These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.
Andrey forwarded me a link to last.fm robots.txt file, which, as many other robots.txt files, forbids search engine bots to access certain areas of the site. This one however does a little bit of more. For machines, it serves as the reminder of Three Rules of Robotics by Isaac Asimov. For humans, it provides a tiny bit of geek humor. Here is a screenshot, in case it disappears over time.
Anyone who has been running a blog even for a couple of years, knows how annoying archives can get. Each year brings twelve monthly archives, and the more years you work, the more archives you have. And they just keep multiplying until there is no easy way to use them any more. For anyone who is suffering from this problem while using WordPress platform, I recommend a solution – Compact Archives plugin. If you are not on WordPress, chances are there is a similar plugin for your content management system, but even if there is none, creating one shouldn’t be a huge problem. See how it beautiful it is – in action on my newly re-created Archives page, or on the screenshot below.
Simple, intuitive, and scalable – just the way it should be.
I came across an interesting tool – Which loads faster?, which allows you to load two web sites side-by-side and measure which one of those loads faster. If you reload the sites several times, you’ll also get the average statistics across all runs.
Here is a quote for you on browser compatibility from an excellent book Diving Into HTML 5, which is available online.
The last time I tried to count, there were 5 doctypes that triggered “almost standards mode,” and 73 that triggered “quirks mode.” But I probably missed some, and I’m not even going to talk about the crazy shit that Internet Explorer 8 does to switch between its four — four! — different rendering modes. Here’s a flowchart. Kill it. Kill it with fire.
And just in the flowchart link will break anytime soon, here is a copy of the image.
O’Reilly Radar runs the blog post comparing performance of several cloud services. While everyone should run their own tests and benchmarks before deciding which one is better, the article provides a nice summary. Here is the graph based on their results.
