why blog pagination URL structure needs restructuring

Posted on 2010-05-28 by Panayotis

The most popular convention on how to represent a blog pagination URL is that the home page is page 1. These are the latest, let’s say, 10 articles. Then you have page 2, where the next 10 most recent articles appear. It sounds reasonable, but it’s quite impractical.

The reason is simple. Every time you publish a new article, ALL “pages” change content. The last article of page 1 goes to page 2. The last article of page 2 goes to page 3, etc. For example, as soon as I publish this blog post, the contents of http://vrypan.net/log/page/2/ will change -and the same will happen to pages 3, 4, 5,.., 44.

As a result:
- indexing any URL that indicated pagination is useless for search engines.
- if you are using some kind of caching engine, you have to re-create all “pages”, whenever a new post is published!

The funny thing? No matter what number I assign to the page containing the very first 10 posts of the blog, I wrote back in 2004, their has been the same for 6 years now, and will continue to be the same for as long as my blog exists (unless I decide to delete one of the first 10 posts). So, why not make this page, page #1?

The way I see it, the very first post of your blog should be on page #1. The last ones on, let’s say, page #100. As you add posts, the pages increment. But the older pages don’t change.

This would cause only one inconsistency: if you have 23 posts, with 10 posts per page, on the home page you will present posts 14-23. Page #1 has 1-10, page #2 11-20, #3 21-23. This makes it impractical to have the usual “older entries” link at the homepage. This link (obviously, no home page has a “newer entries” link :-) should be replaced by an “archive” link or something like that.

In short: a blog is read in reverse chronological order, but its archive should be numbered like a book, in chronological order.. Yes, if you want to know the end, you go to the last page, we’ve been doing this for centuries. This would solve some important problems, and wouldn’t create any new ones, IFAIK.

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@you: twitter UI fail?

Posted on 2010-03-22 by Panayotis

No, my twitter handler is “vrypan”, not “you” :-)

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I’d like to set up a torrent tracker. How?

Posted on 2010-03-12 by Panayotis

I want to set up a bittorrent tracker. I will seed legal content, don’t worry about this.

Even though bittorrent is such a wonderful and widespread technology, I found little information on how to set up my own tracker. It looks like the entertainment industry propaganda is driving away people from sharing their knowledge on how to setup and maintain a torrent tracker. I also couldn’t find good tools, like web front-ends or tools to analyze and visualize tracker traffic and stats.

So, please, if you know about these things, write some decent howtos, and share the knowledge with the rest of the world…

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MEPs deplore Council’s continued secrecy on ACTA

Posted on 2010-03-10 by Panayotis

The “four musketeers” of the European Parliament (Lambrinidis/GR, Castex/FR, Alvaro/DE and Roithova/CZ) issued a press release deploring EU Council’s continued secrecy on ACTA.

PRESS RELEASE

Strasbourg, 10 March 2010

MEPs deplore Council’s continued secrecy on ACTA

Council’s intransigence to disclose all documents relating to the negotiations over an International Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement (ACTA) between the EU and more than 38 countries around the world, has stirred sentiments to Members of the European Parliament.

In a statement released today, MEPs Lambrinidis (S&D, Greece), Castex (S&D, France), Alvaro (ALDE, Germany) and Roithova (EPP, Czech Republic) deeply regret the fact that the Council is continuing its secretive stance, despite the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, which stipulates that the European Parliament should have full and immediate access to information at all stages of international negotiations. They also applaud a joint resolution tabled today by all political groups, according to which, the European Parliament reserves its right to take the case to the European Court of Justice in order to safeguard its prerogatives.

The four MEPs recently expressed their discontent and disapproval to such practices, in a Written Declaration to the European Parliament, which is rapidly on its way to be adopted by a majority of Representatives in the House.

Vice-President of the European Parliament Stavros Lambrinidis added the following:

“This Parliament will not sit back silently while the fundamental rights of millions of citizens are being negotiated away behind closed doors. We oppose any “legislation laundering” on an international level of what would be very difficult to get through most national legislatures or the European Parliament. We are giving private companies sweeping rights to monitor indiscriminately every citizen’s activities on the internet — something that we refuse to allow even to our police when fighting terrorism. Access to the internet is in itself a fundamental right. It must be treated and protected as such”.

According to MEP Françoise Castex, shadow rapporteur on the Gallo report on IPRs enforcement in the internal market: “Beyond the issue of transparency, we will not accept a text which might undermine access to medicines, freedom of speech and internet service providers liability. ACTA, by putting pressure on Internet service providers opens the door to private ‘three strikes’ approaches and generalized surveillance of the Net.”

Alexander Alvaro, substitute member of the LIBE committee said: “Without any doubt, we have to fight counterfeiting rigorously. However, this fight should not be misused to introduce measures that were repeatedly declined by Parliament. Any international agreement affecting the everyday lives of European citizens must be discussed in a transparent and public manner – especially when issues such as blocking internet access of citizens are part of the agreement. We expect the Commission to make sure that the ACTA agreement fully sticks to the acquis communautaire and does not become acronym for Another Crazy Treaty Agreed.”

Zuzana Roithová, rapporteur of the IMCO committee on the Gallo report on IPRs enforcement in the internal market, urges “Counterfeiting is the cancer of the Internal Market and the EU is desperately seeking the cure. The ACTA should improve international cooperation, if it offers the appropriate measures. It should focus on the counterfeited goods, which are dangerous to our health and lives, instead of hunting our high school students for downloading computer games from the Internet. It is unacceptable that the European Parliament is not informed about the current status of negotiations. If the Commission will not communicate with the Parliament there is a risk that the Parliament will refuse the ACTA as it refused the SWIFT agreement. Then we would lose another tool to tackle infringements of intellectual property rights. The majority of counterfeited goods come to Europe from China, but China is not involved in negotiations. How does the Commission think that it could persuade China to sign the ACTA afterwards?”

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post to twitter, but keep your data under your control.

Posted on 2010-02-16 by Panayotis

I’ve been using twitter since 2006, but I’m not a big fan of it. However, it has become my main way of sharing links and information, replacing other services, like delicious.

One of the things I don’t like about twitter is the feeling that all this information that I’ve shared is somewhere “in there”, but I don’t really have access to it. It’s practically impossible for me to search and use my tweets from 2 years ago. I also don’t know what will happen in 5 or 10 years, if twitter decides to shut down -it’s not the first time I use a service that is cool and hyped, and then, after some years no one cares about!

That’s why I decided to set up a separate wordpress blog, used mainly to tweet. (Have a look at http://vrypan.net/asides/). Whenever I want to share something to twitter, I post it there, and it immediately appears on twitter. As an extra bonus, I have all my shared links and thoughts tagged, making them easier to search.

This set up lets me use twitter.com only as a distribution medium. The main source of information, my main repository, is my own blog, where I have full control. Twitter, facebook, friendfeed or buzz become just distribution media.

This is how I set up http://vrypan.net/asides/:

1. I used the prologue theme. It’s simple and let’s me post from the homepage of my blog.

2. I set up my feed on feedburner and activated the “socialize” option (under “publicize”)

3. I made sure my blog pings the feedburner ping server. (Go to WordPress Settings->Writting->Update Services and add “http://ping.feedburner.google.com/”)

That’s it!

To be honest, I feel there are some more things that could be done, to better integrate with twitter. For example, I’d love a plug-in that “prepares” each post especially for twitter:
- it would convert long URLs to short URLs only in the feed
- if the post is longer than 140 chars, it would include a link back to the original post, but if it’s up to 140 it wouldn’t. (I’m not interested in driving traffic back to this blog, I’ve even disabled comments, there’s no need to point back to it unless there is more information that doesn;t fit in 140 characters.)
- it would create a special twitter feed with the above mentioned modifications, and leave the normal rss feed unmodified. I’d post to twitter using the “special” feed, and let other services, like RSS aggregators use the original feed.

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Google public DNS: these guys scare me.

Posted on 2009-12-04 by Panayotis

Why would Google offer a public DNS service?

Because it’s a cheap and easy way to track attention today and in the future. (Almost) anything you do on the internet requires DNS queries. And when I say anything I don’t mean just web browsing (HTTP). I mean email, ftp, and most other internet applications.

Google wants to know what is going on on the net. They want to know of new sites. The want to know sparks in attention regarding a specific domain or service. Google Analytics does that -to a certain extent.

But if they could track all (or most, or a large portion) of DNS requests, they would be able to know in (almost) real time where is the global attention focused. They would also be able to track changes in the internet topology: if I move my data center to a new ISP, they will know, since all the IPs of my servers would change. Or, if users start using BING, they will know. They will also know, if, for example, the usage pattern of api.paypal.com has changed in the last hours or days.

Oh, one more thing: a DNS service that big can be turned into a cache cow: Google, already have a service called Google AdSense for Domains, my guess is they will extend it to be used for misspelled domain names.

And, in case some new, exotic service appears, they will be able to spot it and estimate it’s traffic…

Google public DNS service is a good move from their part. But I don’t like it. They have started to scare me.

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The Openfund-selected start-ups.

Posted on 2009-11-23 by Panayotis

theopenfund

Today, The OpenFund anounced the selection of the first series of start-ups.

Four promising companies: crawdout.com (with an “a”, that’s right), youscan, fashinating, and my favorite, listiki.

listiki
Keep an eye on listiki -I think it can become even bigger than its founders think… I’ll be writing about it.

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rssCloud and file sync

Posted on 2009-11-10 by Panayotis

Lately, I’ve been testing services like dropbox, sugarsync, etc. The reason is bucket3:
1. I’d like to have a “local” copy of my content and be able to add or update it,
2. then have it automatically synced to my server,
3. where bucket3 would notice the changes and update my blog.
4. I would also like to have content added on the server side, by other means (ex. a script downloading my twitter updates daily), synced back to my laptop.

In order for this to work, first of all, I need a file syncing service. Most of the above mentioned are good in syncing files -even though Linux CLI support is very bad, and my server is a Linux box. So they are on the right track.

dropbox has a nice feature: they have an RSS feed of all the changes.

Then it struck me. We need an open source file syncing service that would use RSS to describe the changes on the “main” file repo, and then use rssCloud to notify the rest of the repos.

It would work like this:
1. A local repo knows when a new file is added or modified and pushes this change to the main repo.
2. The main repo updates its changes.xml rss feed and uses rssCloud to notify all local repos of changes.
3. Local repos pull the changes and everything is in sync.

Of course, it might me as easy to set the whole thing as a decentralized system, where no “central” or “main” repository exists, and all repositories notify the rest of any changes.

An extra bonus: it would be very easy for developers to implement action hooks, the github style: for example, I’d like to run a couple of bucket3 scripts when new content is added or updated.

And the whole mechanism is based on open standards, widespread knowledge and experience with RSS, aggregators and tools like rsync making it easy to can have different implementations per platform of programming language or needs.

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my dream blog engine

Posted on 2009-11-05 by Panayotis

Let’s say I could have my dream blog engine. How would that be?

– it would let me easily copy the whole blog to a new server when I decide to change hosting providers.
– I wouldn’t have to worry for database or other updates if I decide to abandon it
– I would be able to keep a copy of my posts localy
– I should actually have a local copy of *all* my content, including photos of videos posted there.
– It would use a version control system for my content, like git.
– It would allow me to create a folder (a real, file system folder) drop in it a bunch of photos, and it would create a gallery and a post from it.
– It would poll twitter and friendfeed for my activity and pull it back to my blog
– I should be able to send it an email with attachments (ex. a couple of photos and mp3 files), that would be automatically extracted to a folder, and all of them would be bundled in a single post, using the title of my email and its body text.
- I would just have to copy my latest podcast episode MP3 file to it, and it would read the id3 tags and automatically create a new blog entry, with enclosures and all.
- I should be able to easily script crazy things for it, in any language, from python to C -even bash.

That’s why I’m building bucket3.

It will only do very few of the above mentioned. But it will also give developers and sysadmins the tools, the environment, where they will be able to easily add functionality “the UNIX way”: by scripting and gluing together old and new tools.

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Suggestion to Friendfeed and WordPress

Posted on 2009-07-16 by Panayotis

I need some tools to turn this blog to my Friendfeed page. I need:
1. An advanced wordpress bookmarklet that will work much like the “share on friendfeed” bookmarklet, but will create new blog posts instead. (the default WP one, leaves much to be desired)
2. A good mechanism to instantly publish my posts to Friendfeed. I already got this: FFDirect.
3. Tighter blog-FF integration. An in-site “like” button would be appreciated.

If we get 1 and 3 done, I will use my blog to host my “identity”, and the networking/sharing features of Friendfeed to connect with others.

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