Users of my Gmail persistent searches user script will have noticed that it stopped working today. This is because Google changed Gmail's domain from gmail.google.com to mail.google.com, which is not on the script's list of included pages. You can either modify the list by hand (select "Manage User Scripts..." from the Tools menu) or re-install the script by right-clicking on the previous link and selecting "Install User Script...".

Since Gmail's domain changed, and the searches were stored in a cookie (unless you use the modified version that uses contacts), your existing searches are not preserved. To prevent this problem from reoccurring, I've switched to using GM_getValue and GM_setValue, two Greasemonkey functions that were not available at the time I wrote the script (version 0.3 or later required). To recover your existing searches, look for a cookie with the name PersistentSearches set on the gmail.google.com domain and extract its value.

Update on 7/5/2005: I had forgotten that my Gmail skinning hack is also keyed on Gmail's domain. I have updated that as well.

There's a perception that Google doesn't care about valid HTML, since bandwidth costs trump correctness. While that thinking has merit for high traffic sites, there's more leeway on our smaller properties. Specifically, I was happy to discover that Google Video validates. And it's not just the relatively simple front page, search results validate too.

Though perhaps not as cool as this build status display, it was fun/satisfying to get one up and running in my corner of the office.

Widgetopia is a site that seeks to collect interesting UI elements from various sites and applications. It appears to be moribund based on its latest post ("Since I have no time for little widgetopia anymore..."), but today I saw something that made of me think of it.

What was special about this sighting was that it wasn't on a computer at all, but in the print version of the New York Times Magazine. This week was "The Money Issue", and they had a series of articles loosely connected with this topic. What grabbed my attention was the graphic at the beginning of each one, a sample of which I've included on the right. It's a bread-crumb trail of sorts, except it also indicates the relative lengths of the articles (conveyed by the size of the circle). I'm not sure if this is a sign that online navigation design is making its way back to the print media, but it was a pleasant surprise nonetheless.

N.B. my Tufte books are still on my shelf, waiting to be read, thus possibly explaining my ignorance.

As I was looking through this site's access logs this week, I noticed that I was getting a lot of failed requests for what looked like attempts at getting at my Gmail skinning post. The strange thing was that these 404s had no referrer, diverse user agents and IPs, and were attempted between one and five times. At first I suspected a (shady) crawler run amok, but the variety of IPs made that unlikely. I then briefly wondered whether a worm could be responsible, but if my little site was getting so many requests, then presumably it would've been noticed by other people as well. Since most of the failed requests were one or two characters off from the real URL, I wondered if traffic was getting subtly corrupted. However, no relevant outages were mentioned, and since the requests were spread out over a few weeks, it's unlikely that such a thing would've gone unnoticed.

For the curious-minded, the relevant access log snippets are here. Below are the top 10 (by frequency) 404-causing requests:

1. 509: /archives/2004/10/05gmail-skinning
2. 160: /archives/2004/10/05gmailskinning
3. 20: /archives/2004/10/05/gmail-skinning/
4. 16: /archives/2004/10/05/gmailskinning
5. 14: /archives/2004/10/05gmail-skinning.com
6. 12: /archieves/2004/10/05gmailskinning
7. 10: /archieves/2004/10/05gmail-skinning
8. 9: /archives/2004/10/05gmail_skinning
9. 9: /archives/2004/10/5/gmail-skinning
10. 8: /archives2004/10/05/gmail-skinning

The only theory that is consistent with all the facts is that the post was mentioned in some print publication, and that the printed URL was incorrect. That would explain the lack of referrers and the diversity of IP addresses and user agents. I assume the URL was wrong since the most popular failed request has an unlikely typo. Users are sensitive to slashes and would not miss one; the second most popular failed request shows a more natural mistake - skipping a hyphen.

I've now added a redirect from the top two items in the list above, though it may be too late. But more importantly, despite my attempt at clean URLs, this shows that they are not as friendly as they could be. The year/month/day hierarchy may be the cleanest, but I could probably get away with just the year, since my entry keywords rarely collide. Perhaps more modern blogging software than my 2003-vintage Movable Type 2.64 installation can do better, but this incident doesn't provide the activation energy to investigate further.

Update on 6/10/2005: It turns that the entry was indeed mentioned in the June 2005 issue of Popular Science. Yay for deduction.