K-Squared Ramblings

Weblog Etiquette vs. Link Rot

On an ideal Web, pages would stay put and links would never change. Of course, anyone who has been on the Internet long enough knows just how far away this ideal is. Commercial sites go out of business, personal sites move from school to school to ISP to ISP, news articles get moved into archives or deleted, and so on.

There are two sides to fighting link rot. The first is to design your own site with URLs that make sense, that you won’t find yourself changing a few months or years down the road. If you have to move something, use a redirect code so that people and spiders will automatically reach the new location.

The other side to the fight is periodically checking all the links on your site to make sure they still go where you expect.

So how do you handle online journals? Obviously they’re websites, so from that standpoint you should at least try to keep the links current. But on the blogging side, there are problems with this, in particular the school of thought that you should never revise a blog entry (also discussed in Weblog Ethics). Read the rest of this entry »

What size is that, exactly?

The Good Guy

The signs-with-interesting-gaps series continues with a Good Guys store:

Here’s a better picture of the lower part of the sign:

And on the other side of the building:

Knight in Santa’s Service

Fear my Formidable Fashion-Fu!

Uh… yeah, I’ll get back to you on that.

Lease the City!

Do I get a key with that?

1.0!

K² Ramblings is now running on WordPress 1.0! It’s using the default template right now, but I was thinking of redesigning the layout anyway.

Two of the nice things to come out of 1.0 are the new format for permalinks (URLs to individual posts make sense now, instead of looking random) and the ability to file a post under multiple categories. Unfortunately, the new permalinks format means breaking all the old links… again. I’ve set up several redirect rules for the old link types, so they should follow through to the new locations, and I’ve updated all the local links I could find. Since the new format actually makes sense, I don’t plan to change it again.

Anyway, expect the layout to change again sometime in the next few days.

Thank you, Steven Spielberg…

… for not making any changes to Raiders of the Lost Ark!

(Well, except the title. I mean, is it really necesary to add “Indiana Jones and the…” to the beginning?)

An interesting proposal from the folks at the IMDb

Now I can’t get “The Scotsman” out of my head.

No frelling way

Last week, probably on New Year’s Eve, I was showing a co-worker where the office keeps the scale and demonstrated how to use it. As I expected, I’d put on a few holiday pounds and decided to start again with the points-watching on the 5th. So I’ve been eating pointily for three days. Three days only. I get on the scale this morning and it shows 7 pounds less. This is just wrong. Even counting 2 pounds for the jeans I was wearing last week that’s still more than I ever lost in a week and it hasn’t been a week yet. I’m going to keep it up for another week and see if I need to do any more.