Archive for the ‘World Wide Web’ Category
Organize to resist SOPA in DC
If you’re in the DC area, there’s an emergency meeting of the DC Tech Meetup to get involved in advocating against SOPA and PIPA legislation.
If you can’t make it in person, you can use the EFF’s online form to write your representatives about SOPA and PIPA.
Don’t wait until it’s too late. The Internet is a vital part of our freedom. Well-intentioned legislators could damage that greatly while trying to solve problems they don’t understand fully.
The drawbacks of shortlinks
These days it seems that people would rather generate a shortlink than use a real link, even when it’s not much shorter. It’s hip, after all. (Peter actually caught me doing this. It was for a link that used to be long but was shortened recently so a shortlink isn’t needed anymore. I did it to continue a habit, not for hipness.)
I’ve begun to see an increasing number of drawbacks to short link services. Here are a few I can think of: 1) if the service is down, the link is broken; this just happened to me. 2) I can’t see where it’s headed, so I don’t know if I’ve already read it. 3) I don’t know what I’m about to click through to, so I’m less likely to trust and click. 4) I’m much more interested in the content if I know what it is. Some of these problems are helped by links that are chosen not to be a random hash, but not all.
I’m starting to feel that it’s bad netiquette to use shortlinks unless they are really needed. And I’m a little troubled by what happens if tinyurl and bit.ly go bankrupt — half the Internet will be full of broken links. Oh wait, that will mostly affect Twitter… maybe it’s not so bad after all.
Why measure pageviews per month?
I don’t get why companies talk about how many pageviews they get per month. Maybe it is a handy metric when thinking about revenue, but when thinking about performance, it’s not a convenient way to measure.
For example, “we get 50M page views per month.” Let’s translate that into something useful for an engineer: 20 page views per second. How about 2.5B pageviews per month? Roughly 1000 per second.
Much easier to think about what this means. And not so impressive.
