What is Pagination? We’ve all heard the phrase, often spoken as a joke, “Hey, that’s just too much information – I didn’t need to know that!” In the course of our daily lives we often get information that we don’t need, or, that we don’t find useful or interesting. Too much information, or information that is poorly organized, can be confusing and counterproductive. The same sort of thing is true on the internet. Who hasn’t found a lengthy article on [...]

Tech Genius Aaron Swartz, dead at 26 On Friday, January 12th 2013 internet pioneer and social activist Aaron Swartz took his own life. Swartz’s family and girlfriend released the news that he had hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment. A true genius, at the age of fourteen Schwartz co-invented the RSS protocol and, later, co-founded Reddit.com (one of the most popular sites on the internet). Suffered from depression, faced lengthy prison term While family and friends have confirmed that Swartz [...]

Have your Twitter feeds flown the coup? Unlike Facebook, which tweaks the “machine” once in a blue moon to force adjustments in the sort of code which allows webmasters to display Facebook blocks on pages, Twitter seems to constantly be fiddling with this sort of thing (from what I’ve seen on the web). Logically, as a consequence of all of this WordPress plugins and snippets of code which have been successfully displaying Tweets on your web site can suddenly stop [...]

From Bulletin Board Services to HTML 5 I first experienced the network we now call the “world wide web” sitting behind the keyboard of an Atari 800 XL. With it’s 300 baud, dial-up modem I could explore the world in an entirely new way. Back in those days almost everyone who connected to the “network” (remarkably different from the modern internet) did so via CompuServe – the first major commercial online service in the United States. Besides CompuServe there were [...]

SEO Optimization is the art of tweaking your website to help the search engines understand exactly what your website is about, and who should be reading your content. Everytime somebody performs a search on a search engine, such as Google, the search engine tries to give the user the most relevant results. They want the searcher to be given the results which have the best content, most informative content, and relative media. If you aren’t optimizing your website’s content for [...]

Making money from the web I started playing with the internet – making web sites, and running a server – strictly because it was fun. I’ve often thought that building web sites (and running my own web server) is like owning my own radio station, but, a station which can broadcast worldwide.   I can make a web site, write something, and people all over the world can read what I’ve written. My first sites contained simple informational pages on [...]

LAMP/WAMP style Server on XP Note: presumably all of this would work on Windows 7, and, Vista. But I’m a goofy old fart who has never seen any compelling reason to upgrade from XP – so I’ve never run the installation which I’m about to describe on anything but XP. I don’t see any reason that it wouldn’t work on the other, aforementioned Windows platforms. Everyone who develops web sites also develops a system for putting together the pieces. In [...]

Just a cold….or is it MySpace Malaise? While his research has produced some startling findings Dr. Larry Rosen isn’t one of those questionable characters you often hear on late night radio, whose credentials have likely come from a diploma mill in the Dominican Republic. Neither a fanatic nor a fraud, Rosen is Past Chair and Professor of Psychology at California State University. An eminently respected and widely published researcher (and author) Dr. Rosen devotes much of his study to the [...]

Matt Mullenweg jokes about the fact that as a freshman at the University of Houston he wasn’t exactly setting the academic world on fire. As he frankly admits (with a smile), “I was a terrible student“. But it’s fair to say that a lot of people are glad that Mullenweg was far too interested in the internet – and specifically, his blogging – to pay much attention to courses like English 101. Frustrated with the limitations of his blogging software [...]

Something of a “traditionalist” (that sounds so much better than “stuck in my ways”, “unwilling to try new things”, etc.) I still use Windows XP – most of the time, anyway. Actually, I like Windows 7. But I’ve got my share of old, Pentium 4 computers and Windows XP (1) runs fast on them, and, (2) does everything I need. Most of the time, I’m either sitting at a Linux box, or, using XP. A problem that has plagued me [...]