Yelp hiding all reviews of Dr. David Shields

A week ago, I received this message from Yelp: Hi Paul, We’re writing to let you know about our decision to remove your review of Shields David S MD. Your review was flagged by the Yelp community, and our Yelp Support team has determined that it falls outside our Terms of Service (http://www.yelp.com/static?p=tos), specifically as …

Another solution for WordPress’ “You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.”

Many WordPress users have run in to the error “You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.” Sometimes, it is because you changed the table prefix and the solution is a database change. For other folks, it was due to old plugin incompatibility. To fix it, you need to replace admin_head with admin_menu. …

MAPLight’s awesome Money Near Votes tool

If you haven’t heard of MAPLight.org before, here’s what they do (which is fantastic): MAPLight.org, a groundbreaking public database, illuminates the connection between campaign donations and legislative votes in unprecedented ways. Elected officials collect large sums of money to run their campaigns, and they often pay back campaign contributors with special access and favorable laws. …

Hey Chase bank — 1995 called, they want their user agreement back

Buried in my Amazon Chase Visa “This E-Sign Disclosure and Consent” was this gem: Hardware and Software Requirements. In order to access, view, respond to, and retain electronic Communications that we make available to you, you must have: an Internet browser (Microsoft ® Windows 95 or higher, Windows NT 4.0 or higher with Microsoft Internet …

The US Congress doesn’t understand the Internet

Recently, I received an email from Nancy Pelosi: Apparently no one explained to her (despite representing Internet central), that scanning your letterhead and pasting it in to your email is a bad idea. It looks worse when it’s on a funny angle. Having text as images this must be some sort of ADA violation. Finally, …

SXSW Interactive Panel Proposal: Abort? Retry? Failwhale? Making Error Messages Suck Less

I’ve proposed a panel for SXSW Interactive: Abort? Retry? Failwhale? Making Error Messages Suck Less. Here’s how I described it: An unknown error occurred. Call your system administrator. Abort/retry/fail? Bad errors are everywhere. Sure, complain on twitter. But how do we fix them? Through hilarious examples, we’ll explore the 12 ways errors fail us. Then, …