Missing

No, I didn’t fall off the face of the earth: our Internet connection did. We get wireless broadband access from a relatively small company, and they don’t have weekend tech support. We lost our connection on Saturday, and wasn’t able to get hold of anyone at the support desk until this morning. Half an hour later the problem was fixed when they rebooted an interface card on the tower from which we get our signal. I knew it was probably something simple like that, so it was very frustrating.

Undistracted by the WWW, I spent Sunday converting the static pages of my website to use the Perl Template module for page templates. and fixing up broken xhtml code. The former was a lot faster and easier than the latter. I have plans for a little redesign, now that the housekeeping is done. I only added one page, and you are welcome to visit my recipe list.

Firefox Custom Keywords

Leaky Tap presents some lists of Custom Keywords that can be used in Firefox and Mozilla, as well as pointers to various other information about setting them up. Once set up, these shortcuts can be typed into the address bar for quick searches. For example, I have a CustomKeyword called write that takes me to the page I use to post to my weblog, as well as one called gnews that will search Google News for a topic.

A Trip Down Memory Lane

I was using markup languages for documents when html was just a gleam in Berner-Lee’s eye. I couldn’t remember when I first saw html or a browser, so I found A Little History of the World Wide Web. Odd to think that it has just been fourteen years since he coined the name World Wide Web.

I remember my first impression of html: “hmm…how limited.” (I was used to a rather fabulous markup language called Bookmaster, which was used by IBM to produce documentation.) This was when Jack first showed me a browser running on our XT machine here at home, not too long after we moved to Colorado. “Boy…this is sure going to suck up a lot of bandwidth.”

I was right on both accounts.