Wikia Search without Search
When, after a lot of PLH [pre launch hype] Wikia Search was presented to a baffled world few noticed and still fewer said that the one thing Jimbo's engine didn't do well was search. Now Seth Finkelstein found an official admission that there never was anything usable.
Buttons for shopping carts
The buttons that come with OsCommerce and similar shopping cart systems all give the impression of an afterthought. Because creating buttons by hand is rather tedious I created a button generator to do button sets for several popular shopping carts. Feel free to use it whenever you need.
Browser Security Handbook
If you're engaged in writing Code which is executable in the browser you should have a look at Google's just released Browser Security Handbook. Just browsing shows a bewildering array of Javascript security aspects treated differently not only by various browsers but also between versions.
Real Snow
It's not often it snows in Cornwall. Snow is one of the very few things I miss down here. Finnigan did enjoy it while it lasted.
Google breaks Referer Logs
Some people are up in arms, because Google appears to play with the way servers log referer information. Instead of using the established way of tucking on name & value pairs to a URL string by using question marks and ampersands they now use a hash sign. Problem is, the '#' in a URL is traditionally a local jump target, so servers only log what's to the left of the hash sign in a URL.
Why is that important? Because there are still people who tune their pages - after they've been published - to contain phrases or terms used to find those pages. Problem is, this approach leads to reduced link popularity, simply because if you start adding keywords and phrases in order to accommodate how people search, you at the same time risk that people start pointing to their forehead when reading your stuff. When that happens, it's more difficult to get linked.
Allowing keywords and phrases to come from external links is a far better approach to extending the vocabulary of a piece of prose than working every conceivable term into the fabric of one's writing. It will, over time, still "contain" all those strings you'd normally pluck from from your referer logs, but once people arrive at the page in question, it will still be worded as you intended. Anchor texts still work as always - unless you're looking at a high profile page where the results have been adjusted by Google.
Casper Security
Some things are really funny[1].
[1] http://hackersblog.org/2009/02/07üsakasperskycom-hacked-full-database-acces-sql-injection/
Wishful Thinking
Launched in 2003 with the promise of more than noise the seekport servers have now been disconnected from the net and the power grid. The companies involved became insolvent some time last year. Game over.
There are still a few independent attempts scattered across Europe, but those I tried today failed for all but the most frequent consumer type queries. Try some medical or computer science queries and you get nothing.