Green Robe Industries Link Blog

As a child, my father would firmly chide if I would bring him the wrong tool. “The right tool for the right job” he would say. Eventually, I learned my crescents and my box ends from my pipe wrenches and my dykes. Now days, my tool belt is more virtual, and the laundry list of choices I have for any given task grows day by day. Photoshop or Gimp, Dreamweaver or NoteTab… I like to think that I’m doing my dad proud and making the right choices. The one area I could stand some improvement is search engines. I optimize for them, charge clients to document them, pull logs to find out how others use them. But more often than not, when faced with a search dilemma, I Google it. Firefox is partly to blame, the prefetching and handy search box are all too seductive. But I hope with this list that will change. I’m sorry Dad, it won’t happen again.

http://www.philb.com/whichengine.htm

Over the years the interface from which we as humans harness the power of the microprocessor has evolved pretty steadily. From punch card to graphical user interface the progression has gone pretty smoothly, all things considered. Over the years we’ve started to not only access these chips locally, but also network the little suckers together. The progression of the network user interface has had many of the same steps along the way. Just as the command prompt once ruled the desktop, so too did the Telnet once rule the BBS. With the advent of Tim Berners-Lee’s little idea and the explosion of the World Wide Web, the network now has a GUI of it’s own. It’s becoming increasingly irrelevant how much power you have sitting on the desktop, as long as you have the horses to fire up Firefox you can cede the power requirements to the server. This has spawned the age of the web application and with it comes and new paradigm in desktop computing. (On a side note, why was there no mention of the Internet in Bill Gate’s 1995 book The Road Ahead? How, as a geek, could he have been that far out of the loop?) To that end, somebody named Danny has setup The Unofficial Web Applications List. Much like the Start button on Windows, it makes a vain attempt to tell you what you can run. Things that get stumbled across wind up here. But hey, you have to start somewhere.

http://www.webapplist.com

Mod-rewrites are evil. Not in the “I am your FAAATHER” sort of way, but in the “umm, what the hell am I doing?” sorta way. Nobody understands this stuff. Just hope you get lucky and have a web technology integrator who knows what you are trying to do. However, if you dare to venture into this murky netherworld of Apache mods and .htaccess files you’ll be able to handsomely reward yourself with search engine friendly URLs. (Or the headache that ate Detroit.) If you need a little help along the way check out this forum.

http://www.mod-rewrite.com/