The Web

This post is a compilation of links I've been reading, with my responses.

There have been remarkably few car analogies in what I've been reading. Shocking, I know.

A bandwidth-meter program I have installed on this PC tells me that in one hour I used 128MB of traffic having an ssh session open to do development on a web app, and load webpages relating to that app. That's an entire gigabyte of traffic within 8 hours. Face it: mere web traffic takes more transfer nowadays than it did in the days of yore. The 'main' page of facebook is half a megabyte of CSS, images, javascript and HTML. Eco-enthusiasts talk of power vampires.

This decade has seen a lot of absurd arguments: obvious problems that bigcorps try to spin out of the way.

I'm confident that the most absurd one of all is that "Net Neutrality Laws are Unnecessary".

The notion that companies who sell internet connections to the public will all 'do the right thing' and not selectively censor and/or slow internet traffic that they: a) Disagree With, b) competes with their other business unit is utterly ridiculous nonsense. Of course they will. It's more profitable for them to do so.

This is part two of a series in Creating the Modern Website: You can find part zero ("Introduction") here and part 1 ("Fundamentals") here. This part covers Software, Open vs Closed-Source software, and Security.

Source: open, closed and free software

Dalhousie University launches a new website tomorrow. They've got a preview on the linked article. For the first time in half a decade, it looks good. But what made this blog-worthy was a quote:

This is part one of a series in Creating the Modern Website: You can find part zero here, which outlines the goals of the series and materials that I'll cover. This part covers the fundamental elements of modern websites and how they differ from websites designed in the past.

This post is the first part in a series about building a modern website. I'd appreciate feedback on what other topics people would have me cover. If you have any ideas or any other feedback, please leave a comment at the end of the article. I also recommend that you subscribe to my RSS feed, which will inform you when future posts are made.

Reasons for this Series

There are many old website still on the web. Many but not all are bad: some are just old and tired.. Perhaps you're reading this because....

With every new Internet explorer release, Microsoft makes many statements concerning their 'commitment to the web'. It's not true. While reading a TechCrunch story, the computer program that everyone refers to as 'Internet Explorer' or 'IE' iswas called Microsoft Internet Explorer. That's fine: it's a bit long-winded, but it's fine to put the name of the company that makes it in the name of the software.

A while ago -- at approximately the same time -- Facebook and Digg both started using a 'Navigation Bar' plopped at the top of all their outgoing links. Anyone who will remember the late 90's on the web will find this tactic familiar. Why is it annoying? Because it steals traffic, that's why.

In the past there have been several worms and viruses that block websites. Conficker is included in this list: it blocks access via the web to several major antivirus vendors' websites.

This means that there is a simple, web-based test to detect its presence:

http://www.confickerworkinggroup.org/infection_test/cfeyechart.html.

If you see all the images, you're not infected :).