Seattle.BloggersPub

A long time ago I asked, “what does Content Management mean to you?” I got all sorts of answers. Since then I’ve thought about, written about and talked about “content” (and content managment) more than I’d care to admit. Some may find it strange that, as a designer, I’d concern myself with content so much, but to me it’s lives at the very core of what I do. Honestly, I often wonder how a designer could not be interested in content.

Having said that, one thing that constantly comes up in my pondering on content is the question of what “content” really is. This is even more perplexing as technology converges and becomes more ubiquitous. Defining “content” has always been a bit tricky, and now it’s even more so. Is it simply text? Is it written? Is it text and media? Is it copy? What about something like a tag? Is that content? What about a form? Is it all of these things? Or none of them?

As you can see, it’s not clear to me, and maybe it doesn’t have to be. Still, I’m curious, so I thought I’d throw it out there: what does “content” mean to you?

A profile of the Witch Hunter career. I’m really looking forward to wasting many hours playing this game.

If you’re a designer and you’re interested in donating some time and creativity, this would be a great place to start.

Looks pretty sweet. Sure as heck would make thos photo booth type shots more fun! For real though, this looks very interesting.

Mike Potter has used coRank to build a Digg-clone for Rich Internet Application topics. He’s got some information on RIApedia and after playing with the site a bit, I think it is a really cool way to promote and highlight RIA stories. The new site is over on http://ria.corank.com/ and we’re all hoping for stories […]

Thanks to my excessive shopping habits, I always end up with a couple of special treats to take home when I travel.

During my recent trip to Korea, I grabbed a trio of artisanal sauces in fairly small jars… gochujang, the fermented chili sauce, dwaenjang, which is Korean miso, and ssamjang, a combination of the two with additional seasonings, including a touch of sugar, usually used for lettuce wraps such as ssambap.

I tasted the dwaenjang and gochujang at the department store in Korea, but I added the ssamjang mostly for completeness, without having a sample first. So when it came time to break the seal on these essential sauces, the ssamjang was first on my priority list.

Ssamdubu

To make use of ssamjang, I usually make ssambap, which involves wrapping lettuce, herbs like gaennip, or kelp around rice and other ingredients. The ssamjang is used to add flavor. Koreans regularly construct baseball-sized lettuce wraps and eat them in one bite. My jaw, however, doesn’t quite have the capacity required for such a challenge.

Since I went tofu shopping at Thanh Son this weekend, I thought it would be nice to have these with tofu instead of rice. I also sautéed some sad-looking enoki mushrooms in butter and soy sauce.

Not wanting to accumulate three or four plates for such a simple dish, I went ahead and assembled the wraps ahead of time. To serve them, I used another treasure from my recent trip: An Aomori-style urushi plate in the shape of ichō, or gingko leaf.

Simple Pajeon

I so jealously guard the crispness of my pajeon (Korean-style scallion pancakes) that I generally don’t sacrifice valuable seconds to shoot a photograph, lest the ephemeral textural ideal be lost before I have a chance to take the first bite.

This time I made a smaller one than usual… somehow I figured, with some rice, kimchi and the tofu dish, I would have enough. It was just right… maybe even a little too much.

As I sometimes do, I followed the technique recommended by a Korean friend, who rather unconventionally replaces water in her pajeon with milk. It makes for a fluffier, more flavorful variation.

A little kimchi

Dinner wouldn’t be complete without a little kimchi and rice… I cheated and used a passable imported gimchi bought at Uwajimaya, though I usually try to get kimchi made at one of a number of Seattle-area Korean markets. No time for that this time… and this did the trick, anyway…

Channel 10 has the scoop on a brand new product from Microsoft called Surface. It’s basically an interactive table that has a touch screen which lets you interact with objects on the glass. Scoble has some good information and the videos on the Surface website are amazing (Popular Mechanics has some more video).
This is the […]

I won’t touch on the offensiveness of Ask.com’s new ad campaign, but I will say that their ad campaign is pretty stupid. The other day I got a call from my brother asking me if I had seen the ad on TV for Ask.com. I told him “no,” fairly certain that he wouldn’t ask me about that strange pimped out cars ad that has been on TV for a couple months now. He then started telling me about a commercial in which a child asks his father about algorithms. My brother then asked me, “what is an algorithm?” I’ll concur with TechCrunch’s assessment that “algorithms mean nothing to [laymen] and [they] should be the core target market for Ask.”

I wonder…has Google ever aired an ad for their search engine?

When I consider this previous countermeasure, I think it’s safe to assume that any of my remaining comment spammers don’t read my blog. So working under that assumption, I think it’s safe for me to actually post about some other countermeasures I’ve put in place to fight the comment spam.

One of the patterns I’ve observed here at my blog, thanks to spam recycling, is that certain spammers like to post nothing more than a single link as the body of their comment. I think it’s safe to assume that real commenters will post nothing more than a link very rarely, if ever. Working under that assumption, denying all comments that look like a single link and nothing more is as simple as writing a regular expression (not that “simple” and “regular expression” really belong in the same utterance together):

// see if this is just a single link with no surrounding text
if (preg_match(”/^<a.+?>.+?</a>$/s”, $text))
{
  $smells = true;
}

Another pattern I’ve noticed is that certain spammers (especially those with a penchant for spamming the bedazzlers out of this post) enjoy posting a buttload of links in a single comment. Again, I think it’s safe to assume that commenters of the living, breathing variety aren’t very likely to post a laundry list of links in their comments. Therefore, a more advanced regular expression should do the trick:

// see if this contains five or more links
if (preg_match(”/<a.+?>.+?</a>.*?<a.+?>.+?</a>.*?<a.+?>.+?</a>.*?<a.+?>.+?</a>.*?<a.+?>.+?</a>/s”, $text))
{
  $smells = true;
}

Combine these two relatively straightforward blocks of code together, and you end up with a function for determining whether or not a comment smells like spam:

// function for spotting spam-ish comments
function smells_like_spam($text)
{
  $smells = false;

  // see if this is just a single link with no surrounding text
  if (preg_match(”/^<a.+?>.+?</a>$/s”, $text))
  {
    $smells = true;
  }

  // see if this contains five or more links
  if (preg_match(”/<a.+?>.+?</a>.*?<a.+?>.+?</a>.*?<a.+?>.+?</a>.*?<a.+?>.+?</a>.*?<a.+?>.+?</a>/s”, $text))
  {
    $smells = true;
  }

  return $smells;
}

I guess we’ll see how it works. Well, hopefully you won’t. But I will.

Tamago-don is a homely thing. It’s the stuff of busy, frugal mothers trying to throw something together for lunch on a Sunday afternoon. It’s the kind of thing a salaryman trying to save a couple hundred yen on lunch might choose during a particularly rough month. It’s comfort food.

Little more than sautéed onions with eggs, seasoned with a heavily mirin-sweetened, soy-sauce based dashi base,  cooked to a soft curd, the prospect of tamago-don won’t trigger a lot of enthusiasm in most Japanese, but perhaps you’ll catch a hint of wistful nostalgia.

On the other hand, if you offered to cook such a thing when the weather is bad and spirits are low, your efforts would probably be appreciated.

Tsukushinbō-don

And if, for example, you happened to have a huge supply of local morels that you really needed to make use of, and some just-picked mizuna greens, and perhaps a little chopped negi, you might be able to enliven this dish just enough to make it interesting.

If you happened to use a heavy hand with said morels, and sauteed them until almost, but not quite charred, along with the softened onions, then added a little seasoned dashi, folded this into an omelet pan full of your seasoned egg mixture, stirred the curds, and poured the just-barely-set eggs over rice, you might have something else entirely.

You might consider how much the shape of morels, more properly translated as amigasatake, resembles the tops of tsukushinbo, or horsetail shoots.

In that case, you might call this variation of tamago-don tsukushinbo-don.

Up way too close 

The result?

Well, it’s still tamago-don. It’s not life a life-altering transformation, but it’s certainly a worthy use of an excess of morels. I’ll probably continue to cook my morels with lots of butter or olive oil, but when I’m looking for a more assari taste, this is a good alternative.

Note: Hiromi deserves all the credit for seeing the similarity between tsukushinbo and morels.