Why is Ghostery ad-network friendly?

They sell the metrics they collect back to the advertising networks. They're public about this, it's not a secret.

It is opt-in, but I do agree, pretty slimy.

If paywalls don't work, and ads don't work, some kind of metered-browsing would be a solution. It's so far away from happening, it's hardly worth discussing, but imagine this:

* let's say soundcloud could charge $.0001 (or something) for every pageview (or play, or some other interaction that the website chooses)

* this fee is mostly transparent to the user, they've signed up once, and have access to all metered sites

* the user would deposit money in an account ahead of time to use for the metered sites

* the metering could be built-in to web browsers to display when you're on a metered site using a standard graphic (like how the lock is a standard symbol for a secure connection)

What you're describing is very close to https://contributor.google.com/ where you can pay to replace ads with content of your choice. For the content publisher this is a completely transparent operation.

On second thought, after doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations, the per-pageview fee would have to be a lot more than that. Even if you charged $.01 per pageview, that still couldn't compete with ad revenue.

So nevermind.

I'll love Mitch Murder forever for recreating the totally rad music from the classic Mr. T self-help video "Be Somebody or Be Somebody's Fool".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWRbf-mUsyU

Thanks for the link. His work is inspiring.

What's to stop them from having "Sprint Business Network". Set up your business website with Sprint hosting to allow the $12/mo members to access your site ... for free!

I don't think he was talking about using Git for graphics files. I assume he meant html/css/javascript files.

As a designer who codes (or a coder who designs, not sure at this point), I can see what he means about learning Git. It was tough for me to grasp until I saw this:

http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/

> I definitely want to be a part of VR, but I will not work with Facebook. Their motives are too unclear and shifting, and they haven’t historically been a stable platform. There’s nothing about their history that makes me trust them, and that makes them seem creepy to me.

Interesting how it all boils down to trust. You could think of all kinds of amazing possibilities, but if you don't trust them, it's 100% off.

That's whack!

I think the key question is: At what point is building a user interface more expensive than hiring a full time developer?

or buying a product

I'm working on a JSON based website layout and component system.

For example: a component that lists blog posts could be represented by:

  {
    options:{
      elements:[image, title, author, date]
    },
    criteria:{
      sort:date.desc, 
      published:true, 
      limit:10
    },
    request_vars:{page:3}
  }

That would show the last 10 posts that are published, ordered by date, on page 3 of the results.

That's a simple example, this site: volumeone.org is built almost entirely this way.

Since it's in JSON format, JavaScript can be used to build UIs that build the components and layouts.

I might suggest using YAML too, either as an alternative or as a complete replacement. YAML (when written in a certain way) is basically JSON without any line noise, and optimized for human reading and writing. You will be able to parse it exactly the same.

I tried that too, but sometimes the nesting level is too deep for YAML. There were also some difficulties when escaping special characters in YAML.

In regards to the nesting level: what do you mean? There shouldn't be any technical limit on the nesting depth.

As for escaping special characters: I've run into that a lot, and I agree it is very annoying. God help you if you want to specify regexes on lines.

So for a lot of my YAML-ish applications, where YAML is used for user templating or configuration, I run everything through a really simple postprocessor (often by encapsulating non-digit lines with single quotes, and a few other tweaks) and that seems to work well for me. That way the user only has to type the bare minimum (no double quotes, no curly braces, no/fewer commas), and what they write "just works."

Your example is a JavaScript array, not a JSON object. Just saying.

How do you implement it in browser?

It's server-side. There's a record for each page/component in a database where the JSON is stored. It converts the "criteria" part into SQL, and the "options" part into HTML, and returns the resulting HTML for each component.

Might I suggest something like redis* for storing this data? Or is that what you mean by database?

* http://redis.io/

Thanks for the suggestion. I've been meaning to try that out, maybe it's time to look into Redis.