Arc Tangent

As part of my duties at Site­Point, I’m imple­ment­ing a Google Cus­tom Search Engine (Busi­ness Edition).

One of the neat fea­tures of Google’s CSE is Refine­ments. You can tag por­tions of your site — sub­di­rec­to­ries, sub­do­mains, or even sep­a­rate sites that you’ve added to your engine — with labels. You can then cre­ate refine­ments that will either boost results from these tagged regions of your site, list only results from spec­i­fied tags, or exclude cer­tain tags alto­gether from the result set.

Unfor­tu­nately the means of using these pro­gram­mat­i­cally are not so well doc­u­mented — the API doc­u­men­ta­tion doesn’t spec­ify how to include or exclude cer­tain labels (as far as I’ve been able to determine).

So! For the record, the solu­tion is to use the strings ‘more:<label>’ and ‘less:<label>’ in your query string.

Con­tinue reading

I want to buy BT’s new album, These Hope­ful Machines. BT is a rad dude and his music is excel­lently sweet. I’ve heard some tracks off this col­la­tion of musi­cally arranged bits, and I know that it is some­thing I wish to par­take of more deeply. Sadly, despite the album being legally avail­able in some places around the world today, I can’t buy it because I’m in Australia.

Now, Aus­tralia is not a large coun­try, but we are fairly tech­no­log­i­cally advanced. We’re well con­nected. Sure we’re slip­ping back­wards a bit in the sociopo­lit­i­cal sphere but we’re doing pretty well as denizens of the planet. We con­tribute. We get stuff done.

So why is it, in the era of the Inter­net, of cheap copy­ing and dig­i­tal dis­tri­b­u­tion, a time of won­der and joy — why is it that I have to wait 10 more days than the rest of the world to buy these eas­ily repli­cated bits? I want to give these peo­ple my money and they’re mak­ing it hard for me because I live in Australia.

They’re mak­ing it dif­fi­cult for me to give them money.

Let those words sink in for a moment. It’s easy for me to acquire this album. I can go to any num­ber of tor­rent track­ing sites and get instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion right now. Today. It’ll take all of an hour, at most, for this album to down­load, and I’ll have what I want. The effort of doing so is vir­tu­ally nonexistent.

Or, I can wait another 10 days for iTunes, Ama­zon and Beat­Port to release this album to me in Aus­tralia. I can choose not to lis­ten to the music, to be patient, and then hand over my $12 to have a dig­i­tal copy of the album. In my imag­i­na­tion, I can see myself impa­tiently eking out my 10 day wait as a bit­ter second-​class cit­i­zen, hop­ping from foot to foot to pre­vent the cold from set­ting in. Bat­tered by adver­tis­ing, I slouch into their dig­i­tal stores, and weakly hand over my money.

Dear music indus­try: Do you even WANT my money? Quit your bitch­ing and get with the program.