Spun

It’s the “Before you finish X, could you do Y?” that always gets me.

This robots.txt file generator is super-useful. I came this close to writing one of these myself back when I wrote Help the Googlebot understand your web site but I never got around to it.

Here’s some useful edit-in-place Flickr style DHTML.

Speaking of prototypes, I really dig 37 Signals’ approach: for each web page, on paper, list the page elements needed, group related items together, design each chunk, and then arrange them on the page.

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

I’m building this thing with some buddies. My current responsibility is the prototype. This thing’s going to use some DHTML and AJAX, and I can envision the screens in my mind, all working in beautiful, usable form, a culmination of all the good interface techniques I’ve seen without all the ones that suck.

So I start to prototype, and I decide I want to totally wow my friends with a nearly-working front end. I’ve only got a few days, mind you - we’re working in 3-day dev cycles. And like an idiot, I wind up getting totally bogged down in writing and debugging Javascript for one little minor piece of functionality that we’ll probably throw out in the end anyway because this is a quick and dirty prototype. End result? Instead of a flashy, nearly-working proto, I had NOTHING to show for all my Javascript screwing around.

Lesson? There is no room for anal perfectionism in rapid prototyping.

I spent a day up at the Microsoft campus in Redmond last week meeting with their search team along with several other bloggers discussing web search problems and solutions. It was a pretty amazing day for me. No matter how much MS’ approach to things irritates or enrages me, the fact is that it’s one of the greatest software companies on the planet which brought personal computing to the masses. This means I was starstruck and totally excited to visit campus, which is a huge, sprawling, beautiful place.

Since I signed an NDA 70 pages long which requires I give up my first born child if I reveal any company secrets for the next 100 years, I can’t say much except 1. the search team was having the same discussions we had back at Kinja two years ago (which hurt, deep, since Kinja still languishes) and 2. the search team is bigger than any team I’ve ever worked for, they are aware of their status as underdog, and they are willing to drop more than a few bucks to listen to random bloggers to sit around and demand what they want from search.

A weird and dizzying experience for someone who’s worked only for small companies which sometimes required I go out and buy more toilet paper for the women’s bathroom.

eWeek coverage of the event quotes me briefly and erroneously calls the meeting “camp,” when the name of it is Search Champs. Only jokingly, a few of us bloggers called it camp.

Singleton’s come in handy for things like, oh, access control lists. (Thanks, Mark.)

Thank you, Marc Liyanage, for not making me build PHP5 for my Powerbook.

Forget XMLHttpRequest, this Ajax method sets the src of an img dynamically to pull data from the server.