UPDATE: More details on FireFTP, an FTP client for Firefox, are available in a new and comprehensive item. Visitors are strongly encouraged to follow this link.

o some this may be no cause for excitement, but many Firefox users would love to integrate FTP capabilities into their browser.

An extension called FireFTP was released two days ago (beta phase) and its value to regular FTP users is high. To discover more Firefox updates, RSS feeds for new themes and extensions exist and are highly recommended.

Long URL‘s (addresses) break consistencies in mail and news clients, as well as on the Web. A URL exceeding the standard line in length cannot be wrapped as it would cause a conflict; layout is compromised instead. Several sites offer tools that produce short permanent aliases to long addresses.

• The first such site, which I discovered long ago is www.makeashorterlink.com. Evidently, it is quite a long URL in itself.
• A very popular site among newsgroups subscribers is tinyurl.com
• Dr. Scott Tobkes has just informed me of another such service: snipurl.com

Domains can now be ranked using the criterion of traffic. This gives insight into popularity, without relying on Google PageRank.

• Go to A9, Amazon’s excellent search engine, which is heavily reliant on Google
• Type in the full name of the URL, e.g. http://google.com
• Hover over the button labelled Site Info to view the figures

Google, by the way, is only ranked 3^rd, MSN at 2^nd and Yahoo! at 1^st.

These ranks include all registered global domains, as well individual parts of the world, most notably Germany (.de) with around 5.5 million. Italy (.it) at second only has 681,779 registered domains.

There appears to be an increase in the number of Web sites with random, incoherent content that is aimed at attracting baffled and errant visitors. Some of these sites make use of public feeds and may have thousands of them. A pattern you might find:

http://.../feed275.htm

These sites will frequently try to sell something. Strong search engines penalise these sites as the algorithms sense unrelevance in the content. It sometimes seems like the World Wide Web is sinking into a jumble with more and more content spam, referrer spam, and comment spam (not to mention E-mail). This induces redundant traffic and frequent maintenance chores. What impact will high-speed connections have? Probably even higher capacity for the spammers.

PHP-Nuke is a free content management system, which is relatively difficult to install and involves a tedious learning curve. I spent the day investigating it in depth and eventually minimalised it to avoid unnecessary clutter a la Slashdot. The package was constructed by geeks and was intended for an audience of geeks.

My favourite example site is associated with Enemy Territory as I was badly addicted to the game (photographics evidence). PHP-Nuke is by far more sophisticated and complex than WordPress, for example,and I would rate it 9 out of 10.

The site I currently work on is titled The Computer Vision Digest. Also see:

• Topics
• Archive
• Surveys
• Submit News

any different forms exist for conversation over the Internet: site forums, wikis, newsgroups, IRC, blogs, mailing lists, IM and so forth. Each of these requires an application to be accessed — a Web browser being the most common among these applications.

The different communication methods have pros and cons, but they all can be bridged. All should be intrinsically entwined. Commercial interests have often pushed conversation protocols apart and disintegrated them to form the chaotic state we are in today. The result: poor compatibility, inter-operability and an endless number of installed applications, all of which are needed in order to keep up with the changing times (and people).

Will somebody, once and for all, take initiative and work towards a single comprehensive package?

Feeds have come a long way towards efficient,
standardised form of one-way communication.

am hoping to explain why spam, to me, has never been a real problem. I recently lost track of the ‘flowchart’ of my mail, so I visualised it for myself and later decided to make it public.

Some months ago I mentioned the need to separate boxes. Different addresses can then be disclosed to different people/sites. Below is an illustration of how my mail is managed at the time of writing (click to view in a legible size). None of the filters is a spam filter, hence no message is abolished; that’s where the power of this technique truly lies.