A Web Standards Bookshelf

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I'm shutting down my Squidoo operations.

That doesn't mean I'm deleting all my lenses and going away mad. It's just that Squidoo isn't meeting my current -- much less my future -- needs as a web platform, and I need to move on.

I'll be "finishing" whatever is half-baked, adding internal links, refining tags, maybe even adding some new content, but ultimately the goal is to get things into "complete" snapshot order and quit wasting my time on a platform run by cut-throat marketers for cut-throat marketers.

Squidoo has some pretty good features. It "pings" some of the standard RSS indices like a blog and that reduces the latency between the time you write something and the time it is actually seen by an audience. That's something I will need to replicate.

Squidoo also allows you to embed RSS content in an XHTML document, which is the reason I've stuck with it as long as I have. Of course, Bitty Browser will accomplish much the same effect, as will XSLT with a bit more hacking."

None of this is easy, so why bother? I've written quite a bit about Squidoo's faults and shortcomings to no avail, and I won't belabor those points here, but it all comes down to a lack of control over one's own content.

You can't build an application that is an improvement over Amazon.com's reasonably competent search function in a nest of spammers.

I'm going to need to fill in some blanks in my own programming skills to get "The Next Whole Ed Catalog" off the ground, so I might as well make my notes and impressions about the relevent books public. Might even sell a couple ...

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