Don't you get tired of all those little 'valid' buttons claiming that the website you're visiting passes validation for protocol x,y, or z? Why should you care? It should be QA's responsibility to worry about whether or not the software validates to the applicable specifications, not yours. Unless of course it is the website owner's way of telling you that it's up to you to verify their code because they can't be bothered with it. Or perhaps for bragging rights. Either way I think it's a bit arrogant. "Hey, our pages aren't broken....". Who cares anyway? If they're broken, you won't be able to read 'em to find out that they aren't supposed to be broken.  So it kind of defeats the purpose. 

In fact, as I've found on this site, just because you're compliant on one day, you might not be tomorrow. I find it a little irresponsible that web specs are allowed to change without notice. That certainly wasn't the case when I was trying to write standards compliant software.

If, like me, you mostly find this amusing, I've got some buttons for you. Put 'em on your website.

Now you too can be compliant with all the latest acronyms. And you can ask your local admin - 'Are you GQX2.3 compliant? What about NORK2?' Huh? You will no doubt cause them a huge amount of emotional distress as they search the web to find out what is required to be GQX2.3 compliant. The nice thing is that your website is in fact compliant, so you can wear these badges with honor.

Give me a day or two and I might be able to come up with a NORK2 validator if you really want to mess with their heads. It will validate any page which has a nork valid image link on it and will fail with unspecified errors any page which doesn't. 

Syntax error on line 1. Illegal command 'DOCTYPE'.
Syntax error on line 2. Invalid or obsolete tag 'html'.  
Script type 'javascript' is not legal in NORK2. Please use 'carrotscript'
 or a transcendant document format instead.
'<title>' is deprecated in NORK2 without 'region=' specifier.
Action cancelled. Too many errors. 

...Isn't that wicked?

PS> In researching this article, I discovered what your local admin is going to discover, that even if they aren't NORK2 compliant, you can date a NORK girl; and they aren't anywhere near as ugly as Stalingrad babes.  They're also mostly Catholic, so you don't have to struggle with those pesky condoms. Isn't that the cat's meow? Details Here.

It's been a few years since Yahoo! redesigned their front page - it was looking pretty cluttered and pretty tired. So they cleaned it up again. Doesn't look too bad considering all of the information they're trying to cram into one screen of pixels. It's still a bit dis-organized though. This is the direct result of being a large company that can no longer turn on a dime. Different pieces of the page have slightly different looks than other pieces. Ah yes, I remember well the process of trying to get development teams scattered across the globe to provide a common look and feel when all their pieces came together on a single page.  

But I would like to draw your attention to the little menu bar on the right, with mail and chat and traffic reports, etc. For those to whom it isn't intuitively obvious, it's a little AJAX app.

Nice touch. 

Family and friends are advised that I've now migrated all my existing photo albums from the old website. You will need an account here to access the photos. (Contact me after you've got the account so I can add you to the access list). The old password won't work anymore - and the old website is going away. 

I've also finally implemented Atom feeds. I know it's been an RFC for several months, but I already had one feed format so it wasn't a priority while I built the rest of the community site software.

But my RSS feeds won't validate if any articles have more than one attachment. There was a huge debate about this a couple of years ago. Dave Winer and Rogers Cadenhead seem to hold the view that the RSS 2.0 spec clearly states that an item can have at most one enclosure.

I've read the spec over and over - in fact every version of the spec. Nowhere is this spelled out. I can't even find the passages they claim 'imply' this limit. But face it, it's a very poorly written spec which Dave Winer grabbed from Netscape and made his own. He changes it whenever it suits him, and interprets it any way which suits his personal ambitions. Along the way teaming up with Adam Curry and 'inventing podcasting' (which also led to the protocol abortion we call iTunes). Dave also get very wealthy off of RSS during the dot-com crash, probably the only person besides the Google founders to get wealthy off the Internet during this period.

But RSS has run its course. It is now time to rid the Internet of everything associated with Dave Winer. He is a disgrace. RSS is a disgrace.  Upgrade all your feeds to Atom. It's a much better syndication format, clearly thought out - well defined and specified.

Just do it.

Standing at the crossroads. The website software has evolved a bit more. Photo albums are necessary so that I can pull in what remains of macgirvin.com - which does little more these days than house my photo collection and collect my email archives.

Soon I'll be shutting down the aging Linux box in my garage and moving everything that's left onto hosted websites such as the one you are getting this post from.  

The photo archives use group permissions. This way if a new family member of friend registers I only have to add them to one list to let them see the entire private photo collection. It is also a departure from the simple permissions I originally baked into the site - registered or not, admin or not.

It provides full control of who can access what. The basic permissions structure was fine for getting something working quickly. Now it's time to move on. You want something only accessible to family? To males over 35 that are into scuba diving? You need a little better permission control. 

This in turn opens the possibility of group permissions for forums, weblogs, or just about anything else. That's what I mean about standing at the crossroads.

This is where everything changes.   

I've been asked why I do this. Why do I spend so much time on my computer? What do you have to show for it? What purpose does it serve? If you aren't making money, why are you doing it?

I suppose to a casual observer it looks as though my efforts have been about as productive as if I spent my days playing Duke Nukum or hack all day. Why bother, indeed? What have I done?

I built a community web portal. If you think it's so easy, try it yourself. There are a lot of smart people on this planet, and a lot of community web portals - and most of them are free. So what is it that drives me? First of all, I don't know of anybody that has tried to single-handedly write a community portal from scratch. This is almost always done by organizations (both formal and informal). It is a huge undertaking full of thousands of challenges. I'm not a worker bee solving one little piece of the puzzle. Instead it encompasses a much bigger picture. 

That's why. 

This is my education. You can't buy this education. You can only live it. Why would somebody choose mysqli over the mysql interface? Why not use HTTP auth for a website? Isn't it easier? Can you make drop shadow images in a cross-platform manner? How about if you change the page layout? How do you upload entire directories to a photo album? Is it even possible? How do you make clean URLs? Plugins? Virtual hosts? Themes and avatar pages? How about ajax chat? How hard is it really? What else is AJAX useful for? Should you use a procedural or object oriented approach for a large website project? Why? How do you manage sessions? What problems are you likely to have if you build a PHP5 application and try and run it on PHP4? Why on earth would somebody use PHP if Ruby is so much faster to develop? Why on earth would somebody use PHP when the execution time of 'C' and 'C++' are so much faster? Which costs more to maintain, MVC programming or mixed-script? Should forums be flat or threaded? Why? What is the most efficient schema in all of these cases? Do you use existing code or write it yourself? Which is really the quickest to market? 

Anybody can download a web portal and create a website. I can answer all of these questions and hundreds more from first hand experience. I've done it. I know why. 

And that's why...