A Few SAB Housekeeping Notes

I don’t like to blog about the blog very often, even though evangelizing about blogging as a communications medium is something I really like to do, but I’ve made a few changes of late that I thought you readers should know about.

First, I had added an ad that a lot of you didn’t like, so I removed it. I was running Google Surveys which basically would have asked you folks to fill out a brief consumer survey every couple of days in exchange for seeing SAB posts. I thought it would be a nice trade off between readability and revenue to keep SAB running, but I got a lot of feedback right away complaining that it was really intrusive so I took it down.

Second, if you’re using the Safari or Chrome browsers (the two most popular browsers among SAB readers according to my analytics) you may notice a message when you load SAB asking if you’d like to get notifications. If you say yes, you’ll basically get a little message in your browser alerting you when a new post has been published. It’s a feature that has just been added to Chrome (you may need to update to see it), but Safari has had it for a while. I’m still experimenting with it, but I believe it’s available for mobile too. Anyway, just another way to stay up to date with the blog. If you don’t want the notifications just say no and you won’t get them.

Third, I’ve updated the blog with SSL security. This isn’t something that’s really necessary – it isn’t like SAB deals in personal information or credit card numbers or anything – but the future of web browsing seems to be heading toward fully encrypted connections, so I didn’t see anything wrong with being ahead of the curve. Plus, it was necessary to implement the aforementioned notifications.

In the short term you may see a warning in your browser that SAB isn’t 100 percent secure. All is fine, there are just a few elements in the template that need to be adjusted. I’m in the process of getting that done.

I now return you to our regular programming.