CircleCI local debugging tips

Recently, I’ve been working with CircleCI for doing some automation and testing work, and I’ve been trying to run things locally on my machine, rather than pushing everything up to CircleCI to have it run on their servers. But I kept running into problems with things like SSH keys, known hosts, and environment variables. These … Read more

The Tao of Programming

A novice asked the Master: “Here is a programmer that never designs, documents or tests his programs. Yet all who know him consider him one of the best programmers in the world. Why is this?” The Master replied: “That programmer has mastered the Tao. He has gone beyond the need for design; he does not … Read more

Klout: A good idea. Too bad it’s complete bullshit.

Oh, Klout.  I want to love you, but you just won’t let me.

Let me begin this post by saying that Klout, the web site that claims to measure social media influence, isn’t a terrible idea.  There’s a really good reason to want a decent methodology for determining influence online.  After all, if you’re going to be spending time and effort to reach out to your audiences through social media, it makes sense to try to target the audience members who are most influential, and most likely to use their influence to talk up your product or service.

The idea is solid.  But Klout’s implementation is terrible, for one simple reason.  Their algorithm is ridiculously bad.

I’m not the first person to point this out.  But until today, I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt; maybe it works, mostly, with little problems here and there.  But in fact, their ratings just don’t bear any resemblance to reality.

To demonstrate, have a look at the screen caps after the jump.  These were all taken today.

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Web apps? Native apps? What’s the right strategy for mobile?

With the explosion of mobile internet access that has been building for the past few years, I’ve gotten a lot of questions from people lately asking about what sort of strategy they should take in approaching mobile for their news or information site.  Should I develop a mobile version of my web site?  Should I … Read more