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josephdunphy

Last seen: 14 hours ago

Joseph is a guy from Chicago, Illinois, USA

Politically Moderate, Underemployed Jewish Applied Mathematician / Electrical Engineer tutoring all knowing freshmen in Mathematics. This profile, like most of the Web, is optimized for a screen resolution of 1024 x 768, and must be viewed in Internet Explorer. A more complete listing of posts, including archived ones, can be found on the introduction page for this site, and is backed up on this page at Googlegroups, with occasional commentary found on Stumbling into the Void on Tribe.

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  • josephdunphys blog - StumbleUpon

    Rated Dec 14 2008 • 7 reviews • stumblers • stumbleupon.com






    Hi, again. I'm in the process of turning this profile into something that will be more of a blog. A recurring theme will be my attempts to build on what I've seen on some of the sites I've reviewed; what did I learn from visiting them, what subjects did they touch on, etc. You might have noticed the continued post format I was playing around with on the Draka and Steak Porn Video reviews; expect to see more of that, with some of the short, one-liner reviews moved into the spaces between the essays. What I'm trying to get away from is the idea of Stumbleupon as a bookmarking site, as I move toward making this into a site that one can simply sit down and feel comfortable reading; more like a magazine and less like a phonebook, or something like that.

    Comments about Stumbleupon related drama, past and present, can be found elsewhere, if you really want to read about that for some reason.




    Browser selection - Please pardon the imperious tone in my comments above, but Stumbleupon surprised us by changing the background color on our pages. In IE, my blog has a black background, and you can see the links. In Firefox and Chrome, the background is white, so you can't, unless you have logged into Stumbleupon, in which case you might see a black background even after you log out, again. Very silly. I can't imagine what they were thinking about, when they did this. It definitely damages the functionality of our pages, and causes a needless headache for visitors to SU.

    I regret any inconvenience, but would point out that this wasn't my idea or doing, and that unlike the SU staff, I have no say in it. If you'd like to know when this will be fixed, they're the ones to ask. I wouldn't have the faintest idea, myself.


  • StumbleUpon.com: Personalized Recommendations to Help You...

    Rated Dec 14 2008 • 1471 reviews • stumbleupon • stumbleupon.com





    Yes, I gave a thumbs up to a site I'm subscribed to. There's a shocker.



    This is fun. Hit the stumble button and randomly pull up sites that you never heard of, surprisingly many of which turn out to be pretty good, and most of which are at least entertaining. One drawback to the site is that the owners have jumped on the rel=nofollow bandwagon, going so far as to deny their users fully operative linkbacks to their homepages. Go to my "about me" page, unrender it and look for the piece of code with the string "mashable.com" in it and you'll see what I mean. Experience has taught me to be wary of the establishment of effectively unreciprocated links within my sites, that these seem to provide a sort of trap for the search engine spiders, the nonreciprocating pages soaring very much at the expense of my other pages, so this means that I'll have to insert some rel=nofollow tags into the links to my Stumbleupon profile where I can and cut the links elsewhere. Most disappointing.



    Disappointing enough to greatly reduce my usage of the site, but not enough to get me to abandon it. For the most part, by Internet standards, it seems to be a very friendly kind of place, with far less trollage than I've seen elsewhere, offering an abundance of delightful surprises to go with the less delightful ones, like the absence of a logout button in the location where one would expect to find it. To log out, one needs to click on "tools" on the Stumbleupon navbar and choose "sign out" out of the dropdown menu; be honest - is that one of the places where you'd look first?



    I can only hope that some users were careful about setting up their account on shared computers, especially if their roommates were a little mischievous, because until their mildly bewildered friends succeeded in discovering where the logout option had been hidden, those roommates would have been able to post to the site as the unlogged out users, raising so many possibilities. Somewhere I know that even as we speak, there's a headbanger trying to explain to his buddies why he wrote that homage to Pat Sajak's homepage. I can't imagine that's going to go well for him.