http://visitsteve.com/404.html

The site uses a basic blogzine format and will contain articles on PHP, XHTML/CSS, and basically anything to do with web development and design I come up with.

I do realise that I have published on this subject here before, but this blog is moving more towards general IT infrastructure business and a lot of personal stuff, so I thought it’d be a fun idea to build a blog separately just for web work.

The content is somewhat limited right now, but will steadily grow as time goes on. Why not have a browse?

If you believe this graph you might actually agree with the impending death of the Web. But Rob Beschizza at BoingBoing drew a new graph based on the actual total traffic numbers, which paints a completely different picture:

Rob quickly figured out that the original graph only showed a proportion of total traffic, not the actual total traffic which has undergone major growth (duh!). As Rob puts it:

In fact, between 1995 and 2006, the total amount of web traffic went from about 10 terabytes a month to 1,000,000 terabytes (or 1 exabyte). According to Cisco, the same source Wired used for its projections, total internet traffic rose then from about 1 exabyte to 7 exabytes between 2005 and 2010.

Read the full article on BoingBoing.

If you really want to know more (and you should!), try these links and decide for yourself:

• Here’s a good summary of why you should consider quitting too @ Gizmodo.
• Here’s a timeline of FB’s privacy policy @ EFF.
• Here’s a great description of the deletion process (and how tricky it is) @ groovyPost.

In case you’re wondering: yes, I’m still on LinkedIn (my only active social network now), them I do still trust.

UPDATE: The EFF has an interesting post up on how to opt out of Facebook’s Instant Personalization (which you probably want to do if you do decide to stay on Facebook).

UPDATE 2: Ryan Singel over at Wired has written a very good article on Facebook and (the lack of) privacy: Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative .

UPDATE 3: Dan Yoder (the author of the post on Gizmodo linked above) has written a very insightful follow-up: More Reasons Why You Should Still Quit Facebook

UPDATE 4: Facebook is having an internal powwow on the storm of criticism their privacy policy has caused. Will this change anything? Nah, I really don’t think so. But do expect a slew of new marketing, and a whole cadre of management types declaring that what they do is actually a good thing and what you want. Yeah, right.

The University of Nottingham has launched www.sixtysymbols.com, a brilliant and interesting website with lots of videos (okay, 60 videos) explaining different symbols of physics and astronomy and the thinking behind it. It’s a fun browse and the films are quite entertaining and very educational. Go check it out. Then come back and discuss

I have a podcast and audiobook fetish. No support groups for me.”, and the reply I got from ‘podiobooks’ was “We can be your support group for your podcast and audiobook fetish! ”

It turns out that Podiobooks is a free audiobook podcast service with quite an interesting selection of books. No major mainstream names here, but mostly independent authors. Users can donate to an author if they like his/her work, and of every donation 75% goes directly to the author in question.

A very cool system (I have an account now and will be enjoying my first downloads in the car tomorrow), and first proof that Twitter marketing actually works. On me anyway, but still…

1. We’re not for sale.
2. Everyone can use our work with a few conditions.
3. We speak Banyumasan…and about 250 other languages.
4. You can’t actually change anything in Wikipedia…you can only add to it.
5. We care deeply about the quality of our work.
6. We do not expect you to trust us.
7. We are not alone.
8. We are only collectors.
9. We’re neither a dictatorship nor any other political system.
10. We’re in it for the long haul.

Of course, as with any source, you should always check before accepting anything as truth, doubly so with publicly-editable sources, but I still would actually grade my trust of Wikipedia info as 90%.

Yeah. Sure.

I agree that people should be made more aware of alternatives, but for Pete’s sake be honest about it. Browse Happy actively steers people away from IE, pointing in stead to Firefox, Opera, Safari or Mozilla, on the grounds that IE is unsafe. Yes it is. So are all the other ones. What’s your point?

Made and promoted by the otherwise great folks at WordPress, I think this is pushing it a bit far. Make a fair comparison in stead of just quoting articles about IE’s flaws, people! I’m no big fan of IE myself but I also know that with some Googling I can find quotes on the issues on all the other browsers in the world as well. Inform, don’t just shove some subjective opinions and “testimonials” down my throat.

Oh, and as much as I absolutely love WordPress, I really don’t appreciate the banner in the admin interface, thank you very much.

Update: twitter’s downtime is causing long load times on this page. Gone is the twitter widget henceforth.