Since this is nothing more than an API to access data, I wonder if this couldn't be used as the backend storage for existing file storage services, instead of paying for servers and bandwidth yourself...
This limits costs to storage actually used (at $0.15/GB which is a very fair rate), and bandwidth actually used. The cost that could add up is the bandwidth, where you'd obviously have to direct users to the amazon URL directly to avoid using bandwidth to get the file then to pass it on too.
Plus, at $0.20/GB of bandwidth, upload/download could get expensive still, with no cap on that cost. For example, 2,000 GB of bandwidth, which is bundled with most low-end dedicated servers nowadays (ie. even the sub-$99/mo. machines), this would cost you $400 from Amazon. That's pretty steep, and may be the limiting factor making it unfeasible for this idea. Interesting nonetheless.
For something they expect to become "indispensable and ubiquitous as the mobile phone" they're going to have to do something to increase the battery life from 3 hours. I charge up my cell only every few *days*, not a couple times a day. How will 3 hours suffice when you're on the go? It won't, that's how.
Thanks for the feedback! We're actually working on desktop integration right now, but it's not ready just yet. What we're working on is a webdav server so users can simply mount putfwd.com as a network drive and drag and drop to it. You'll be able to access all your files that way too, so it won't just be one-way.
Hopefully that will solve the desktop component, since webdav is supported by most desktop OSes too, as well as the requests we've had for FTP access (I think the webdav will make FTP unnecessary).
Let's see if they add much in the way of web-based features (ie. more than just a download and "email this file" UI), or if it's just like other traditional services. For my opinion of why over time, people will want more than that (although most people will use a service from someone as large as Google anyway):
That seriously sucks to hear. If no PHP 4, no go for me for a long time. Even if the current version works in PHP 4 right now, based on their FAQ it's not supported, so I'd be risking having the carpet pulled out from under me at any time.
Damn. I was really hoping to use that search component...
Does this work with PHP 4? They mention PHP 5 specifically several times, but I seem to remember they were saying this framework would be backwards compatible too. This would be nice since most PHP sites are still running 4.x but gauging from their site (and their manual, and the download itself) it looks like they may have abandoned that idea.
Unfortunately, until PHP 4 is only used on a very insignificant number of sites, I can't integrate this into products without cutting off a significant portion of my potential users. I'd love to use things like Zend_Search and ditch the Java requirement altogether, but not without PHP 4 support.
But now that users are flocking to non-modifiable, one-size-fits-all web 2.0 apps like Gmail or Flickr, are we moving away from our open source ideals?
Perhaps there needs to be a distinction between "we"s here. We, as in the open source believers/advocates/etc, may indeed be partially giving away our open source freedoms in exchange for convenience in using new web-based apps like these. We, as in the mainstream, are doing exactly what could have been predicted we'd do: going for convenience as we always have. That's never changed, and is why open source is still only used by a fraction of end users. Where open source users move towards web-based applications is at the fringe of open source where it meets the mainstream: Those who aren't super dedicated to open source as a concept, and only really used it because of the value proposition it sold them on initially.
If you look at things in other areas of IT, you'll find confirmation of this there too. For example, this is partly why the iPod is successful with less options than its competitors, why most people don't bother with replacing MSIE even after all the security nightmares over the years, and so on. In the case of the iPod, ease of use is more convenient than learning how to use extra features. In MSIE's case, it _appears_ to most people to be more convenient to do nothing and fret than to find an alternative.
Web-based applications succeed based on their ability to sell convenience over desktop equivalents. In cases like Gmail and Flickr, they've succeeded against their desktop counterparts. The sharing of photos is way more convenient with Flickr, and Gmail is not only easier to use (ease of use == convenience), but it's also online, which is more convenient in itself for many people.
Sure search engines help people find your content, but they aren't the only or even key reason why this is on the rise. Search engines have been around since roughly the beginning of the web's popular usage. What's new these days is how easy it is to do two things: publish and advertise.
Publishing via blogs is ridiculously simple, and it's so interlinked that it naturally plays into the latest search enging ranking methods.
Advertising, thanks to Google Adsense (not due to Google search:)), as well as others now trying to immitate them (some came first, but everyone looks second to the public, so...), is now just a matter of pasting a few lines of HTML into your blog template. Adsense brokers the deals with advertisers and you get a cut.
These two things are clearly what facilitated the gold rush of the past few years for advertising dollars online. In turn, this affects content quality because right now we're in a race for quantity and the two aren't often found together. Once the dust settles, the quality will improve again and most of the gold diggers will go home.
Isn't it a little early to talk about who's already won the race for 2006, seeing as how we're not even two months into it? Must be a slow news day I guess...
The push mode looks like it will be really fun to play. Not sure I quite understand standard mode though... Is it that you're controlling the currently falling piece, and Mario, at the same time? That would be a challenge for us single-minded folks!
The touch mode also looks neat, since it looks like it's more logic-based than traditional tetris. You're not worrying about pieces as they fall -- and fall faster over time -- but on solving an ever-changing puzzle of already mashed up pieces. Kind of like the modes in tranditional tetris that started you with half a screen full of pieces and you had to work your way out.
Looks like at least the slider examples all work in Firefox, Safari, and Opera for me. This is great news!
I think a standard JS widget library is a definite good thing, and with a company like Yahoo behind it it will probably get more developer awareness and traction with the business folks too than what's been available up to this point from smaller developers.
BSD licensed too, so it's free in any sense of the word for any use (good for us half-commercial folks;)).
The desktop still outperforms web-based applications in many ways, including providing a seamless user experience (after all, it _is_ the user interface, not confined to a box within the user interface). The desktop is still the most appropriate execution environment for large binary applications (photoshop, for example). A web-based alternative like http://pxn8.com/ is definitely very neat, but it's limited compared to photoshop (for professional use at least).
What's cool about web-apps is that they're beginning to integrate with one another. That's one of the most exciting things about the "web 2.0" generation of applications, and offers potentially more convenience increases than all the ajax realtime-esqueness that everyone's talking about.
But the real end I think we're all moving towards is not just limited integration between sites, but also integration with the desktop. Look at Dashboard on Mac OS X and the fact that Vista is going to support RSS like crazy. Other standards like WebDAV and developer APIs on sites extend the possibilities in this way too. Either way, I think this guarantees that the "web 3.0" generation of apps will be just as different from "web 2.0" as the current gen. are from what some would call 1.0 (that's way too many version numbers, ugh!).
PS. Check out my own "web 2.0" app in my sig -- it's a free file storage service with lots of cool features!
I should mention our project, which is a modern, user friendly SourceForge clone that is fairly easy to install and requires little maintenance. It's open source and based on the open source Sitellite CMS framework and it's called SiteForge.
Nothing in the Bible will help us understand how the physical world works (in the sense that we can use this understanding to raise our quality of life by means of technology and increased enlightenment). Physics will.
I agree that the Bible isn't meant to explain the "how" of the world, but the disagreement is with people who believe that science alone can paint a complete picture of the world. Science can't tell us the "why" of the world, for starters. That's the domain of philosophy (Kant, Nietzsche, etc.) and theology (Bible, Koran, etc.), of course.
Since science can only describe and predict physical phenomena, it can't touch upon things like moral actions at all, which makes philosophy and theology necessarily the other half of the means of achieving the good and happy life. In this way, the Bible does sort of describe the world around us, or at least the aspect of our relation to it. I think more scientists would recognize this if they were more familiar with Aristotle's "four causes".
If it's true, as Augustine would suggest, that morally right actions lead to the happy life and bad actions lead to unhappiness, then the Bible does have a role to play towards the goal of enlightenment, and one that science alone can't achieve. Enlightenment/progress itself shouldn't be mistaken to be the goal itself, but a proposed means of using science to achieve the real goal of improving the quality of life for everyone. The funny thing is that science can't even help us evaluate questions like whether the proposal of the enlightenment is a good one or not.:)
It's sad though when the reaction to such questions is for people to claim that they are meaningless...
PS. Forgive me for my long-windedness; I don't get to talk about this stuff very often.:)
(Don't come waving a bible. Someone making a world so complicated and then giving people a handbook is a ridiculous story. Besides, there are a few of these books, depending on which religion you ask). So, screw God. I'll try and find my way alone.
Disclaimer: I'm a theoretical physicist.
So was Einstein, yet somehow he managed to find a balance within his life between his religious and scientific beliefs. In fact, his religious beliefs were a large inspiration for his scientific pursuits. So did Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and many other historic names in science. Newton spent more time writing on religious subjects than scientific ones. How could that possibly be? Were they simply dogmatists at the heart of it, or could there be some dogmatism on both sides of this issue? Perhaps they are not two separate entities, but two halves of the same thing, different but compatible approaches to the same goal? Perhaps a combination of the two, as it seemed to for these great men, could yield better results than just one side alone?
Let's look at the Bible another way for a minute. Could it perhaps have been a divinely inspired book (no mystical connotations necessarily implied here, all art is the product of inspiration is it not?), written by mere mortals? It was obviously not written by God himself, as we can attribute specific human authors to its different parts, so perhaps this view of God providing a handbook is an ignorant comment in itself, no? Now, could it be possible that this book, like many others, contains some wisdom passed down from these people? If that's in fact possible, then what's so wrong with people reading it today and citing it as a source of wisdom in discussions such as this?
If the Bible (an *allegorical* piece of writing based on history) coheres with what we can discern about the world via science and logic, then its lessons, at least those that do meet this criteria, are correct. Please keep in mind that an error by one author in one part doesn't necessarily discredit the whole either, like it would for a mathematical proof where each part builds on the next. There are many interpretations of the creation story, at least one of which I've read that seem to me to cohere completely with the scientific view of the creation of the universe. Again, the Bible is not a literal work, despite what some people would like to believe. Literal interpretation of it leads to many contradictions within it. That doesn't disprove its message, but it does suggest a misinterpretation of it.
Anyway, I'm sorry you feel this way. Some of us feel that learning from the past is important though, and would rather not throw out such philosophically rich sources wholesale simply because some people take them too seriously.
As an aside related to the original topic of discussion (ID/creationism), I'm with you that this crap should NOT be taught in schools. This is not an alternative theory to evolution, it is a dogmatic, literalist interpretation of the first few pages of the Bible. It deserves no more a place in a science class than any other religious belief. It is not science and belongs nowhere near it. Perhaps a religious studies course could cover it, not from a "this is fact" standpoint but from a "this is what these quaint folks over here believe, isn't that nice?" standpoint.
You have some valid points, but you're complaining about URLs pointing to dynamic requests, not just to standard web pages in the system. The two are logically separate, and necessarily visibly different.
True,/index/ appears in every URL. Many systems include something like this, the controller script, at the start of each request. Usually it's something more like/index.php/ in those cases. We felt/index/ was an improvement on that.
Plus, it's easy enough to use mod_rewrite to allow/page-name to map to/index/page-name, and/index/page-name referring to a specific page in the system is pretty easy for users. No numeric references, and you're free to name your page as you please. When we originally added our URL rewriting scheme, mod_rewrite was less prevalent as an Apache module than it is today (we're going almost 5 years back), so we didn't want to rely on it and add that extra requirement. Today, that decision would have been different.:)
As for the rest of your points, tutorials-story-action doesn't expose the inner workings of the system any more than/tutorials/story.php does, arguably less so since it never refers directly to the file in question. By this argument, publicly available documentation on an open source CMS would be bad because it exposes the inner workings of your website. We don't rely on this for security-through-obscurity, and for dynamic request handlers (ie. something more than a page with static body contents) you need some way of referring to it. This is as good as any, and avoids the.php which used to deduct points in some search engine ranking schemes./tutorials/story.php is no more meaningful to the user, but you do need to refer to these dynamic things somehow.
Using Sitellite's box chooser (Sitellite Pro, specifically), you can simply embed an action like tutorials-story-action directly into an ordinary page, in which case you're right back to/index/page-name and you can make 'page-name' anything you please. So there are standard ways of reducing the use of these dynamic references even further.
The idea of parameters like/story.11/ is exactly that they'd come across like files, to the search engines rating the page. To users, they're no worse than ?story=11 and for all they know, we named that file or folder 'story.11'.:)
For the main content pages on the site,/index/page-name is already the solution, but some stuff does have to be dynamic on a site moreso than a database-driven collection of web pages, and for those you'll still need a dynamic way of referring to them and for passing parameters to them.
The title.url-rewriting-in-sitellite-4 part being superfluous is on purpose. The variable itself is actually never used at all in the tutorials-story-action script. It's only reason for being there is to boost the frequency of keyword terms occurring in the URL for search engine optimization purposes.
While nicer looking URLs are said to be more considerate to visitors, the main reason for them originally and still today is for search engine optimization. Sitellite and all of its major add-ons have been designed to be automatically optimized for SEO, that way SEO-savvy companies can use it without needing to jump through hoops.
Hopefully that clears up some of the rationale behind our URL design, which I personally find quite elegant (although imperfect -- I too would do away with/index/ if we could, but changing it now is not worth the effort for such a small gain and a break in backward compatibility on existing sites), and which lends itself to doing some very powerful stuff in Sitellite too.:)
Not sure what you mean though that the URLs don't make sense... They're SEO-friendly (ie./index/page-name instead of/index.php?page=page-name) and have a special structure for dynamic requests as well that avoids the.php and ?foo=bar parameter passing. If there's a way you think would be better, I'd love to hear it.:)
Here's some info on the full workings of our URL scheme:
I was hoping from the summary for a bit more depth to the article, maybe a few pages in length. Good start at least. There are many differences to consider when comparing open source vs commercial CMS (ex: open source CMS developers tend to be quicker about embracing standards), in addition to the general open source vs commercial software differences.
There's also a lot of difference between types of CMS, from blog-level packages to easy site builders and Mambo/Joomla-esque packages which are missing any real enterprise-ready features such as versioning, workflow, and fine-grained access control (more advanced than Unix permissions please!), to mid-level packages which vary greatly within themselves as to their focus (marketing/SEO, publishing, or traditional content/document management), to high-end enterprise packages. There's also a big difference between a CMS that includes a content server/content publisher and one that doesn't. An easy comparison of these in the open source world would be Midgard vs any of the Midgard-based CMS packages. The no-content-server packages are more flexible, but require a lot more implementation effort as well.
Really, it comes down to defining your goals. And often people find that some commercial CMS still solves them better than the open source ones, while many find the opposite to be true. Different goals. (note: I'm the lead developer for the open source Sitellite CMS that also has a commercial counterpart -- dual-licensed).
A few articles I found interesting related to CMS selection:
I just discovered Flip4Mac the other day and just installed it to try it out a day or two ago. Microsoft striking a deal to give it away for free is great. Now I can play WMV files in QuickTime, which is a much better player on the Mac anyway.
You raise important points in what is unfortunately a pretty one-sided argument. Hosting costs real money, especially when support time is being eaten up. At a minimum, customers should always act in a considerate and polite manner to any support staff. They deserve the benefit of the doubt.
I hate to say this, but it's also rarely the end of the world if a website goes down for even a day or two, let alone an hour, yet people panic because they feel out of control when technology such as a website suddenly "breaks", and that out of control feeling causes people to act like it's the end of the world. That's a natural response, but the fact is, if it _is_ the end of the world if your site goes down, then you should probably be thinking of redundancy at this point. If you can't afford such a level of service, then you're not making enough to cover the required overhead of running your business, meaning your business isn't working out for you.
As a rule, being the support person for a software company myself (lead developer, but answering questions and solving problems is a big part of my job), I try to be courteous to all support staff, and to only call on them when there's a real problem I've verified lies on their end of things. This has usually resulted in me receiving very good customer service. I have had a few bad incidents with one slimey mass-hosting provider, but you live and learn.
Renewal protection is a common service that ensures nobody else can register your domain name should it expire for an additional X number of days. This is not cyber-terrorism, it's a nice-to-have feature.
Aside from the fact that merchants in other markets are allowed to charge whatever they can get for an item (high or low, each has its own merits in terms of strategy), here's another good counter-argument to the music industry's desire for variable pricing:
Personally, I find it to be a piss-off when the specific item I want is higher than what I'm used to paying, meaning they figure I'm part of the "we can gouge these guys more" market segment. I like going to iTMS and knowing what I'll be paying beforehand. I don't mind paying $0.99 for a song I like or $1.99 for a TV show. At that price point, it's slightly cheaper for me than buying the equivalent CD or DVD these days, and way more convenient.
I'm also not cool with subscription models, and I won't enjoy browsing Google Video only to find some publishers take a preference to forcing me to subscribe to the things I buy from them instead of allowing me to buy them outright. I either own it or I don't. I'll never subscribe to music, just as I don't pay for cable TV, just as I'll never pay for satellite radio either.
Anyway, I think I've ranted enough for one night.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Since this is nothing more than an API to access data, I wonder if this couldn't be used as the backend storage for existing file storage services, instead of paying for servers and bandwidth yourself...
This limits costs to storage actually used (at $0.15/GB which is a very fair rate), and bandwidth actually used. The cost that could add up is the bandwidth, where you'd obviously have to direct users to the amazon URL directly to avoid using bandwidth to get the file then to pass it on too.
Plus, at $0.20/GB of bandwidth, upload/download could get expensive still, with no cap on that cost. For example, 2,000 GB of bandwidth, which is bundled with most low-end dedicated servers nowadays (ie. even the sub-$99/mo. machines), this would cost you $400 from Amazon. That's pretty steep, and may be the limiting factor making it unfeasible for this idea. Interesting nonetheless.
For something they expect to become "indispensable and ubiquitous as the mobile phone" they're going to have to do something to increase the battery life from 3 hours. I charge up my cell only every few *days*, not a couple times a day. How will 3 hours suffice when you're on the go? It won't, that's how.
Thanks for the feedback! We're actually working on desktop integration right now, but it's not ready just yet. What we're working on is a webdav server so users can simply mount putfwd.com as a network drive and drag and drop to it. You'll be able to access all your files that way too, so it won't just be one-way.
Hopefully that will solve the desktop component, since webdav is supported by most desktop OSes too, as well as the requests we've had for FTP access (I think the webdav will make FTP unnecessary).
Let's see if they add much in the way of web-based features (ie. more than just a download and "email this file" UI), or if it's just like other traditional services. For my opinion of why over time, people will want more than that (although most people will use a service from someone as large as Google anyway):
l e.an-online-file-storage-manifesto
http://www.putfwd.com/index/news-app/story.35/tit
Let's hope for at least a developer API so external apps can integrate with it.
That seriously sucks to hear. If no PHP 4, no go for me for a long time. Even if the current version works in PHP 4 right now, based on their FAQ it's not supported, so I'd be risking having the carpet pulled out from under me at any time.
Damn. I was really hoping to use that search component...
Does this work with PHP 4? They mention PHP 5 specifically several times, but I seem to remember they were saying this framework would be backwards compatible too. This would be nice since most PHP sites are still running 4.x but gauging from their site (and their manual, and the download itself) it looks like they may have abandoned that idea.
Unfortunately, until PHP 4 is only used on a very insignificant number of sites, I can't integrate this into products without cutting off a significant portion of my potential users. I'd love to use things like Zend_Search and ditch the Java requirement altogether, but not without PHP 4 support.
Perhaps there needs to be a distinction between "we"s here. We, as in the open source believers/advocates/etc, may indeed be partially giving away our open source freedoms in exchange for convenience in using new web-based apps like these. We, as in the mainstream, are doing exactly what could have been predicted we'd do: going for convenience as we always have. That's never changed, and is why open source is still only used by a fraction of end users. Where open source users move towards web-based applications is at the fringe of open source where it meets the mainstream: Those who aren't super dedicated to open source as a concept, and only really used it because of the value proposition it sold them on initially.
If you look at things in other areas of IT, you'll find confirmation of this there too. For example, this is partly why the iPod is successful with less options than its competitors, why most people don't bother with replacing MSIE even after all the security nightmares over the years, and so on. In the case of the iPod, ease of use is more convenient than learning how to use extra features. In MSIE's case, it _appears_ to most people to be more convenient to do nothing and fret than to find an alternative.
Web-based applications succeed based on their ability to sell convenience over desktop equivalents. In cases like Gmail and Flickr, they've succeeded against their desktop counterparts. The sharing of photos is way more convenient with Flickr, and Gmail is not only easier to use (ease of use == convenience), but it's also online, which is more convenient in itself for many people.
Sure search engines help people find your content, but they aren't the only or even key reason why this is on the rise. Search engines have been around since roughly the beginning of the web's popular usage. What's new these days is how easy it is to do two things: publish and advertise.
:)), as well as others now trying to immitate them (some came first, but everyone looks second to the public, so...), is now just a matter of pasting a few lines of HTML into your blog template. Adsense brokers the deals with advertisers and you get a cut.
Publishing via blogs is ridiculously simple, and it's so interlinked that it naturally plays into the latest search enging ranking methods.
Advertising, thanks to Google Adsense (not due to Google search
These two things are clearly what facilitated the gold rush of the past few years for advertising dollars online. In turn, this affects content quality because right now we're in a race for quantity and the two aren't often found together. Once the dust settles, the quality will improve again and most of the gold diggers will go home.
Isn't it a little early to talk about who's already won the race for 2006, seeing as how we're not even two months into it? Must be a slow news day I guess...
Sorry, I had to. Go Canada! :)
The push mode looks like it will be really fun to play. Not sure I quite understand standard mode though... Is it that you're controlling the currently falling piece, and Mario, at the same time? That would be a challenge for us single-minded folks!
:)
The touch mode also looks neat, since it looks like it's more logic-based than traditional tetris. You're not worrying about pieces as they fall -- and fall faster over time -- but on solving an ever-changing puzzle of already mashed up pieces. Kind of like the modes in tranditional tetris that started you with half a screen full of pieces and you had to work your way out.
Man, now I want a Nintendo DS!
Looks like at least the slider examples all work in Firefox, Safari, and Opera for me. This is great news!
;)).
I think a standard JS widget library is a definite good thing, and with a company like Yahoo behind it it will probably get more developer awareness and traction with the business folks too than what's been available up to this point from smaller developers.
BSD licensed too, so it's free in any sense of the word for any use (good for us half-commercial folks
The desktop still outperforms web-based applications in many ways, including providing a seamless user experience (after all, it _is_ the user interface, not confined to a box within the user interface). The desktop is still the most appropriate execution environment for large binary applications (photoshop, for example). A web-based alternative like http://pxn8.com/ is definitely very neat, but it's limited compared to photoshop (for professional use at least).
What's cool about web-apps is that they're beginning to integrate with one another. That's one of the most exciting things about the "web 2.0" generation of applications, and offers potentially more convenience increases than all the ajax realtime-esqueness that everyone's talking about.
But the real end I think we're all moving towards is not just limited integration between sites, but also integration with the desktop. Look at Dashboard on Mac OS X and the fact that Vista is going to support RSS like crazy. Other standards like WebDAV and developer APIs on sites extend the possibilities in this way too. Either way, I think this guarantees that the "web 3.0" generation of apps will be just as different from "web 2.0" as the current gen. are from what some would call 1.0 (that's way too many version numbers, ugh!).
PS. Check out my own "web 2.0" app in my sig -- it's a free file storage service with lots of cool features!
I should mention our project, which is a modern, user friendly SourceForge clone that is fairly easy to install and requires little maintenance. It's open source and based on the open source Sitellite CMS framework and it's called SiteForge.
Here is its homepage, which is running the SiteForge software: http://www.sitelliteforge.com/siteforge
Nothing in the Bible will help us understand how the physical world works (in the sense that we can use this understanding to raise our quality of life by means of technology and increased enlightenment). Physics will.
:)
:)
I agree that the Bible isn't meant to explain the "how" of the world, but the disagreement is with people who believe that science alone can paint a complete picture of the world. Science can't tell us the "why" of the world, for starters. That's the domain of philosophy (Kant, Nietzsche, etc.) and theology (Bible, Koran, etc.), of course.
Since science can only describe and predict physical phenomena, it can't touch upon things like moral actions at all, which makes philosophy and theology necessarily the other half of the means of achieving the good and happy life. In this way, the Bible does sort of describe the world around us, or at least the aspect of our relation to it. I think more scientists would recognize this if they were more familiar with Aristotle's "four causes".
If it's true, as Augustine would suggest, that morally right actions lead to the happy life and bad actions lead to unhappiness, then the Bible does have a role to play towards the goal of enlightenment, and one that science alone can't achieve. Enlightenment/progress itself shouldn't be mistaken to be the goal itself, but a proposed means of using science to achieve the real goal of improving the quality of life for everyone. The funny thing is that science can't even help us evaluate questions like whether the proposal of the enlightenment is a good one or not.
It's sad though when the reaction to such questions is for people to claim that they are meaningless...
PS. Forgive me for my long-windedness; I don't get to talk about this stuff very often.
(Don't come waving a bible. Someone making a world so complicated and then giving people a handbook is a ridiculous story. Besides, there are a few of these books, depending on which religion you ask). So, screw God. I'll try and find my way alone.
Disclaimer: I'm a theoretical physicist.
So was Einstein, yet somehow he managed to find a balance within his life between his religious and scientific beliefs. In fact, his religious beliefs were a large inspiration for his scientific pursuits. So did Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and many other historic names in science. Newton spent more time writing on religious subjects than scientific ones. How could that possibly be? Were they simply dogmatists at the heart of it, or could there be some dogmatism on both sides of this issue? Perhaps they are not two separate entities, but two halves of the same thing, different but compatible approaches to the same goal? Perhaps a combination of the two, as it seemed to for these great men, could yield better results than just one side alone?
Let's look at the Bible another way for a minute. Could it perhaps have been a divinely inspired book (no mystical connotations necessarily implied here, all art is the product of inspiration is it not?), written by mere mortals? It was obviously not written by God himself, as we can attribute specific human authors to its different parts, so perhaps this view of God providing a handbook is an ignorant comment in itself, no? Now, could it be possible that this book, like many others, contains some wisdom passed down from these people? If that's in fact possible, then what's so wrong with people reading it today and citing it as a source of wisdom in discussions such as this?
If the Bible (an *allegorical* piece of writing based on history) coheres with what we can discern about the world via science and logic, then its lessons, at least those that do meet this criteria, are correct. Please keep in mind that an error by one author in one part doesn't necessarily discredit the whole either, like it would for a mathematical proof where each part builds on the next. There are many interpretations of the creation story, at least one of which I've read that seem to me to cohere completely with the scientific view of the creation of the universe. Again, the Bible is not a literal work, despite what some people would like to believe. Literal interpretation of it leads to many contradictions within it. That doesn't disprove its message, but it does suggest a misinterpretation of it.
Anyway, I'm sorry you feel this way. Some of us feel that learning from the past is important though, and would rather not throw out such philosophically rich sources wholesale simply because some people take them too seriously.
As an aside related to the original topic of discussion (ID/creationism), I'm with you that this crap should NOT be taught in schools. This is not an alternative theory to evolution, it is a dogmatic, literalist interpretation of the first few pages of the Bible. It deserves no more a place in a science class than any other religious belief. It is not science and belongs nowhere near it. Perhaps a religious studies course could cover it, not from a "this is fact" standpoint but from a "this is what these quaint folks over here believe, isn't that nice?" standpoint.
You have some valid points, but you're complaining about URLs pointing to dynamic requests, not just to standard web pages in the system. The two are logically separate, and necessarily visibly different.
/index/ appears in every URL. Many systems include something like this, the controller script, at the start of each request. Usually it's something more like /index.php/ in those cases. We felt /index/ was an improvement on that.
/page-name to map to /index/page-name, and /index/page-name referring to a specific page in the system is pretty easy for users. No numeric references, and you're free to name your page as you please. When we originally added our URL rewriting scheme, mod_rewrite was less prevalent as an Apache module than it is today (we're going almost 5 years back), so we didn't want to rely on it and add that extra requirement. Today, that decision would have been different. :)
/tutorials/story.php does, arguably less so since it never refers directly to the file in question. By this argument, publicly available documentation on an open source CMS would be bad because it exposes the inner workings of your website. We don't rely on this for security-through-obscurity, and for dynamic request handlers (ie. something more than a page with static body contents) you need some way of referring to it. This is as good as any, and avoids the .php which used to deduct points in some search engine ranking schemes. /tutorials/story.php is no more meaningful to the user, but you do need to refer to these dynamic things somehow.
/index/page-name and you can make 'page-name' anything you please. So there are standard ways of reducing the use of these dynamic references even further.
/story.11/ is exactly that they'd come across like files, to the search engines rating the page. To users, they're no worse than ?story=11 and for all they know, we named that file or folder 'story.11'. :)
/index/page-name is already the solution, but some stuff does have to be dynamic on a site moreso than a database-driven collection of web pages, and for those you'll still need a dynamic way of referring to them and for passing parameters to them.
/index/ if we could, but changing it now is not worth the effort for such a small gain and a break in backward compatibility on existing sites), and which lends itself to doing some very powerful stuff in Sitellite too. :)
True,
Plus, it's easy enough to use mod_rewrite to allow
As for the rest of your points, tutorials-story-action doesn't expose the inner workings of the system any more than
Using Sitellite's box chooser (Sitellite Pro, specifically), you can simply embed an action like tutorials-story-action directly into an ordinary page, in which case you're right back to
The idea of parameters like
For the main content pages on the site,
The title.url-rewriting-in-sitellite-4 part being superfluous is on purpose. The variable itself is actually never used at all in the tutorials-story-action script. It's only reason for being there is to boost the frequency of keyword terms occurring in the URL for search engine optimization purposes.
While nicer looking URLs are said to be more considerate to visitors, the main reason for them originally and still today is for search engine optimization. Sitellite and all of its major add-ons have been designed to be automatically optimized for SEO, that way SEO-savvy companies can use it without needing to jump through hoops.
Hopefully that clears up some of the rationale behind our URL design, which I personally find quite elegant (although imperfect -- I too would do away with
Cheers,
Lux
Hi! Thanks for the compliments about Sitellite!
/index/page-name instead of /index.php?page=page-name) and have a special structure for dynamic requests as well that avoids the .php and ?foo=bar parameter passing. If there's a way you think would be better, I'd love to hear it. :)
t ion/story.11/title.url-rewriting-in-sitellite-4
Not sure what you mean though that the URLs don't make sense... They're SEO-friendly (ie.
Here's some info on the full workings of our URL scheme:
http://www.sitellite.org/index/tutorials-story-ac
Cheers,
Lux
I was hoping from the summary for a bit more depth to the article, maybe a few pages in length. Good start at least. There are many differences to consider when comparing open source vs commercial CMS (ex: open source CMS developers tend to be quicker about embracing standards), in addition to the general open source vs commercial software differences.
There's also a lot of difference between types of CMS, from blog-level packages to easy site builders and Mambo/Joomla-esque packages which are missing any real enterprise-ready features such as versioning, workflow, and fine-grained access control (more advanced than Unix permissions please!), to mid-level packages which vary greatly within themselves as to their focus (marketing/SEO, publishing, or traditional content/document management), to high-end enterprise packages. There's also a big difference between a CMS that includes a content server/content publisher and one that doesn't. An easy comparison of these in the open source world would be Midgard vs any of the Midgard-based CMS packages. The no-content-server packages are more flexible, but require a lot more implementation effort as well.
Really, it comes down to defining your goals. And often people find that some commercial CMS still solves them better than the open source ones, while many find the opposite to be true. Different goals. (note: I'm the lead developer for the open source Sitellite CMS that also has a commercial counterpart -- dual-licensed).
A few articles I found interesting related to CMS selection:
Tire Kicking and CMS Shopping
Will your chosen CMS vendor go bust?
I just discovered Flip4Mac the other day and just installed it to try it out a day or two ago. Microsoft striking a deal to give it away for free is great. Now I can play WMV files in QuickTime, which is a much better player on the Mac anyway.
All too familiar, mate. All too familiar. :)
You raise important points in what is unfortunately a pretty one-sided argument. Hosting costs real money, especially when support time is being eaten up. At a minimum, customers should always act in a considerate and polite manner to any support staff. They deserve the benefit of the doubt.
I hate to say this, but it's also rarely the end of the world if a website goes down for even a day or two, let alone an hour, yet people panic because they feel out of control when technology such as a website suddenly "breaks", and that out of control feeling causes people to act like it's the end of the world. That's a natural response, but the fact is, if it _is_ the end of the world if your site goes down, then you should probably be thinking of redundancy at this point. If you can't afford such a level of service, then you're not making enough to cover the required overhead of running your business, meaning your business isn't working out for you.
As a rule, being the support person for a software company myself (lead developer, but answering questions and solving problems is a big part of my job), I try to be courteous to all support staff, and to only call on them when there's a real problem I've verified lies on their end of things. This has usually resulted in me receiving very good customer service. I have had a few bad incidents with one slimey mass-hosting provider, but you live and learn.
Renewal protection is a common service that ensures nobody else can register your domain name should it expire for an additional X number of days. This is not cyber-terrorism, it's a nice-to-have feature.
Aside from the fact that merchants in other markets are allowed to charge whatever they can get for an item (high or low, each has its own merits in terms of strategy), here's another good counter-argument to the music industry's desire for variable pricing:
m l
;)
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/11/18.ht
Personally, I find it to be a piss-off when the specific item I want is higher than what I'm used to paying, meaning they figure I'm part of the "we can gouge these guys more" market segment. I like going to iTMS and knowing what I'll be paying beforehand. I don't mind paying $0.99 for a song I like or $1.99 for a TV show. At that price point, it's slightly cheaper for me than buying the equivalent CD or DVD these days, and way more convenient.
I'm also not cool with subscription models, and I won't enjoy browsing Google Video only to find some publishers take a preference to forcing me to subscribe to the things I buy from them instead of allowing me to buy them outright. I either own it or I don't. I'll never subscribe to music, just as I don't pay for cable TV, just as I'll never pay for satellite radio either.
Anyway, I think I've ranted enough for one night.
Amen. Too bad my last mod points just expired...