Simon Willison's Weblog: jason-kottke

Quoting Jason Kottke

2023-03-28T22:36:41+00:00

I would say ChatGPT (mostly the new GPT-4 model), with a lot of hand-holding and cajoling from me, wrote 60-70% of the code (PHP, Javascript, CSS, SQL) for this AMA site. And we easily did it in a third of the time it would have taken me by myself, without having to look something up on Stack Overflow every four minutes or endlessly consulting CSS and PHP reference guides or tediously writing tests, etc. etc. etc. In fact, I never would have even embarked on building this little site-let had ChatGPT not existed...I would have done something much simpler and more manual instead. And it was a blast. I had so much fun and learned so much along the way.

— Jason Kottke

Tags: jason-kottke, ai, chatgpt, llms

Kottke on Chatroulette

2010-02-11T17:52:49+00:00

Kottke on Chatroulette

Jason Kottke: “In short, Chatroulette is pretty much the best site going on the internet right now.”

Tags: chatroulette, jason-kottke

Paul Otlet described the "radiated library" in 1934

2007-09-12T17:28:39+00:00

Paul Otlet described the "radiated library" in 1934

Beating Vannevar Bush in predicting something not unlike the Web by more than a decade.

Tags: history, jason-kottke, paul-otlet, radiatedlibrary, vannevar-bush

The dangers of PageRank

2004-02-06T16:58:23+00:00

A well documented side effect of the weblog format is that it brings Google PageRank in almost absurd quantities. I'm now the 5th result for simon on Google, and I've been the top result for simon willison almost since the day I launched. High rankings however are not always a good thing, especially when combined with a comment system. A growing number of bloggers have found themselves at the top position for terms of little or no relevance to the rest of their sites, which in turn can attract truly surreal comments from visitors from search engines who may never have encountered a blog before.

I know of a couple of entries on my own blog that are attracting this kind of traffic. The most interesting is probably this entry on artifical diamonds, which has attracted comments from both buyers and sellers of artificial gems. My entry on MSN messenger usability problems from 2002 has drawn a steady stream of hilarious comments, no doubt caused in part by its top rating on Google for msn messenger sucks. Amusingly, for a long time Microsoft's own search engine was giving my page a high rank for a wide variety of less negative messenger related terms.

My own experiences of this phenomenon pale in to significance to some of the others I've seen. The most impressive example has to be Jason Kottke's brief review of the Matrix Reloaded, which drew over 900 comments from Google strays, developed its own micro-community and resulted in Jason pondering who owns the conversation on my web site? Jason eventually deciding to close and archive the thread after the page grew to more than a megabyte in size.

The problem can take on a far more disturbing twist. I won't link directly to these entries for fear of adding to their predicaments, but searches for crime scene cleanup and suicide chat rooms both return blogs in the first two results. The former thread is mostly crime scene cleanup companies marketing their services, but the latter is quite frankly disturbing. It's certainly lead me to double check the titles of my entries before posting them.

Thankfully, avoiding this kind of unwanted comment traffic is pretty simple. One way is to simply disable comments for entries older than a certain time (generally a couple of weeks), although personally I like to see the occasional comment on old entries. A neater solution proposed by Russell Beattie last year is to simply hide comments from search engine referrals, thus ensuring that random strays won't leave their mark without understanding the nature of your site first.

Tags: blogging, jason-kottke, pagerank, seo

More blogmark tweaks

2003-12-11T00:28:50+00:00

I'm up to 110 blogmarks now, and from my point of view they're the single most useful feature I've added to this site in a long time. I've modified my day archive pages to show the blogmarks added on that day, and I'm considering adding them to individual entry pages as well so that an entry is displayed along with the blogmarks added while that entry was at the top of my blog. The idea there is that I could aim to blogmark "related items" for the top entry, although obviously unrelated sites would end up in there as well.

The other thing I'm currently mulling over is whether or not blogmarks should allow comments. Jason Kottke's inline links get a decent amount of comment traffic but I'm not sure mine would get enough individual traffic to warrant a comments thread for each one. I could always add comments to the blogmark daily archive pages, although that could get confusing on days with a lot of comment-worthy links.

Does anyone actually look at the blogmarks? Would you comment on them or read the comments if they were available?

Tags: blogging, jason-kottke, site-upgrades

Blogmarks

2003-11-24T00:52:16+00:00

This entry was going to be another list of links, together with a note about how much I really needed to set up a separate link blog. Then I realised that it would make more sense just to set one up so that's exactly what I've done. I still need to implement the archive but it's getting dark so I'm posting this and heading home.

My main points of inspiration were Paul Hammond's bookmark store, Mark Pilgrim's b-links, Anil Dash's Daily Links and Jason Kottke's Remaindered Links. Since there didn't seem to be any naming convention I decided to call them blogmarks, which isn't a new term but doesn't seem to have a widely accepted meaning yet either.

The system is powered by a simple bookmarklet. To make things a little more interesting I'm capturing the referral information and using it to automatically generate the 'via' link; since the title of the previous page isn't available in Javascript I extract is using a server side script instead. I swayed briefly between using page extracts a la Hammond or sarcastic commentary a la Pilgrim and decided that commentary would be far more fun.

Tags: anil-dash, blogging, jason-kottke, mark-pilgrim, paul-hammond, site-upgrades

Shiny

2002-10-27T11:00:45+00:00

It's probably a good idea to keep axes and Jack Daniels away from Jason Kottke for the next few days...

Tags: jason-kottke

Pretty link on Kottke

2002-07-16T09:51:34+00:00

In a discussion on css-discuss recently about underlines a on links, I pointed to kottke.org as an example of clever use of CSS for links where by the link underline is a slightly later colour than the link text. Today, Jason explains the technique and the thinking behind it.

Tags: css, jason-kottke