Build Your Own Dog Wagon

An anonymous reader writes "Philip Greenspun isn't the only Web-site innovator with an interest in dogs, airplanes, photography, and travel. While Kyler Laird appears to operate on a budget that's a couple of orders of magnitude lower, his description of adventures in dog-cart development exhibit the same virtues of technical specificity and lucidity."

Comments

Re:already

[adipocere]

This paragraph pretty clearly states why the Slashdot editors should try to seek permission, or at least alert the site owners, before linking. We all think it is cute when a site bursts into flames as we all hit it simultaneously, but a lot of small businesses, hobbyists, and so forth, cannot afford to have some giant T3s attached to the latest and best clustered servers on the off-chance that Slashdot would link to them.

However, when it does happen, it's like a Lottery of Suck: sites go down, fees get hiked, business could be lost. A great deal of Slashdotters work for small businesses who simply could not withstand the hit.

Nor is there a good excuse to NOT warn first, just the eagerness to "get the big scoop" on a site that is only vaguely journalistic. Slashdot could offer a "why don't we cache this page for you?" or ask for permission to reprint a page. It seems like the fair thing to do.

Before you laugh, consider that people have made modules for Apache, last I saw, specifically to deal with sudden slashdotting by throttling based on referrer. Now, if the open source community sees a need for it, it probably is a valid need.