Ajax woes

Why oh why are there no simple, straight forward tutorials on things like Ajax? (signed Disgusted, Tonbridge Wells). You would think, given the hype around this new “Web 2.0” (kill me if I ever use that phrase again) and it’s associated technology would have actually produced something of value. But no.

There are tons of articles going on about “how great” AJAX is and how it will revolutionise the web, but the reality is it is very much a niche product. Great for people who want an interface into GoogleMaps for instance – but for 95% of websites does it actually add ANY value what so ever?

I have yet to see an application of this where is has been anything other than eye candy and really, not worth the effort. The technology is not so far removed from the common usage so I assume for normal people it’s not that hard to learn (only dullards like myself struggle with the non-tutorials on the net), but there is still new things to learn. There are new methods of working to be put in place etc., and all these things cost money. What value does AJAX add to a website (or the web in general) that cant be achieved by an existing technology without the training burden and associated costs?

Hopefully someone will prove me wrong here and point to the BESTâ„¢ website on the net…. but I wont hold my breath.

Now, if you really want to see a rant, ask me about web 2.0……….

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How to hammer firefox :-)

(from http://splasho.com/blog/2006/02/26/the-superbrowser/)

Firefox is definitely growing in popularity (it is used almost exclusively here at Why Dont You and by our linux friends) and this blog entry shows how someone decided to install the “top 100” extensions. While we have never gone this far, as you can read at the blog, despite the strain this must place on FF it has remained stable.

Load time and system resources will inevitably suffer, but the fact that so many programs written by so many different people can work together so well is seriously a testament to the open source movement.

Well done firefox.

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The Roman Army

The update at http://romans.etrusia.co.uk/ is continuing well. There is a new article on the Roman Army, before and after Marius’ reforms which makes very interesting reading.

Please let us know if you find any other interesting history sites.

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.htaccess resources

Writing .htaccess files is something of an arcane art. The problem discussed previously was to do with not having the obligatory /. However, no sooner had the redirect seemed to be working perfectly when the whole site disappeared under the weight of a 500 error (which is being worke don at this moment.)

First stop on looking for how to switch files to a new location without losing search engine ranking is to use a redirect 301, the syntax for which is on http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_alias.html#redirect

However, to make it clear why and how to do this, there was a fair bit of useful help in more comprehensible English on http://www.tamingthebeast.net/ as well as some (as yet untested but apparently good) Search Engine Optimisation advice.

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