A Web Standards Bookshelf

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Linux / Apache / MySQL / PHP = LAMP

"... As to whether modules are a good idea for someone who doesn't like modules... obviously no. For someone like you, you're pretty better off with a blog or a custom site."

                    --Seth Godin in Squidoo Says My Lens Needs Improving

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So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.

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.

Squdoo Advantages

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."

Why Switch?

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.

The Bookshelf

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 ...

JavaScript

Standard browsers that encounter a <script> tag without a "type=" attribute assume that JavaScript is intended. 'Nuff said.
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AWS

Up to date information on Amazon Web Services is available online, so who needs a book? Maybe nobody, but I want to look for some new ideas while things are still in the planning stages rather than retrofit them into an existing implementation.

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Integration

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XML

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XSL & XSLT

Be sure you're talking XSLT 2.0

Amazon XSL Top 25

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More XSLT

What if you could get big names like Amazon.com to serve highly customized pages you design directly? You can with XSLT -- the altogether too mysterious eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations.
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Semantic Web

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PHP & MySQL

These are "Phase 2" technologies. 'Bots to build pages (which can be served as static pages.)
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LinkBuddies Rocks!

No. Really. It does.

The Whole Ed Cata-Blog

Subscribe to The Whole Ed Cata-Blog

I've never quite been sure what distinguishes a blog from a regular webpage. Timeliness seems to have something to do with it, but that doesn't seem to be a hard and fast rule.

Anyway, here are some of the things I've been working on lately...

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