Peterbe.com

The Wayback Machine has archived my websites since April 2001.

The last archive entry is of how this website looked like with the new design first. I.e. 7 months ago. I didn't know about this project but it looks promising yet limited. It's like a permanent cache.

Another fun one was my profile page from our intranet when I was working for Net4Any. (have patience and wait for the animated mug shot)

I've changed my RSS feed to be RSS 1.0 compliant. My feed has been invalid for couple of days so I thought I needed to upgrade.

RSS 1.0 also allows for a Subject meta data so my items will look better on Webforce.at

In my "blog about Wikipedia"n:/plog/blogitem-040206-1 I mentioned that one thing I didn't like about Wikipedia is that there are too many links that distract you when you're reading. I prefer to read the text when the inline links aren't underlined like they do it on "susning.nu"n:http://susning.nu/susning.fcgi?action=browse&id=Emacs&oldid=EMACS or "metafilter.com"n:http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/31190.

"Slashdot"n:http://slashdot.org/ disagrees with me. Look at this example on Slashdot. So many links that you don't know whether to read it or to click everything.

The convention of good web design usability is that links should look like links. I.e. blue (purple when visited) and underlined. I still wholeheartedly agree to this, but blog articles are exceptions. Normally in blog articles you want to link certain words to ease surfing. That's a good thing, but I say too many links can draw away attention from what is important.

This is why my new solution supports both underlined and not-underlined. Underlined links for things I urge people to click on and non-underlined for all those things that are just references.

Three examples, where the writing objective is to focus on "Search by Location" but you still want to have a reference link to "Google":

• With Google you can Search by Location
  Not obvious which one is the most important
  
• With "Google"n:http://www.google.com you can "Search by Location"n:http://labs.google.com/location
  Neither link more important then the other
  
• With "Google"n:http://www.google.com you can Search by Location
  Perfect! First link for reference, next link more important

This is now a proud feature of my website. It would be interesting to hear what some web design usability experts have to say about this.

Supposing I want to send someone a URL to one of the pages of my site. Then if the URL is too long it gets complicated. In emails there's the risk that the long URL gets broken up on many lines. And on SMS there's too much typing. So I've introduced Quick URLs.

For example: https://www.peterbe.com/photos/misc/balloon-flying/ballong_skog_eld.jpg/view becomes https://www.peterbe.com/q-004 Much easier to type in when sending a text, isn't it.

I have to manually select every URL that I want to do this too, but this might change with time. When you enter a Quick URL like the one above you get redirected to the real URL.

Now there are two icons on all pages of this site in the bottom right-hand corner. One is for a printer friendly version and the other is an experimental PDF version.

The PDF trick idea I got from this How-To by Maik Jablonski.

The trick to enable multiple versions of the header & footer was actually inspired by myself. I wrote about this on ZopeLabs.com a long time ago.

This is my first attempt on trying to describe some of the technical mechanisms of this site. I will try to keep it updated as I change the website.

Hopefully I will also write a little something about me, myself and I when time allows.