Smokes your problems, coughs fresh air.

The joys of being well-known to Google

The “Places” system in the new Firefox 3 is great. I’m still getting more effective usage out of just the location bar every day. But, sometimes I’m on a different computer, or I haven’t been to one of my web pages for a very long time.

How cool is it then that I can just Control+K to my Google search box and enter: bypassing smart completion to get my own page on the top of the result list?

Since my blog is literally a log that I mostly use to keep track of what I think and do while problem-solving, it’s great that I can rely on Google to find my way through memory lane.

2 Comments

  1. Ryan

    Wow. Your website is so impressive. It’s just way too advanced for modern man. I can see why you wouldn’t want IE users using it. Their computers would catch on fire at the very sight of your home page. Behold, the greatest web designer ever – ignoring better than 70% of all internet users. I guess you are just too cool and ahead of your time. You sir, are an idiot.

  2. Rowan Rodrik

    Ryan, you jerk, you’re probably referring to the error that I display to Internet Explorer users that visit my regular website. That has nothing to do with being a great web designer—about which you can shut the fuck up, thank you—but everything with the techniques I chose to explore when I built the site.

    You see? If you’d analyze the pages, you’d see that they were written in XHTML 1.1. The only compliant way to serve that is with a mime-type that says application/xhtml+xml. Internet explorer doesn’t recognize that. It also doesn’t recognize the XML prologue I like to put at the begging of my XML files (which XHTML files are). Neither does it dig the inclusion of a CSS stylesheet through an xml-stylesheet processing instruction. The only way to have made Internet Explorer accept this was to serve it as application/xml and than include a client side XSLT sheet to turn it into something passable for IE. Incidentally, I had played with these techniques but chose to toy with different techniques instead.

    I don’t like IE and I think nobody does once they get their hands on a better browser. I did the site for free under no obligation towards anyone so I also liked the idea of finally having a project where I didn’t have to spend 60% of my time accomedating an at-that-time abandonware browser. Neither did I have to stick with techniques and standards that were at that time properly supported by IE (close to none).

    As I nice side-effect of not striving to be compatible with Internet Explorer, I could do things intuitively and expressively in CSS that would have required a shitload of extra work in IE. Admittedly, I’m now mostly done toying with these concepts and am moving much of my content over to my WordPress blog here. Actually, the www website also started out as a WordPress installation before I decided I preferred to play with a website consisting of static pages where I would not strive for uniformity between pages.

    In the end, my website isn’t built for your convenience, but as a public wanking exercise for myself. If you happened to find yourself inconvenienced because you were actually interested in the content that you expected to find, that’s just bad luck. Had this indeed been the case, you could have asked me nicely to do something about it, so that I could have derived some satisfaction out of pleasing you. Now I’ll just try to please myself by being a bigger wanker than you can ever be. So sod off!

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