Though I haven’t noticed any myself, it appears Flickr has had some minor hiccups during its recent hardware move and other transitions related to being acquired by Yahoo!. So what you ask, why bother pointing it out, what makes this different or worth mentioning?

Well, not so different for Flickr, but I thought it worthing of pointing out Stuart Butterfield’s posting this morning Sometimes we suck. In a way that few companies are capable of he comes off as honest, apologetic and and the same time speaks on the level of his customers instead of taking a much more polished and cautious approach to interacting with their users or otherwise trying to put a heavy spin on any issues that have come up.

Its something one can read, nod your head in understanding, and most importantly be at ease about moving forward with their product. The approach wouldn’t work for every company, with any product, but it certainly has its place.

To steal a line from Haughey yesterday… If you understand what “Uninstall the monkey” means, you’re a nerd.

Guilty as charged I guess.

Fot those non-nerds out there, or those nerds that have been on vacation for the last week it looks like a fairly serious vulnerability in the Greasemonkey scripting application has been found and the call is out to upgrade or uninstall to lock down your Firefox install.

So now that you’re up to speed (sort of) or are at least feeling a good bit nerdier, Simon Willison has posted a full explanation of the vulnerability, detailing how the use application code was opened up to cross site scripting vulnerabilities.

If any authors of either RSS readers or mail clients are listening heres a suggestion for you – where you allow flagging of messages it would seem to be to also all allow some form of note, label or tagging to be attached to that flag. Particularly with web feeds, or incoming mail from mailing lists I find that I pick messages to because they contains some useful information, a link I want to refer to later or other piece of information that I think I may want to follow up with.

But what I seem to end up with in the end is an overwhelming jumble of flagged messages (either in Mail.app or NetNewsWire). Sure, each app then allows for searching or sorting of some kind, but I find I rarely simply browse the pile and rarely end up revisiting those messages unless I’m looking for something highly specific.

Now, I’m not huge into the tagging phenomenon (though useful, I don’t feel the urge to tag everything I ever look at) but some method of tagging or simple comment system (“this is a really good solution to that problem you had on site xyz”) would be more then welcome in these type of apps.

Alternatively, does anyone out there have any Mac solutions, different apps that would allow me to flag messages (or entries) and tack on some additional information to go back later? Mailing myself messages from lists is just so much of a kludge.

Hockey Players and Owners Reach a Deal! Though it still needs to be ratified its finally the real thing!

Thank God that’s finally over with, watching the hockey sites the last few weeks have been almost as painful as the first few weeks with all the rumors and leaks.

Time to gear up for a few months of trying to keep up with free agent signings, players staying overseas, learning the new players, salary cap troubles, and cursing at the freakin genius who thinks shootouts are a good idea.

Oh, and finally…

LETS GO RANGERS!

There have been a slew of recent articles about careful incorporation of AJAX features into more traditional web based interfaces that I thought needed to be highlighted for those that haven’t yet seen them. In each the authors point out that care must be taken to not be too subtle because site visitors might not have the prior experience to pick up on changes inside the current page and instead may sit back and wait for a refresh or other indication that their changes took.

Jeffrey Veen posts: Designing for the subtlety of Ajax

Eric Meyer posts: Increasing the Strength of Ajax

Alex Bosworth posts Ajax Mistakes

Make sure to go through the comments at each site as well for some quality discussion and links.