Now that the Furl-Delicious-Frassle-CiteULike-Connotea-Bag Bookmarklet Tool (a simepl web form to help you build a one click browser bar tool for adding web sites to various collections) seems to be working– I decided to make another tool. This one helps you create a browser bar button for quick searching of any MovableType weblog, as described […]
Does anyone still look up number, business names in a big thick yellow pages phone book? Is that still the first reflex when a net connected computer is in reach? Two recent observations indicate that for many folks, not just techies, but Jane and Joe Citizen, the web is becoming the reflex. We have a […]
I keep a pad of frequently called numbers near my office phone- there is a number next to a label called “Helpless desk”. In theory, this is how our helpdesk works. I go to a web site and fill submit a problem request form. It gets routed electronically to someone who addresses the issue. The […]
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 times migrate a 70+ Mb web directory to different servers yet never produce a bad link message for that pile of content.
But I am not writing to be nostalgic about the web of the early 1990s (remember those ugly grey pages? Title tag animations? The Green Netscape logo?). Let’s take a look at scenarios that might happen among the people who create web content:
“We’ve improved our site to use interactive scripting so all web file pages will be changed from *.html to *.asp”
“That is an effective data analysis web site you built in your personal directory, Smithers, but since it gets so much traffic, we want to provide it a shorter URL by moving it to a top level on our main web site.”
“Most of the web content will be re-organized from a directory structure based on department names to ones based on services provided.”
“That is sol old, let’s just delete it from the web server”
What do these have in common? Let’s talk about Linkrot…
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 […]
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 […]
(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 […]
flickr foto MCLI Server "Farm"available on my flickr A tour of the mcli server “farm”, more of an agglomeration. Starting from the left, we have “Jade”, a 1.33GhZ Apple Xserver that runs CogDogBlog (weblog plus a few more), the Feed2JS site as well as virtual hosting Maricopa eP, an electronic portolio system. The Xserve also […]
As a geek happens a lot- I get curious and start poking around on the net, peeking at web page source code. Tonight, I was checking out the NOAA weather forecast for near our cabin and there was a little note near the top:
New! Cell Phone (wap) URL: www.srh.noaa.gov/wml
Now I have a stone age cell phone with no hope of being WAP capable (Wireless Application Protocol) but vaguely recollect how the limited display capabilities require web content in WML form (Wireless Markup Language). Well, see more on the WAP/WML acronym soup from W3Schools.
You can get at info pretty quickly through WAP since it is designed to be just data, structured, and lightweight (the NOAA urls load s-l-o-w on the 28 bps modem speed up here).
So here is what I dug up….
