About this web site

Last Update: 9:45PM, 8th November 2009

This page is obsolete

See the new About page.

What is james.lab6.com?

I admit it. This is a blog. But it’s also a more traditional website and an idea.

The short version

This is a blog about things that interest me, but not necessarily about all the things that interest me. I love The Simpsons but I don’t write about it too much because almost everything that could be said about it has already been said. I prefer to write about really really detailed trivia and minutiae – things that nobody has ever thought about, or written about, or at least blogged about.

Chances are this means you’ll find it all rather tedious. Not to worry; Google has shown that I have been quite successful at sweeping up hits from the far end of the long tail.

Some of the non-trivia topics I tend to cover: photos, software, geekery, mathematics and politics. Topics I inadvertently seem to retread: Gattaca, zombies and the Unabomber.

Yes, I have no life, but the remarkable thing about having no life is that you don’t care!

The long version

As recently as 2003, when james.lab6.com first came online, blogs and websites in general had awful, awful URIs. They were long, undescriptive, full of cruft, unnavigable, inextensible and changeable. I wanted to make a website with beautiful URIs - nothing more, nothing less.

Permanence is the biggest problem, as it requires an ongoing commitment to serving pages. Moving between content management systems is the second biggest problem; you can't guarantee anything about the operation of software from the future.

My solution was to create a blogging platform that properly implemented the W3C's guidelines on URI construction. Not a single content management system implements this by default, to this day. Even Wordpress's default clean URIs look like this:

http://site.domain.com/archive/2006/11/13

What exactly is the purpose of the word archive?

Orthogonal and independent

james.lab6.com is about 90% datewise orthogonal on the user end, and about 50%90% datewise orthogonal at the back end (/2003, /2004 and /2005 are served by static HTML while /2006 to date is served by a database. In principle, if I switch to a radically different backend in the future, I can always "render out" the database to HTML) There is now fairly clean separation of years, because all the textual content is now in the database.

An ongoing process

The system is imperfect. There is arguably content in the form of templates which has no proper URI: the sidebar originally said:

What is this site? A blog in the form of an attempted extended long term memory, then the other way round. I hope we both enjoy reading it.

The topic/tag agglomeration also resides conspicuously outside the year-based URI system. I am happy to consider this a secondary index into the content rather than a way of addressing it.

Colophon

For ongoing detail, see the meta tag.