Browsing the "Internet" category...
Using a Debugging Proxy
I’m a strong believer in the power of “View Page Source” in the browser. But that doesn’t get you very far in this era of AJAX and Flash. If you want to see the real action these days, then you need to use a debugging proxy.
On windows, my recommended proxy is Fiddler. Primarily because Fiddler will automatically configure itself as the proxy server for Internet Explorer on startup and automatically remove itself on shutdown. If you use something like Burp, then you’ll need to manually configure the browser proxy server host and port [and more importantly, manually disable the proxy configuration when you’re done]. The downside of this WinINet magic is that you may pick up HTTP requests from any HTML mail you receive in Outlook.
The following image shows the Fiddler results for the Take the First Step home page. The left pane shows all the HTTP requests and the right pane provides detail on the selected request. Skimming down the requests, you can see that I have the Google toolbar installed in IE and that Take the First Step uses MyBlogLog, Google Analytics, and the Radio Userland webbug.
Of course, there really isn’t anything here at Take the First Step that you couldn’t find just as easily via “Page Info” or “View Page Source”. But I’m confident that you’ll find a visit to your favorite AJAX site quite illuminating.
TiddlyWiki
I have been playing around with wikis at work, trying to improve my management of all the incidental information that flies around nemail. Unfortunately, most wikis that I’ve tried out are a bit much for a personal information store.
Until now. I just started working with TiddlyWiki, an open source micro-content wiki. TiddlyWiki is a self contained HTML file that runs a javascript wiki in the browser.
Page Rank is Back
My page rank took a big hit when I moved my home url from the blog.ideoplex.com sub-domain to the main ideoplex.com domain back in June. I was beginning to think that it wasn’t going to come back.
I’m sure that it was just a coincidence, but after setting my preferred domain to ideoplex.com in Google’s Webmaster Tools my home page rank rose from 2 to 5. Not quite the 6 that I had before the move, but I was blogging much more frequently back then.
Coincidences aside, I’ve always known that most of my readers come for my Java Tutorials as a result of a Google search. But I’ve never really understood my search terms until now:
Thanks go to David Hornik for his post on Google Webmaster Tools
180 Google to Yahoo Ratio
I’m sure that I’m an extreme case; but if Google forgets that I exist, then I’m going to drop off the face of the internet.
Yahoo and Me
Perhaps my readers prefer Google. Or perhaps Yahoo hasn’t recognized my existence. But I know that Yahoo isn’t sending many readers my way.
20 Dec: James Robertson experiences a similar trend.
20 Dec: 180 Google to Yahoo Ratio
Rogers vs MGM
Rogers Cadenhead is taking on MGM in a dispute over wargames.com. Rogers purchased Wargames.Com with the intention of building a commercial site for the sale of military wargames.
I was playing wargames from Avalon Hill and SPI long before Matthew Broderick appeared on the big screen. I’d hate to see a big bully prevail based upon their so-called trademark.
Rogers will be covering his legal saga on his weblog. I’m eagerly awaiting information on how to protect a domain name from a name grabber.
I Hate Free Web Hosts
I try to check for new comments and trackbacks every day. And I find that spam out numbers real information about 100 to 1. Back in the day, spammers actually registered real domain names. Now I find that 100% of my spam comes from free web hosts.
I know that I should have more sympathy for people on a budget. But with good hosting plans available for $60/year (a domain name will run another $10/year), the savings from a free web host is a false economy. Just like real estate, a small place in a good neighborhood is better than a big place in a bad one.