Before I begin the reviews, I’d like to mention something. Personally, I don’t know anyone who uses a naked iPhone (I call that “going commando”). The fact that everyone uses a case of some kind is pretty good evidence that the sleek nice-for-the-eyes backing of the iPhone is actually not very practical. It’s just too slippery. It will slide out of your pocket or hands very easily, which is not something you want your high-end mobile phone to do. There are soft cases, leather cases, and hard plastic cases. Shortly after purchasing my iPhone, I, without much thought on the matter, purchased a Griffin Clarifi case, which has a built in close-up lens. I have been very happy with this product, even though the lens is sometimes hard to clean.

So that’s where I’m coming from when I began to test out Proporta’s products.

Antimicrobial Silicone Case with SteriTouch for the iPhone 3G

The silicone case with its paper insert next to my naked iPhone.

For no good reason, I decided to replace the anti-scratch film on my iPhone’s screen that had come with my Clarifi with the identical one included in the Antimicrobial Silicone Case. The case does what it promises.

• It makes the iPhone less slippery
• It prevents scratches from casual drops or bumps.

After a couple days of use, however, I began to get annoyed by two main problems.

1. The silicone backing becomes a magnet for pocket lint, which is hard to brush off of the case.
2. The case doesn’t fit quite snugly enough around the phone. Particularly down at the bottom where there is only a fine strip between the hole for the USB connector and the main button. When you press the button, the silicone case moves a little bit and generally gives the sensation that it’s going to fall off.

I suspect that these complains are true of all silicone soft cases, and that it is not a particular problem with this case from Proporta.

Ted Baker Leather iPhone 3G Case

Personally I have no idea who Ted Baker is, but when my wife saw it, she said, “Oooh! A Ted Baker case!”, so I guess handbag-aware women might be impressed. The quality of the case is very impressive. The leather screams elegance. And there’s something very appealing about the wrist motion to flip up the cover to use the iPhone.

My only complaint about the Ted Baker case is that it makes touching controls on the edges of the screen rather difficult, which is pretty important for doing anything with the onscreen keyboard. Several times during the week I used it, I found myself removing the iPhone from the case (which is very easy, by the way) to type an email before placing it back inside for protection and reading of email.

After a week of normal use, the snaps that seemed so pleasingly crisp when I first began using the case began to get stubborn to unsnap. And eventually one of them broke off. Remember that this is after only one week. Proporta assures me that all their products come with a lifetime warranty and that, due to the handmade nature of this particular product, defects sometimes occur.

The broken snap on my Ted Baker iPhone 3G case.

If leather cases were my thing, I would definitely buy and use this product. But I just don’t like the extra unsnapping and flipping motion every time I want to use my phone. However if you like leather cases and you want to look like an elegant executive when you use your iPhone, I highly recommend the Ted Baker iPhone 3G case from Proporta.

Handy Travel Bundle

The third item I chose to review was the Handy Travel Bundle, which consists of an Airline Headphone Adapter, which lets you listen to movies on an airplane without paying the 5€ ridiculous fee the airline offers you, a leather Passport Holder, and a Leather Memory Wallet. I have not yet been on an airplane, so I have not been able to test the audio adapter, but it looks just like my old one. The passport holder is quite nice and will come in very handy in displaying the picture page of my passport in the future. The memory wallet…well… You see, the memory wallet never actually arrived…

Shipping Confusion

First they sent me the entire Handy Travel Bundle except for the Memory Wallet. I wrote back that the whole shipment had arrived except for the one item, and my contact apologized and said she’d send the Memory Wallet immediately.

A week later, I had a package in the mail from Proporta, but rather than the Memory Wallet, they had sent me another Passport Holder. I reported this to my contact and she asked if I’d send it back to them. I told her that I wasn’t willing to pay postage out of my own wallet (not a memory wallet) for Proporta’s mistake, but that if she’d like to send a courier, I’d give it to them. She said I could keep the Passport Holder and that they’d send the Memory Wallet.

Shortly after this interaction, out of professional curiosity, I began examining the product ids listed for the products I’d ordered on their website and the ones listed on the invoice. The Passport Holder had the same product id as the Memory Wallet! That would make it pretty easy to mistake one for the other in their shipping database. I informed my contact of my discoveries and she passed my information on to the web developer. Managing databases full of products and the website that displays them and takes and organizes orders is what I do, so I understand that sometimes mistakes like this can happen (although I’d never ever have two products with the same id – that’s an extremely amateur mistake).

Another week goes by and I get another package in the mail, and what do I find inside? A Leather Wallet – Limited Edition (St. Patrick’s Day). Well blimey!

I emailed Proporta and told them that with their third strike, they’re out. I don’t really want a Leather Memory Wallet. I just chose the Travel Bundle because I needed the audio adapter and as a bundle, it seemed like more free stuff. Within a half hour I received a call from my contact apologizing again. She said that the Memory Wallet was out of stock and she had, without contacting me, chosen a similar product based on the upcoming holiday. At the very least some sort of “We didn’t have X, so we sent you Y. We hope you don’t mind.” note should have been included on the invoice.

The St. Patrick’s Day wallet is actually very nice, and of high quality. If I hadn’t just bought a new wallet this week, I might use it for a while. At least now I have a backup.

Conclusion

Proporta’s products are very nice. The level of quality and detail is very high. While some mistakes may be made and flaws found, they are very professional about it and, most important of all, actually stand by the motto “The customer is always right.” Not all companies do so, and Proporta deserves some respect.

However, none of their products really interest me, so I don’t think I’ll be using any of them in the long term except perhaps the passport holder. Really, Proporta, it’s not you, it’s me.

Time to put my Griffin Clarifi back on my iPhone….

To be honest, I was a little doubtful, but I added the link and replied that I would remove it if I didn’t receive $50 in my PayPal account within 24 hours. Sure enough, the next day, there was a big fat Ulysses sitting in my PayPal account. Awesome.

What I did not expect was to later find, in my blog stats, a referrer back to a Google Spreadsheet that was publicly viewable (I’m row 302 of the “LA” sheet). This is the document where the Search Engine Optimization company is keeping track of websites where they see the word in question and are willing to offer money. It seems that offers range from $25 to $100 per year. It makes me wonder if I could have demanded more. Anyway, I was pleased to note that one of my row neighbors in the spreadsheet is none other than Zoë Keating.

Anyway, it seems pretty amateurish for an SEO company to A) click on links in your online spreadsheet without disabling referrer information in your browser, and B) allow public access to your spreadsheet so anyone, particularly those that you may not have negotiated a deal with yet, can see how much you’re offering to others.

UPDATE (2010-Jan-19): I’ve donated my Ulysses to Non-Believers Giving Aid to be split 50/50 between Doctors Without Borders and the International Red Cross for use in Haiti. I can’t think of a better place for the money of this incompetent SEO company to go.

I’ve ordered them from least important to most impressive and important, just like top ten lists are supposed to be.

10) WP Security Scan

[plugin dir link] This is just the equivalent of installing a virus checker on a Windows machine. It’s just something you should do. It runs some checks on your Wordpress installation and suggests that you change some settings from the defaults, because leaving some values like your database name and administrator login name as the factory default makes your Wordpress installation that much more hackable. Another thing it does is hide the particular version you are using (also important information for hackers) if you’re using one of the many Wordpress themes that display it in the footer.

9) WP Widget Cache

[plugin dir link] I can’t remember how I found this one, but I love it. Most of the widgets, the individual sections on a Wordpress blog’s sidebar that are present on every page, don’t need to be executed for every single page hit. The Blogroll for instance, only needs to be run if a link has been added, edited, or removed in the database. Unless that has happened, there’s no reason to be querying the database for that information every time a page that is visited on your blog. This plugin caches the output of your widgets to static html files and allows you to set triggers (i.e. new comment submitted, new post submitted, etc.) or time limits to cause them to be uncached and re-executed. It’s a brilliant idea and works wonderfully.

8) All in One SEO Pack

[plugin dir link] I read an article recently that claimed that many Search Engine Optimization (making it easier for search engines to index your site and send you traffic) experts are snake oil salesmen. In reality, the article was really saying that most SEO work is simple stuff like putting proper meta tags, titling your pages, and formatting of your urls. While not difficult, that can be a lot of tedious work. And that is where this plugin comes in. You simply install it and boom, 90% of what is tedious about Search Engine Optimization is done for you.

7) Google XML Sitemaps

[plugin dir link] XML sitemaps (here’s mine) are another piece of the important Search Engine Optimization puzzle. This plugin generates a file on your server that search engine web crawlers look at to determine when your content has been updated and should be re-indexed. Without this plugin your site will be indexed on whatever default monthly schedule that search engines spiders use, but once you have an XML sitemap, you can tell them to come more often for recent posts that are likely to change and be commented on, and less often for ancient posts that are probably static for a long time.

6) iMax Width

This particular plugin performs an impressive little trick and is very, very handy. It does two things, really. If you are naughty enough to embed an image in your post without specifying the width and height information in the img tag, when you save your post, this plugin will go fetch the image you are embedding and set the width and height for you. However! If the width of the image is wider than a threshold you have set (mine is 500 pixels, because of the current design of my blog), it will change the width and height tags on your img tag to proportionally (no distortion) size down the image so that it fits inside your blog design. This plugin might not be useful for everyone, but my blogging style is often very photo-heavy, and this plugin saves me several hours each week.

5) Subscribe to Comments

[plugin dir link] I only installed this plugin just recently, but I’ve been wanting this functionality for a long time, and I love how well it works. As the post author, I get an email any time someone comments on my blog. But sometimes it’s nice for my readers to receive emails when comments are submitted to posts that they have commented on, so they know to come back and defend their point of view without having to remember to check back for new comments. That’s what this plugin does. When you submit a comment, you may check a box that says, “Notify me of follow-up comments via e-mail” and you will be notified via email of each subsequent comment on that post. And unsubscribing is easy, so you don’t have to worry about spamming your readers. This plugin is a must for running a good reader-friendly blog.

4) Wordpress.com Stats

[plugin dir link] I use Google Analytics, but there’s something nice about how well the Wordpress.com Stats analytics package nestles right into my blog admin. As a result, I check the stats provided by this plugin much more often than Google Analytics. To be honest, I even like the presentation of the data better than that of the Big G. If you want an easy way to know about the traffic to your website, mainly which pages are most popular, how many hits per day you’re getting, and where traffic is coming from, this plugin is for you.

3) Get Recent Comments

[plugin dir link] Wordpress comes with a built-in “Recent Comments” widget, but it’s not very customizable. I found and adore this plugin because it lets me format and filter the recent comments widget at the top right of my blog just the way I want it. Highly recommended.

2) WP Super Cache

[plugin dir link] This plugin is an absolute must if you expect any level of traffic to your blog. It caches entire pages and saves them to static html files on your web server for super fast page loading on your high traffic pages. Their motto is that it makes your blog “Digg-proof”. While I have not been dugg since installing it, I have to say that I am very impressed with the performance improvement.

And the #1 plugin I can’t live without is…

1) WP Captcha Free

[plugin dir link] When I found this plugin, as a professional web developer, I was seriously impressed by the ingenuity behind its method of avoiding automated comment spam. It works by sending a behind-the-scenes AJAX request to the server to request a special hash code (like an autogenerated password based on information about the requesting browser, time and date) which is then included when the comment is submitted. Comment submissions, like those generated by an automated spam bot, that do not have this secret hash code attached to them will be rejected. Since installing this plugin, my comment spam has plummeted, and I’m pretty sure that the two spam messages per month that I get are actually submitted by a person rather than an automated bot. The work that an automated spammer would have to do to get around this mechanism is tremendous, so as long as those of us using this plugin are in the minority, they won’t do that extra work and we can live relatively free of comment spam and those horrible, horrible CAPTCHAs. I love this plugin!

Honorable Mentions

WP Ajax Edit Comments

[plugin dir link] This plugin is very handy for the admin for quick edits to comments, but it also allows commenters to correct mistakes that they find shortly after publishing their comment. I much prefer the submission-and-correction paradigm to the preview-and-submit paradigm. It feels cleaner.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

[plugin dir link] This is by far the most customizable “related posts” plugin I’ve seen. It’s a great way to direct interested new readers to your other content to hold their interest. Wonderful.

WP-PageNavi

[plugin dir link] If you go out to my homepage, you’ll see a nice page navigation user interface at the bottom of the page. In the business, we call this pagination. It’s a nice way to let visitors quickly navigate through a long list of posts in a certain category or in your archives or whatever. It’s one of those plugins that is so simple and useful that you wonder why isn’t core Wordpress functionality.

Hi Erik

I am a contributing editor of Secrets of The Lost Symbol, a reader’s guide to Dan Brown’s new novel, which will be published in December.

I am writing to request permission to re-publish your blog post Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol is Anti-Science as part of our book.

Secrets of The Lost Symbol will comprise a range of interviews, essays, and articles from scientists, historians, thinkers and writers about the major themes embedded in the novel. It will be published by William Morrow/HarperCollins this December. We expect a print run of 100,000.

Our previous books, which include Secrets of the Code and Secrets of Angels & Demons, have sold more than four million copies and been published in over 30 languages. (If you would like to learn more about those books, and their list of contributors, please see: http://secretsofthecode.com.)

We are still finalizing the content of our book. But we wanted to explore whether you would be interested in allowing us to republish your article for a fee of $250?

Many thanks
And best regards

[NAME REDACTED]

Okay, so a number of thoughts are running through my head at this point. On the one hand, someone is offering me $250 for about 2.5 hours of work that I already did with no expectation of compensation! Awesome.

On the other hand, say this publisher sells his books for $9.99, they pay 100 authors for their essays, and they sell four million copies. Hold on, let me get my calculator. That comes out to… Cost: $25,000, Revenue: $39,960,000, and Profit: $39,935,000! And they want to pay me $250!!?

In my other publishing negotiations, at least I’ve at least been able to get a free copy of the book! So I responded thusly, from my hotel room in Bordeaux:

Very interesting! A few questions…

Attribution will be my name and the URL to my post?

What will you do with hyperlinks? Some of my points are made with a simple link. Footnotes with urls? Even so, I’d like to flesh out the 9/11 point with a summary of the linked page’s conclusion, before you take your copy.

How about $300 and a copy of the book? Can you ship to Spain?

Sent from my iPhone

Those are all reasonable things to say, I think. That was on a Saturday, and it took him until the next Tuesday to respond. Luckily I was busy with tourism, so the wait wasn’t as excruciating as it could have been.

Hi Erik

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you.

Our editors have spent the past few days running through the table of contents for their book and discovered that they do not have enough room for all of the articles/essays they initially hoped to include. I’m afraid your blog post is one of the items that they have, regretfully, had to pass on.

Many thanks for your willingness to work with us.
And best regards

[NAME REDACTED]

Doh! I responded to confirm that my rejection was unrelated to me trying to get an extra $50 out of the deal and confirm that at least some of the essays they will publish cover the Anti-Science angle. He confirmed that:

Hi Erik

No, not at all. The money had nothing to do with it.

Our big problem is space. We’ve simply reached a critical stage where the book had to be rejigged. Unfortunately, a large number of pieces, including yours, didn’t make it through the other side.

We do have a number of pieces on the science angle – including some big name writers. So never fear!

[NAME REDACTED]

And so I join the enormous club of people who have had their hopes raised and rejigged by professional editors. Oh well. I still stand by all my points in that post and it continues to get a fair amount of traffic from internet searches. If anything this incident has motivated me to spend the time in the future to criticize pop culture phenomena when they deserve it.

Just like an astronaut navigates the stars (still only figuratively, unfortunately), an internauta navigates the complex network of tubes connected computers collectively known as The Internet. The threshold to be considered an internauta is more or less being able to send and read email and watch a video on YouTube. I mainly hear the term on the television news when talking about users of a certain website.

The Spanish wikipedia page for internauta vaguely claims that the term originated in France. The English wikipedia page for internaut claims that its use is spreading, but I haven’t ever seen it written or heard it spoken in English. Personally I’m all for its spread.

I’ve always despised the term “web surfer”. The term was borrowed from someone who rapidly changes television channels, and I can only assume that it originated there (or maybe in pre-television radio?), as a clever metaphor for “looking for a good radio wave”.

Why It Works

1. Everyone is an expert on something.
2. When asked a question you don’t know, often times the name of a friend who probably knows the answer pops into your head.
3. People are more likely to trust an answer from someone that a friend referred them to.
4. Sometimes Google just isn’t good enough for finding information, particularly to “why?” questions or opinions (e.g. “Does anyone know a good Italian restaurant in Charlottesville, VA?”). Google can list them for you, but what you’re really looking for is a single person’s testimonial.
5. Answering questions about your areas of expertise, even to complete strangers, is rather fulfilling.

I choose to use Aardvark’s instant messaging interface, via XMPP to my Google Talk account, but it will work perfectly well through the website or via email. Currently I am listed as an expert on the following subjects: Apple Mail, artificial intelligence, Cantabria, CSS, expat, Flickr, HTML, iPhoto, java programming, javascript, Mac OS X, poop (thanks, sgazzetti!), Spain, Spanish, timelapse photography, and web design.

How It Works

Whenever any Aardvark user asks a question that Aardvark’s sophisticated natural language parser determines to be about something I’m an expert in, I get an instant message, first asking me if I want to answer a question on topic X, and then the question if I confirm that I do. To which I can provide an answer, say “pass” to skip, refer the question to one of my contacts, or say “mute” to make Aardvark stop asking me about that topic. I say “pass” to about 80% of the questions, but they are very often interesting. You can also help out their language parser by tagging the questions with what they are really about. If I get a question asking about any good B&B’s in Malaga, just because I know about Spain, I can add the tag “Malaga” to it, to better help Aardvark track down a knowledgeable person. So far I have only referred one question, but that’s because my only Aardvark contact is sgazzetti, and our areas of expertise don’t overlap much.

If my explanation hasn’t helped much, perhaps the 20 second demo video on their homepage will.

No Bother

One thing that Aardvark has done really well is allowing you to fine tune how intrusive you want it to be. You can set the days of the week and times of day when it can contact you, and whether it should only contact you by instant message or if it can contact you by email. If you are waffling on whether or not to join, getting spammed to death should not be a concern. Personally, I enjoy the questions, and I have it set pretty much wide open. As a result, I get about six questions a day.

Responsive To Contact

Twice I have contacted the folks at Aardvark, once to suggest a feature, and once to ask to participate in a trial for an iPhone app, and both times a human has responded to me in a matter of minutes. And they have only sent me one unsolicited email, to invite me to be an “Aardvocate”, which is some kind of beta-testing superuser to reward all my participation. If you’re jealous, you should be.

Leprechauns

Almost all of the questions are serious. But since I’m such a smart-ass, when I joined, and all I knew was that it was a service for answering questions, I gave it “Is there a god?”, to which I received the serious and thoughtful answer, “I think so, but apparently I’m hardly representative of everyone.”

But a couple weeks ago, I got this one. This screenshot is also a good example of how Aardvark contacts you, and if you don’t respond within a few minutes, apologizes and leaves you alone unless you request the question.

Later I was informed that the question had been withdrawn.

The Third R

So far, all the questions I’ve asked Aardvark have been along the lines of “Is there any way to do X with software Y?” Those questions have only elicited “I want to do that too, but I don’t think it’s possible. Let me know if you figure out how!?” responses. But there was once when I couldn’t easily find an answer on Google. I was trying to figure out how to name a “to be subtracted” variable in a computer program, and couldn’t remember the proper word for “the thing being subtracted” in arithmetic. My question:

In arithmetic, the word for “number to be multiplied by” is “multiplicand”. For division, it’s “divisor”. What are the equivalent terms for addition and subtraction?

The answer I received was very thorough:

I think this is what you are looking for: addend + addend = sum, subtrahend – minuend = difference, muliplicand x multiplier = product, dividend ÷ divisor = quotient.

Perfect! I later ended up not using the word minuend in my program, but still cool.

Want to try it?

I think Aardvark is currently still on the invite-only system to reduce an user numbers. If you would like to give Aardvark a try as my contact, click here.

Your organization has been using the internet for at least 20 years, way back before there existed a World Wide Web or even a Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Even I remember the days when Gopher was the most user friendly internet service. In the intervening years, however, you may have noticed that a few unwritten standards have cropped up.

Principally, I’m referring to the total dominance of HTTP and HTML as the primary method of communicating between servers and human clients on the internet, and how every single site on the internet will forward you to www.domain.com if you attempt to visit domain.com without the now-completely-assumable www prefix. Some websites, in the interest of brevity, will forward you the other way, preferring their website to not use www. But the important thing is that a web page will show up with or without the www!!!

Every time I visit your website, I type in nasa.gov into my browser’s address bar, and every time, it fails!! To actually find your website, I am forced to hit my W key three times and go to www.nasa.gov. I know of no other websites in 2009 where there is a distinction made between domain.com and www.domain.com. Please, please, please fix this!

Sincerely,
Erik Rasmussen

This letter has been submitted via NASA’s contact form.

Update! Within an hour of me submitting this, and before this post was published, I got a response from NASA:

If you’re using Safari or Firefox you can type in nasa.gov and it will direct you to NASA’s Web page. For other Web browser’s please use www.nasa.gov.

This is, of course, not true, as I am using Firefox and visiting nasa.gov fails. While normally, I have no problem with ignoring non-Safari-or-Firefox users, fixing this problem would take, at maximum, three minutes for anyone who knew what they were doing with DNS or Apache. Boo, NASA!

And watch him play just about every guitar and vocal part to Hotel California. Kudos to the arranger, Tomi Paldanius, on this one.

There are a tons more similar videos on this YouTube channel, and I guarantee there’s a pop song on there that will make you say, "Ooh! I love that song!"

Wow, you guys are tough here.

I own 42.com. I bought it in 1995. Diamond.com, business.com, and many others were available then that later sold for more than 10 million dollars, but no, I was (and am) a Douglas Adams fan and bought 42.com instead.

Some trivia about my 42.com domain name: – it was appraised at 3/4 million dollars during the Internet boom (but no offers of cash to me) – Before Douglas Adams died I offered him an email address of his choice at the domain. He replied, declining, saying that much too much had been made of the number 42 (I was disappointed…) – I was and am between uses for that domain, and have no time to develop a HHGTTG web site, so I offered to just redirect it to a friend’s site; a guy who taught me to smoke meats decades ago. His present jerky product is worlds better than any jerky I can get elsewhere; its a first rate, honest product sold by a good man. I buy jerky from him myself. – The large price tag that Mr. Beefjerky.com quotes is meant to drive tire kickers away; I was getting tons of 100 dollar offers a month. – I have turned down (within the last year) a solid 6 figure offer, though I am not rich. Its likely you have more money than I.

So hey, how about going a little easier on me? And order some jerky; you won’t regret it.

Steve

I knew most of that, but I didn’t know that he actually communicated with Douglas Adams.

Funny.

My best idea for that domain name was to make yet another url shortening service. But then competitors came out with only five character domains (tr.im, is.gd, etc.). I bet there’s still a few thousand Hitchhiker nerds out there that would use 42.com to shorten urls.