Dylan Greene dot com

So about 12 hours from now, assuming I stop playing with this web site, finish my laundry, get some sleep, and the snow outside doesn't reach the top of my car, I'll be heading to Wisp to go snowboarding for my first time. And you know what - I'm nervous. Not because what you're thinking. I'm nervous because I still have over 200 photos to sort and put online, and my camera has another 100 megs of photos that haven't even been downloaded to my pc and uploaded to the server yet. I've put over 1000 photos online in the last two weeks and I'm still behind!

Coming soon: Faster connection and CSS compatibility for non-IE users.

It took a while, but the last of the winter break photos are now online. I hope everybody enjoys them, especially those that were there, and even if you weren't - add captions to the photos.

Among the Fort Lauderdale photos is the last photo from my previous digital camera. You'll see in the photo what happened to my camera.

I've taken down TeacherReviews.com for a short while until I can find some new hosting for it. If you're able to provide free Windows 2000/XP hosting, let me know.

Update Feb 26: I've found hosting! Thanks Tim! More information coming soon, and the site will still take a couple days to move over.

I predict Google will merge with Amazon and/or eBay. You heard it here first.

Why do I think this? Because Google, Amazon, and eBay are personal-information-collecting-machines. Google remembers every web search you've ever done. Amazon and eBay remember every product search you've ever done. If you use the Google Toolbar, it knows every web page you browse to. Amazon knows every product you browse to. If you use Blogger.com or BlogSpot.com, which Google just bought, then Google has access to your personal logs, which show every person that's visited your blog. So if these companies merge, they will know about about you, those you know about, and those that know you. Why would they want all this? For better targeting marketing, and maybe to control our brains so that we all buy Segways.

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, got a patent today, filed August 2, 1999, for online discussion groups. Besides various forms of newsgroups being around since the '70's, I've owned and run Messageboard.com since 1996. Prior art, Mr. Bezos?

I'm big into Interaction Deisgn, and because of that, I like to see how people use this site, and because of that, I keep track of what links users click on by using a redirect script. The problem is the site you visit sees a visitor coming from my redirect script - not the real page that the link is on. How can I count the clicked link and present the correct refer page?

You'll have to excuse my excitment, I've been on the Internet for a while now, but never as a blogger.

http://www.scripting.com:

http://zajac.ca/xmlbutton:

http://www.dotnetweblogs.com:

And there's always somebody that doesn't like the idea:

http://gammatron.novarese.net:

Check out this guy's question on Experts-Exchange. Cool, eh?

I saw on Scripting News that somebody has created a PNG version of the XML icon. Here's code to create XML via CSS (261 bytes) instead of a GIF (429 bytes) or PNG (283 bytes):

Now you can do neat tricks, such as a more obvious button: RSS 2.0. No more wondering what RSS version you're about to access, and now Google and other search engines will see the words "RSS" on your web site. You can even use your browser's built-in find function to find that pesky link to the RSS.

But I have a question - Dave Winer calls the PNG version "more politically correct" than the GIF version. Is the CSS version even more PC than the PNG version?

Finally, photos from New Years are online and sorted. Photos from the rest of our Florida trip will be up shortly.

Been uploading photos from this weekend all day long. Man my connection is slow...

A team of plows assisted by a front-end loader are attempting to make a path wide enough for one car to go down. I now have to shovel a path from my driveway to this new path, a distance longer than my driveway, but at least I'll be able to return a movie I have from Blockbuster, and renew some books on tape from the library.

My RSS code wasn't valid, but it is now. I even got this to prove it. Go me! You know what sucks? I can't quickly find some non-techie page about the goodness of RSS. Is it for geeks only? Hell no... just I can't prove it right now. Somebody leave some helpful URL's in the Comments for the rest of us please - thank you!

Here's some more. Each folder doesn't have many photos so I've put them all up today.

I've created a new counter system that's more efficient and detailed than the old one. Unfortunately this means that all of the page counters have to go back to zero. Oh well.

Okay, this happened abount a month ago, but it's never too late to celebrate Jennifer's birthday once again! Check out the fun we had and leave a comment here wishing her happy b-day.

Starting on Monday, I'll be posting new photos just about every day, until I run out of new photos to post, and then I'll return to the normal schedule. The first set will be Jennifer's birthday at Strike Bethesda. I might even get them online tonight.

Re-doing major portions of this site is going a lot slower than I hoped for. Part of it is that I re-coded the entire sorting engine to make it easier to use and debug. In doing so, I added a bunch more features. The rule seems to be: the easier it's going to be for the user, the harder it's going to be to program.