Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
I have a post at ScriptTeaser, or what is still ScriptTeaser, with links to older tech writings I’m recovering and throwing online.
It is an object lesson in the dangers of too many domains, as well as getting caught up in overly complex web site organizations, sub-domains, and so on.
Originally much of this was under yasd.com, and I have no regrets letting that domain go: it was horribly contaminated by spammers and other nefarious folk. But I’ve had others and I’ve let them go, such as forpoets.org and p2psmoke.org and so on. If I had picked one domain, used plain old sub-directories, I would have established both history as well as context for all the material I’ve been putting online since 1995.
As it is now, I realized that I’ve fragmented my material behind salvaging and can only grab what I can, put each chunk in as subdirectory to burningbird.net, drop all my other domains (except for missourigreen.com and addingajax.com, which I do want as a completely separate sites), and work to re-design, re-org, and so on.
(I’ll also keep shelleypowers.com, because that’s who I am: Shelley Powers, ghost in the machine.)
I’m probably responsible for 5% of the internet’s bad links and 404’s–not to mention those pages with all the links used by people to game Google. I guess I lived up to the name, “Burningbird”, because like the Phoenix, I was always in a constant state of re-birth.
Update All of this reminded me of one of the most helpful sites I’ve ever found, which is still in business and still extremely helpful: isbn.nu. Here’s the site with my newest book: Learning JavaScript.
Update 2: I found several of the presentations I gave in 1999-2001, listed here. Among them:
Developing Applications with XUL is a presentation I gave at two XML DevCons. Note that this one won’t work with Firefox, which is the danger of putting your presentation into a format other than a powerpoint presentation. However, you can download the entire work, or try going through the pages starting with Page 1 and kind of extrapolate from there.
Internet World Winter 2000 and Spring 2001: Interactive Web pages…thanks to the W3C that still works! This one is actually still very timely, for a historical perspective at a minimum. You have to click on each header to expose additional info. Yes, I know: not very accessible.
Then there’s the powerpoint presentation titled Semantic Web and RDF I did for the SDForum SIG group in October, 2001.
I did NET: Your key to programming language independence for some group, I can’t remember now. It requires IE–sorry.
Finally, for the first O’Reilly ETech conference, when it was called P2P, A Distributed Configuration Tool for Distributed Systems by my former boss, Michael Hitz and myself. This has a flash show as well as powerpoint presentation, and actually does a take off of Groove. About the talk:
Managing power grids (such as Florida Light and Power’s) and mass transit systems (such as the new light rail system to the airport in Hong Kong) each require sophisticated control systems. The sale of these large scale complex systems often requires an international marketing and engineering effort that demands the input of many different people, many of whom live in different countries and speak different languages. Such a sales process is fraught with an engineering challenge of its own that demands accurate price estimates, bills of material, forecast manufacturing orders and communication across sales, engineering and manufacturing teams in multiple time-zones.
This talk focuses on a development effort currently underway to create an automated configuration tool for such systems; one which will allow a number of distributed participants to collaborate on the description of a complex system of distributed parts. Output are various stages of quotation, requests for approval, and an automatically generated bill of materials (BOM).
In order to facilitate the geographical separation of people using the tool, the creators will be using P2P technologies to locate and access distributed services based on the needs of both configuration and user, at each stage of the configuration cycle. Streaming data will be used to dynamically generate the user interface, based on work in progress by one or more active participants and each engineer’s locale.
Now, it was Michael’s idea to use the word fraught in this context. I would never use the word ‘fraught’ in front of hard core American geeks. But he was Australian.
Yes, this was a system we were contemplating developing, until Michael decided he’d had enough of the states and took off for home and relative obscurity. I compare this, though, with the Web 2.0 applications getting billions of dollars and can only shake my head.