As you may have noticed, the web has evolved a set of common principles that are a mix of ratified standards and ad hoc practices. The notion of a Web Architecture was codified in a W3C technical report called "Architecture of the World Wide Web" http://www.w3.org/TR …

Sometimes the best way to solve a programming problem is to see how others have done the same thing. When that happens, having immediate access to the various search engines helps get you back on track quickly. Here are OpenSearch plug-ins (suitable for Firefox and MSIE7) that will search the …

A while back we created an LDAP directory to consolidate account information for various back-room services, and when we created it we decided to use the individual's e-mail address as the account identifier (uid in LDAP-speak). It seemed like the logical thing to do -- it is something that the user …

An e-mail from Leslie Daigle, chair of the Internet Architecture Board, crossed my inbox tonight through the IETF-announce list (excerpted below) that brought back memories of the mid-90s and the Internet growth explosion that spurred the deployment of NAT (Network Address Translation) devices, the shift in large scale Internet routing …

Recently, I was asked to outline a plan for a structured process for software development that maximizes productivity and reduces bugs that reach the user. This was originally an internal OhioLINK document, but the process described is pretty traditional and others might find a use for this as well. You …

Earlier I mentioned creating a Google Custom Search for Planet Code4Lib. The Google-supplied markup puts a form on your web page that leads to Google's server farm. (Alternatively, you can create a custom URL that points to an HTML page at Google which contains the form.) Well, that's really neat …

I wanted to mess around with Google's new Custom Search Engine feature and in casting about for a list of URLs to feed it I thought I'd try the list of blogs at Planet Code4Lib. As it turns out, this might be a modestly useful search if you remember reading …

The word "Successful" in the title, when juxtaposed with "Standards-Compliant" and "Accessible," should be big, bold and flashing (except that the flashing style would then go against web accessibility best practice). The goal is to embed a video clip into a web page that validates as "XHTML4.01 Transitional", includes …

Up until about an hour ago, Technorati refused to update its database of postings to DLTJ, and having reached the 31-day point of no updates I was starting to wonder what to do about it. I came up with two theories for which I put in fixes to the configuration …

Okay -- this seemed like a lot harder than it should have been. At the very least, it took piecing together information from a number of places in order to make it happen. The goal is to use a Go Daddy Turbo SSL Secure Certificate (the $19.95/year one) to …

I've just had the third occasion where in support of a user I suspect that user has a piece of software which is blocking or modifying the HTTP "referrer" header that comes normally with most interactions between a web browser and a web server. Rather than asking that user to …

At the recent LITA Top Technology Trends gathering, Clifford Lynch spoke of an advanced network emerging from Internet2 that is built as a hybrid between optical-switched and packet-switched networks. Today's Internet2 Newsletter has a description of the activities, excerpted below

Internet2 and Level 3 to Deploy Next Generation Nationwide Research …