We first learned about this from my friend and start-up adviser Greg Head in this great 5-minute video from an event in Phoenix:

Some of the advertisers and Web analytics firms used on this site may place “tracking cookies” on your computer. We are telling you about them right upfront, and we want you to know how to get rid of these tracking cookies if you like.

I’m impressed with the visual treatment and the fact that they’re very upfront with this information. Of course you’ll only see this message once (or whenever you clear all your browser cookies), but it’s a big improvement over most sites.

For more details on tracking cookies, see the EFF’s coverage of online behavioral tracking.

Click the image below for a full size screenshot:

Fiddler is a Web Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP(S) traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP(S) traffic, set breakpoints, and “fiddle” with incoming or outgoing data. Fiddler includes a powerful event-based scripting subsystem, and can be extended using any .NET language.

I originally used Fiddler back the early days with Internet Explorer, but have recently picked it up again for use with several different browsers. Although some browsers have more native capabilities now (like Firefox with FireBug), using Fiddler consistently makes it a bit easier to concentrate on the problem at hand rather than the tool itself. Fiddler can also handle and decode HTTPS traffic now.

Setting up Fiddler with different browsers is pretty straightforward:

• Internet Explorer: No changes needed; when Fiddler is running it will automatically pick up all IE traffic
• Google Chrome: Same as IE (automatic)
• Apple Safari: Same as IE (automatic)
• Opera: Same as IE (automatic), but may need to start Fiddler before Opera
• Firefox: Change network options to use the HTTP proxy at address 127.0.0.1, port 8888; also see the Fiddler Firefox addon
• Curl: Curl from the command line is very useful when testing webservices; to route through Fiddler, just include the proxy option like --proxy 127.0.0.1:8888
• Other Apps: See the Configuring Clients help page for any other application which lets you configure a proxy
• Mac/Linux: For cases where you need to debug on a different platform, you can still route traffic through Fiddler on a Windows system; after starting Fiddler, set up the application on Mac/Linux to use the proxy at windowshost:8888

For more background and “how-to” guides to get started with Fiddler, check out the Fiddler help page.

The following chart shows the percentage of the top 8 platforms visiting cantoni.mobi over the last nine months:

Observations:

• Android is the big gainer, growing from 4% to 21% of traffic
• Blackberry gained from 16% to 24%
• The above gains seem to be at the expense of Windows devices which dropped from 31% to 15%
• iPhone + iPod share remained about the same
• Symbian, Samsung and Palm all dropped slightly

Data source: Google Analytics mobile device reports for cantoni.mobi website

Some good collections of login form examples:

• Login Forms gallery (Chris Messina)
• Elements of Design: Login Forms Design Showcase

… Go to www.spoke.com, search for your name, click your name to access your profile, then click the “This is me” button to update your profile and set privacy preferences. … If you would prefer to permanently suppress your information from Spoke’s directory, access your profile as described above, click the “This is me” button, select the “Learn more” link, then see instructions in the “How do I claim and update my Spoke Profile?” section.

After following these steps, my Spoke.com page still shows up in search results, but presumably that will stop at some point. In any case, anyone clicking on my profile will just see the message “This profile is no longer available”.

I recommend not installing their toolbar or providing any further information on the site. You should be able to give just enough to “claim” your profile, then disable the public view of it.

Normally I don’t visit Sprint.com much, but this weekend I needed to activate a replacement phone and couldn’t get it done online. Visited the local Sprint store today and got it taken care of, but even the Sprint staff was grumbling about their in-store software which was also just updated.

Cute outage message screenshot (click for larger image):

One tool in particular is his Geomaker application which “creates microformats and maps from geographical information embedded in texts”. GeoMaker feeds your provided text into Yahoo’s Placemaker service which will identify any geo locations referenced. Geomaker then massages this data into a Yahoo map widget which can be placed on any web page such as a blog entry.

Geomaker accepts either a block of test, a web page, or an RSS feed. The RSS feed option is a great way to quickly visualize to locations being referenced. For example, the following is a map of recent items from the Yahoo! World News RSS feed:

To stress test Placemaker and see how accurate it is, I dropped in the lyrics for Johnny Cash’s rendition of “I’ve Been Everywhere”. Results? It identified 70 place references and missed 22. The detector seems to be less accurate when given place names like this in a list. It does better when places are used in context, like the news articles above.

Here is the resulting map for “I’ve Been Everywhere” (minus the outlying countries Argentina and Costa Rica):

What is Lorem Ipsum text? The lipsum.com site explains:

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

I made a simple custom data table to access this service via YQL. To use these services, you’ll need to reference the custom table I created, then “select” some random text. The service can create text in a specified amount of either paragraphs, words, bytes, or lists. You can also control whether or not you want each string to start at “lorem ipsum…”, or to start randomly.

For example, to request 5 paragraphs (try it in YQL Console):

use "http://scooterlabs.com/yql/lorem.ipsum.xml";
select * from lorem.ipsum 
  where amount="5" and what="paras";

To request 20 lists (try it in YQL Console):

use "http://scooterlabs.com/yql/lorem.ipsum.xml";
select * from lorem.ipsum
  where amount="20" and what="lists";

As a quick exercise, I made custom data tables to access these random number services via YQL, Yahoo’s “select * from internet” service. To use these services in YQL, you’ll need to include the custom tables I created, then “select” some random numbers.

For example, to request a few random numbers (try it in YQL Console):

use "http://scooterlabs.com/yql/random.integers.xml";
select * from random.integers 
  where num="10" and min="1" and max="1000";

To request a random sequence, where every number in the range is used once (try it in YQL Console):

use "http://scooterlabs.com/yql/random.sequences.xml";
select * from random.sequences 
  where min="10" and max="19";

To generate some random strings (try it in YQL Console):

use "http://scooterlabs.com/yql/random.strings.xml";
select * from random.strings 
  where num="10" and len="20";

For a full description of each service, and more optional parameters, refer to the Random.org HTTP interface description.

Update 2010-02-25: I heard back from the owner of the Random.org site who said he has been blocking all Yahoo! Pipes traffic. So, this YQL query may stop working at some point.