. That seems worth explaining.

Highlights from the bad-word regex list I’m working on:

2011-01-19T21:38:57Z

Today I put together the first draft of the regular expressions that will filter out bad words in the comments in a future commenting system. The variations are pulled from more than three years of comments + bad words on The Denver Post’s article commenting system.

These are the highlights:

(CHAI|TE?E?A?)[ -]?B.*(A|U).*G.*G?(E.*R|I.*N.*G?|E.*D)?.*S?
d(i|1|\|)ck(less|head|wad|weed)?
(m(o|u)th(a|er))?(F|PH)[aeiouv\-\.\*':@]+.*C?.*K(E?R?S?|I?N?G?|FACE|HEAD)
(jack|bad|dumb|fat)?(a|@).*[\$sz8x].*[\$sz8x].*e?.*(\$|s|z)?
(dip|dog|chicken)?[\$s]?.*h.*[i\|1!-@a]+.*t(ty|t|head|eating)?s?

Some people have a hard time getting over “Click Here”-style writing

2010-12-30T21:26:25Z

Example:

For the full interview with Miss Colorado, click the link.

Quote

2010-10-08T01:12:19Z

The Los Angeles Times reported recently that an estimated 30 reporters had been killed or had gone missing since a government effort began in 2006 to break up the powerful criminal groups. The article followed an extraordinary editorial in a newspaper in Ciudad Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas, that appealed to the drug lords to tell it what news they don’t want published. The front-page plea followed the killing of second journalist on the paper’s staff.

From Difference between our news media and others’: 45 words

Further proof newspapers are relevant:

2010-09-16T15:20:10Z

An editor had a voicemail left on his phone this morning… this is how he explained it to a colleague:

“I got an awesome message — a woman at a hotel room in Arvada, her alarm clock broke and she called because she wanted to know if it was Thursday or Friday. She left a voicemail, and included her phone number.”

Doteasy is a domain registrar that is not worth your trust

2010-07-06T15:42:00Z

Doteasy is a domain registrar that is not worth your trust. How do I know? Because I host Flight Club with them, and when I went through their password retrieval process this evening, they sent me my password in an email.

Emailing passwords is a bad idea for (at least) two reasons:

It means it’s likely the system storing the passwords does not encrypt the passwords, and encrypting passwords that you store is something they teach you in Web App Development 101.
That email I got with my username and password went through the internet’s tubes, and at any point along those tubes it could be sniffed, captured and used for malicious purposes.

Here’s the email Doteasy sent me:

DOTEASY MEMBER REQUEST
—————————————————————–
As requested at Jul 05, 2010 21:28:11,
the login info for your Doteasy Hosting account is shown as follows.

Domain…..: flight-club.org
Member ID..: flightclub
Password…: [my actual password]

Thank you.

Doteasy Support
‘Join the hosting revolution!’