Oct
31
2005

Rear View

I have in recent weeks had complaint about the content of my journal. I was told it was all about things that were not very important in the grand scheme of things, things like computers. With this remark in mind, I was going to talk about the lovely sunset I saw today, but then I decided that actually, I would rather talk about where I saw it from. I saw said sunset from the rearview mirror of the car today. There is nothing quite like driving down a country road, in the dark with muse – absolution playing very loud on the speakers.

There are so many things that have bugged me in recent days, so I have little doubt I shall have remembered them all by the time I finish writing this. The few that I do remember will have to suffice and be clumped together and labelled “an entry”.

I read (some time ago) that a company was claiming a patent over xml. Now this annoys/concerns me in several ways. First off, I still don’t like this concept of a company claiming an intellectual right over such an obscure and ambiguous thing. In this case, the “transfer of data in its neutral form”. What the hell does that encompass for goodness sake. Having read some of the patent information on the us patent office site, myself I think this patent could actually include html if you choose to read it that way. As is see it, this could have implications so wide spread that it does not even bear thinking of. Imagine having to pay a fee for the use of xml….well, that hits most advanced free scripts for websites (so who knows how many sites), MS, google, all your major open source projects like the much acclaimed OpenOffice. Is nothing sacred to now? This is just becoming another extension of the sue culture with everyone trying to get a cut of money they don’t deserve.

Ah, just remembered the next thing that annoyed me today. It relates back to the driving. Why on earth cant road signs in this country be consistent. Mainly with regards to corners. Many a time do I come across a corner that has signs all round it telling me to slow down, telling me to not go over 20mph for it, telling me it’s a sharp bend etc. The road is marked red, large arrows have been put up all round it. There are more signs than hedge surrounding the corner. Then for all this hype I go round it at 50mph and wonder what all the fuss is about. Then other times I see one that has no markings, no red paint, no big signs with arrows and I take said corner at 50 and really wish I’d been doing 20. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t drive like a madman. I do drive cautiously, but I do rather candidly it seems, rely on these signs to be consistent in mapping out the route ahead for me. Standards are wonderful things, we have so many of them on our computers. It would be nice to see a few more where it mattered.

Now, on to the more computer related parts of my life. I have for some time now been working on a website for myself. In fact this website is linked to on my LiveJournal. It also happens to be the name of my LiveJournal (Please Remove Your Feet From Under My Chair). Now this website (as you would see if you clicked the link) has little in the way of content (bar those sub-domains that I have actually been partially populating). Now there is a good reason that this website has remained under developed for so long. It is not for lack of content, as I have 200+ pages of the stuff ready and waiting. It is dues to this simple problem.

How do you order 200+ page of random, un related content in a way that means they can all be accessed simpley, and quickly from anywhere in the site, without building the worlds most annoying large menu with multiple entries for each page under different headings?

The answer to this problem has eluded me for about 2 years until 3 days ago. I mentioned this problem to a friend and the first thing he said was “why do you need to order them?”. This of course is the answer. You can order unrelated content in a sensible way, so why bother. So the concept that has now been come up with is as follows.

Each page is supplied with a selection of keywords for its entry in the database (the whole site is CMS based). This is very much like LJ tags. A list of key words is then generated so that users can see this list, guaranteeing them of content on the other end of a click. These keywords, along with the page content itself are then searchable (via a nice little bit of SQL). This now covers all those who know what they are looking for, but the final part is the best if you ask me. The menu at the top of the page will contain mainly static links for things like home, contactus, faq’s etc, but one part of it will be a randomly generated dropdown of pages in the site. This means that any users just wishing to browse the content the site has to offer will always be kept happy.

And here end this “entry” as I’m too sleepy to keep going.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *