Categories
Delicious

links for 2008-12-09

  • Microsoft develops open-source content-management system: This is probably going to be huge, just by having the stamp of approval from Microsoft. Microsoft is positioning Oxite as more than just a blogging engine, claiming it can support even large Web sites. The company also is positioning the platform as customizable, allowing users to swap out Microsoft technologies, like database and search providers — specifically, SQL Server and Live Search — for non-Microsoft ones. Notably, the platform is ASP MVC, not Web forms. Via Seth who notes: From poking around a bit, Oxite seems to be a project introduced by some MSDN developers who needed a platform on which to build MIX Online (Microsoft’s big developer conference. Here is their description of Oxite). We all know that Microsoft’s mainstream content management offerings would not be up to the task for this kind of open community site. I am guessing that the code was first re
  • Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, is under attack by online pirates. An add-on for the Firefox browser called ‘Pirates of the Amazon’ makes it possible to shop at the Amazon store but leave without paying a dime. Instead, on Amazon product pages the add-on integrates links to ‘free’ copies on The Pirate Bay.
  • I changed the URL scheme of this Web site over the weekend. I had been meaning to do it for a while, but some problems with Movable Type 3.2 kind of forced the issue. (I have got to stop rushing into every beta that presents itself…) To make everything backwards compatible, I built a simple redirect system — I have a table in the database with every single permalink from the old site (all 9,000 of them — including entry RSS feeds and category pages) mapped to every single new URL. If someone looks for a page which has moved, the 404 page does a lookup on this table, “resolves” the old URL against a new one, then redirects with a “301 Moved Permanently.” It seems to work well. A side benefit of this system is that I can watch for “unresolved 404s,” meaning 404s that were not in my lookup table — a genuine 404, if you will. I’ve noticed some interesting phenomena
  • Many e-commerce sites aren’t the most attractive websites. There’s often a lot of clutter with little to distinguish the design from any other site. Of course, selling products is more important to an e-commerce site than having a pretty design, but these 50 examples show that some e-commerce sites display excellent design.
  • Free wordpress themes for everybody
  • ]]>