Posts tagged: WEB DEVELOPMENT

In an effort to shed time-sucking side projects in the past couple years I’ve let a number of sites go dark and domain names lapse. Some of these were ideas that never got off the ground, but one or two were sites with real traffic and Google pagerank (PR 5 in one case, not stellar but not achievable overnight either).

Sadly, some of these domains have now been taken over by those useless squatter pages that manufacture lists of “related links” and “popular searches” and so on to trick people into clicking on ads. This only makes sense – if you were a domain squatter, you’d certainly prioritize grabbing expired domains with high pagerank and many existing inbound links. If you set up your server never to return a 404, some of those linking sites might never even notice the change.

Despite their adoption of Big Green Download Button technology, SourceForge still has an absurdly cumbersome download process. I know it’s annoying to just gripe (I try to see the positive side too); I’m just surprised that it’s still this crufty. According to the OSTG site, “SourceForge.net hosts more Open Source development products than any other site or network worldwide.” But if the pace of modernization doesn’t pick up, I’m afraid that won’t be true for much longer.

For several weeks at work I’ve been prepping for a server move; this week we flipped the switch. It was the most serious migration I’ve ever done, and it went very well. Some notes:

• Previously we shared a dedicated box at a certain very large colo provider. A few weeks ago, in the course of swapping out a failing drive in our box, staffers at the colo 1) wiped out the live backup of the drive and then 2) destroyed the contents of the failing drive, overwriting it with a week-old backup. A week is a lot for us, with a couple limited-access applications (Django apps, naturally) seeing steady daily use by hundreds of users. This just firmed my resolve to go with a smaller provider (JohnCompanies) who has taken good care of me over the past three years.

I’ve been getting unrequested messages from the eBay Developer Zone site over the last couple days about email address changes. I have a Developer Zone account, but I haven’t touched it for months if not longer. I sent an e-mail to them about it, but haven’t heard anything.

I just got yet another one of these and I think I see what’s up. Check out the registered email address. Somebody found a hole.

After the frameworks post I kept thinking about this. Of course any generalizations I make are heavily colored by my own direct experience, but the progression seems to go along these lines:

1. Make static web pages.

2. Make modular pages using simple includes (in SSI, PHP, ASP, or what have you).

3. Make pages with more involved functionality (form submissions to database, basic CRUD).

4. Get sick of re-building dynamic stuff for every project; write your own kinda portable library or framework.