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Year View| Summary| Highlights| Month View| Sunday 13 July 2003 (Day View)

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13.07.2003 – Sunday 13 July

7:49am

• I became very tired, but did not want to go to sleep and waste away my Sunday, so struggled to stay awake, failing about half an hour later when I collapsed into bed and slept until midday.

Midday

• I woke up, having either forgot to turn on my alarm, or more likely, having woken up and turned it off, and then gone straight back to sleep without remembering.

Website

• I modified my journal and amused web sites so that their URI’s don’t contain any question marks, slashes, ampersands or other complicating legacy things such as file extensions, having tested my modifications on my UNI site last night. It’s surprising how slowly people uptake new ideas, or rather, how ingrained old practices become. The huge majority of URI’s out there end in a file extension, which is standard across the entire site. For example, if a site uses plain HTML files, chances are every page on that site will end in “.html”, and every URI across that site will also end in “.html”. What happens if it is decided to switch from plain HTML to a server-side language such as PHP, and change the file extensions to “.php”? Immediately, all page-specific links to that site become obsolete, any entries in search engines, people’s bookmarks, magazines, or anywhere else are no longer valid. The same thing happens if you decide to change the way you’ve organised your files, the directories they’re in, or practically anything else about your site. There’s no reason that URI’s need to be tied to the logical location of their files in a local file system. In fact, to do so is arguably foolish and very short sighted. Technology moves so fast that tying a URI to anything is asking for trouble. The problem I am facing though, is that I have an existing site that is currently flat-file HTML, with direct links to the pages, and I wish to convert that to a template based system without having to change or lose any links (or edit any pages), and at the same time I wish to supersede those links (without obsolescing the existing links) with a more future-proof and pleasing link system. I have the template system to parse the existing HTML files, and now I’m testing the link system – which is working well so far. The three forms, http://journal.the-i.org/syndicate, http://journal.the-i.org/?syndicate and http://journal.the-i.org/syndicate.html all serve the same file, allowing me to use the first type while still remaining compatible with the existing two forms. Now all I need is the motivation and the time. As a nice side effect, all search engines should see my links as “normal” links and crawl them. Plus I never liked question marks in links, and refused to use ampersands, and it is good practice at coding websites, as I don’t have any fancy software to help me up here – although I’d never plummet as low as Notepad, it doesn’t even support multiple undoes.

Evening

• After my website binge I went for a walk down to the Home Rule Bridge and looked at the water, and I’m afraid that’s about the only time I’ve been outside today. I blame the weather – it’s still overcast and sprinkling on and off.

2:54am

• I fall into bed and enter a state of semi-awareness, interspersed with ultra-awareness, although my waking self is unaware of anything at all. That sounds good, although I’m not sure if it makes any sense.

Comment by Ned – Tuesday 31 August 2004, 1:33 AM

  Spambots appear to be attacking me.