Ooh, a new feature!

There should be two mini-posts before this post, and one after (in a minute…), unless you’re reading this in more than 5 posts time in which case all these one-liners should be archived on the day pages

As soon as the exams are over I’m going to refactor my spaghetti python into something releasable and make it all polished and gr9. I’ve even thought of a name :)

Meta-bloggery is usually horrid; a perfect target for those bitter blogs-are-all-rubbish screeds written by people who seemingly can’t use their back buttons. However, despite not being politically correct, it is nevertheless a lot of fun, and quite popular. I promise not to do it too much; my eyesight’s bad enough as it is.

Having said that, this site has been way more popular than I imagined it would be, so I couldn’t just say nothing! Let’s get the omphaloscope out and gaze away!

Not naming the site

The more I think about it, the more amazed I am that a bunch of nervy 15/16 year olds could choose such a great domain name as Lab6.com. It could’ve been lab6.org.uk or jimmeslab.com or hahslewis.org or bunsens4u.com or nude-jimme.net (er, or maybe not, although it was suggested). What genius to keep the length to 4 characters (all other meaningful permuatations are taken now). What genius to select .com, capturing the dotcom zeitgeist at the time, and appearing quaintly ironic on a non-commercial site in these times of enthusiasm rationing. How astute not to limit ourselves to a geographic name, and how foresighted to throw our weight behind the biggest TLD: when the revolution comes, domains may be appropriated, so we want the best financed team to fight for our property rights. What does a permalink mean when the People’s Army of East Riding have carbombed the root-servers and taken control of .uk?

In short: aren’t we clever? Yessir, we are! But enough bragging.

(Not that impudent 16 year olds are a bad thing. It’s what 16 year olds do. Everybody goes through that phase, so it’s best to get it out of you when it’s expected.)

I almost consider ‘lab6′ to be more a part of my name than my real name. I didn’t choose my first name, and not even my parents chose my surname. Real names are arbitrary labels, defined only by the actions of your namesakes. Lab6 though, is something I helped define, and something that defines part of me. A perfect blend of given reality (it could easily have been Lab2), personal creativity at a formative age, and camaraderie with other bunsen legends. On the the net, a man is his URL. I’m eternally glad mine is something I can identify entirely with.

And so the name is not really the name of the site. It’s my name. I could’ve given the site a name of its own, as if it were something separate. Most blogs suffer from horrible names: either the scope of the name is limiting (”James’s Maths and Photos Blog”), or the name slides into pretentiousness over time (”Raincloud Wonderings”, “Dreams of a Functionalist”, “Gravity’s Crossbow”), or it carries ephemeral baggage (”James’s Blogspot Blog”, “Jameslog”), or it’s a joke that’s funny the first n times, where n is embarrassingly small (”Naperian Blogarithms”, “Blogical Positivism”, “Scebloglaux”), or it’s incoherent (”The blogings!”, “S Club Cthulhu OMG***”, “Godboxer tells it like it is, you minnow”), or it’s just lame (”James’s l33t musings”, “tEH opinion ZOEN!!11!”)

(Obviously I didn’t consider any of those; james.lab6.com was the name that came to me before I even knew I wanted to make a website out of it.)

I never intended to write anything people would read daily (although some do). I’m too into dilettantism for that. I’m not interested in soap operas or hip-hop; I’m interested in everything else.

Some people have a problem with dilettantism, as if they would prefer to be monomaniacs. An indiscriminate exuberance about every topic under the sun would be debilitating, but this is dilettantism in its most pathological form, as monomania is to focused study. Dilettantism is the bottom of the ladder that generalists are in the middle of, and polymaths are at the top of. I want to be on this ladder. I find it hard to imagine that people can totally dismiss vast swathes of knowledge in favour of sticking to what they know. I do have a ‘day job’ so hardly any of my time is really spent on ephemera and trivia, but I do believe my chosen career path calls for a level of generalism that can only be achieved after years of wide, ankle deep, roaming.

Back to the Future

Hopefully I’ll soon have quoted the entire Back to the Future script in the course of normal (but admittedly contrived) writing and error messages. After all, if you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.

Notable searches

Logs are the raw data generated by the Internet. They catalogue the activity and interactions of net-flora and web-fauna. You’re not a real webologist until you’ve examined logs.

These are the keywords via which people have found this site. I can’t help but feel many searchers will have been disappointed by what they found.

• what makes fire
• carl is the worst pun ever
• how to be a superhuman
• lol!!1
• omg lol
• warez lol
• rap street phrases example
• unusual refrigerator
• milk byproduct
• 18th girlfriend
• a chemical reaction and what is going on
• computer generated essays
• james drugs manchester
• library song place where books are free
• loaf bar deansgate pussy galore
• maths(the history maths of hindubabylonegyptianarabic)
• old pussy grannies
• olof ballet
• udders toffee
• bong bong bong
• do you collect hard rock t shirts:
• flava flav sunglasses
• hand drawn pictures of god
• how is a good coursework like
• november 2003 assassinate bush
• supervillain lair design
• boylove
• catcher in the rye- best parts
• girdle adverts
• horrorfood
• human testicle pie
• manchester nh whores
• photos of colonial time dogs
• picture of a sprained finger
• what did they do before the internet
• satanic versus translation
• somebody please assassinate bush
• short short facts about the ozone layer that’s not by nasa
• return-of-the-king get-away-from-her-you-bitch
• return of the king gay theme
• disgusting drinks

Did I really write about any of those? On closer inspection it turns out that I did.

Another interesting fact: although most searches came via google, a not-insignificant number came from Yahoo. Wow. I didn’t think anybody really used that any more.

Hosting

Thanks to a chain of mysterious benefactors, leading, I believe, right back to the British taxpayer, my hosting has been free and top quality.

Design

My childhood drawing ability was so low that it actually went below zero, wrapped around to the other side, and came out on top, which meant I could draw things so completely devoid of artistic talent that people really enjoyed seeing them. The badness was legendary. I drew a truck in year 3 or 4 that got pinned on the wall because it was so comically awful. In the same way Picasso used perspective to great effect, I didn’t. I still have trouble with it. Not that I was into abstractionism or anything; I was totally unaware of all artistic methods and devices. I just scrawled cynically until the teacher told us the lesson was over.

The same teacher (Mrs. Parks) once told me a sheet of sums wasn’t finished because I hadn’t coloured in the picture properly. That was the moment I realised that Art in all shapes and forms was utter shite. I’ve backed off from this position now, but I think I still have a subconscious lack of respect for all human endeavour short of pure maths.

So I hope that’s clear why I never went into design.

Still, I can try. I think I basically know what web design is. And it is this:

1. Permalinks permalinks permalinks! How useful is a book whose pages keep falling out, or being replaced with polite notices pointing you to where the chapter is now located? Link rot will kill a website from the inside out. Chronological ordering is the only elegant scheme that has a chance of surviving more than 5 or 10 years.
2. Links are blue. Everybody knows that. Don’t make everybody wrong. That makes it quite convenient for the whole site to have a blue colour scheme. Maybe it’s possible for other colour schemes to work with blue links. Who knows? Ask a designer.
3. Blind links are bad. This is why those calendar blocks on MT blogs are so pointless. This is why most date-based navigation is useless. This is why every post on this site has a keyword in the URL (’nanocontent’?).
4. Art is utter shite in all shapes and forms. Not really. But it must take a distant second place to usability. So many beautiful sites are just horrible to use.

My most popular pages have been Why are there 24 hours in a day?, and Clue: The Movie. Someone asked google “are there really 24 hours in a day?”. Yes dear, there are! I’m quite proud of this page. Hundreds of people have reached it asking the exact title question, and I can only assume they now have an answer.

The Confession Box

What started as an idle joke generated some rather grim content. In case you haven’t seen it, The Online Confession Box allows you to talk to god, over HTTP. If you believe that, you’ll believe anything, and many, many people did.

I predicted the responses would be 80% “your gay”, 10% counterjokes and 10% garbage. What were the actual numbers?

45% real, 30% jokes, 25% garbage. There’s some pretty disturbing stuff in the real ones. The drug dealing/murder confession looks genuine but a little too extreme to be real. And what am I supposed to do? Turn in an IP address? Mostly people were confessing infidelity with members of the opposite sex and/or hand. The page does claim all submissions are private, being processed only by CoJ officials, so if you want to read them, you’ll have to join the cult and advance to the rank of Priest (price: one photo of an amusing JIM). I assume anyone who submitted jokes surrendered their right to privacy, so here’s my favourite:

I have committed sins of impurity with myself. I would like to be forgiven by God now and for future times.

404s

A quick survey of links on a random Metafilter page (12th of January) from 2001:

• 6 pages generate 404s
• 3 links replaced by spam domains
• 9 survive

That was only 3 years ago and half the links are gone.

I thought long and hard about URL longevity before writing a single word of content. Thankfully, every URL has lasted. None of them have changed and none ever will.

(Actually, bugs in the backend software have generated bad URLs occasionally, but they’re fixed now.)

That’s not to say there haven’t been 404s. Most are for a non-existent robots.txt. I’ve written one now, since a blank robots.txt is smaller than a 404 page. Bandwidth savings ahoy!

Other 404 usual suspects are favicon.ico (which I didn’t have at first), the formmail script exploit, bots looking for OPMLfiles in ’standard’ locations (how dare the standards people steal part of my namespace by making people expect things to be there?), various IIS exploit attempts, hits from Frontpage looking for _vti_bin and all that MS rubbish (who tries to edit someone else’s webpage live?).

Looksmart has a particularly aggressive crawler which they call the “ZyBorg Dead Link Checker”. It seems to crawl the same set of pages every single day. This is both offensive and incompetent.

Features

Post updating is supported, but I haven’t used it for much more than typo corrections. Still, there’s no paper trail (i.e. revision history), so multiple major changes would be poorly tracked. This needs improving. The style data (CSS, logo) is tracked by the software, to support a hypothetical future feature that would work something like “Show me how this page looked in 2003″. If I can do it for the style, I should be able to do it for the content.

The comments feature is useful, but still slightly buggy. There are no dangerous site-breaking bugs (hehe, does that sound like a challenge?), but some combinations of input cause the script to choke, and I haven’t yet narrowed down what those are.

Future Features

At some point, I will release the software. Not sure who’d want to use it. Movable Type will always have more features, and blosxom will always have more magic command-line zen, and both will be coded by people who actually know what they’re doing.

So why do it at all? Mainly to learn Python, but partly so that it can form the web-arm of a future ultra-integrated Lab 6: Blogging from IRC! IRC from the web! Email from SMS! Telnet via URLs! Blog comment wiki forums via Royal Mail! URL discovery via T-shirt slogan! Morse code from semaphore via webcam! Low-bandwidth computerless blogging through dynamite modulated earthquakes, via RSS.

Ambitious perhaps, but that’s what summers are for, right?