CogBlogged from ‘February, 2005’

Do you remember when the web was young and everything was about having a “Home Page”? The legacy is still there in our web browser’s “Home” button (and do you wonder why we are limited to one home?). In fact, when I started our web server in 1993, like others, I made our primary web entrance a file named… homePage.html In fact, in those days (late 1993), the correct URL to get to the MCLI main entrance was: http://hakatai.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/homePage.html Using a few little tricks of web “redirection”, this 11 year old URL actually still works and gets you to the current main entrance at http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/. Is it magic? Not at all, and it is easier than you think. The biggest mystery is why so many sites, big and small, are willing to leave old links hanging in the breeze. I will show later how I have been able to 3 [...]

From suggestions, I’ve added two more sites to the web site submission multi tool, what was once blogged the DeliciousFurlBagConnotea Marklet Maker is now… DeliciousFurlBagConnoteaFrassleSiteULike Marklet Maker– having added posting tools for CiteULike and Frassle. Check it out, your mileage may vary given my tendency for programming typos: http://cogdogblog.com/alan/marklet_maker.php

Following a recent a brief server outage I have been tinkering with an approach to solve problems that might occur on external sites using our Feed2JS service. I’m lookng for some folks willing to test some extra JavaScript aimed at preventing page hangs should we blink out on you. Here is the issue. The whole magic works because your web pages are looking to link to an extneral file of JavaScript commands that output the content. Typically this is done as a link toa file, say of some common routines used on many pages, so the JavaScript is linked via a command like: <script language="JavaScript"     src="../js-lib/cool-functions.js"   type="text/javascript"></script> Feed2JS does the same, except the src= points to a script which dynamically builds the JavaScript output statements. The problem is what if the URL in the src= tag is not available? It does not seem to time out the browser, like an [...]

E-mail flame wars (a torrent of angry, differing viewpoint exchanges) must be as old as the first listserv with more than 20 people on it. Whether you want to classify participants according to some phylum/species or not not, it is just human nature, and what happens in the loosely structured online environment. A reading of the chapter on “Perfection” in Small Pieces Loosely Joined (SPLJ) puts some good light on the mixture of people, their human behaviors, and what happens in open environment. We have an interesting, oft repeated scenario going on now in our internal e-mail system. There are “distribution” lists that include all employees, and have been the bane for many as they feel they are deluded by announcements of things that do not interest them– offers for basketball tickets, announcements of art shows, peopl’s names getting changed, etc. Compared to the spam I get externally, these are [...]

(Thanks to James Farmer for popping this article our way). The Register today unveils the life of the rich and infamous, “Interview with a link spammer”: Sam – let’s call our interviewee Sam, it’s suitably anonymous – lives in a three-bedroom semi-detached house in London, drives a vintage Jaguar and runs his own company. But “it’s not not all rock and roll and big money”, says Sam. What isn’t? Spamming websites and blogs with text to pump up the search engine rankings of sites pushing PPC (pills, porn and casinos), that’s what. For that’s what Sam does, pretty much all day long. He – we’ll use the male notation, it’s easier – would do this anyway for fun, but it’s more than fun; he says he can earn seven-figure sums doing this. Sam is a link spammer. There is some interesting history that indicates the actions of spammers are pretty [...]