he Internet Archive may be one of the most fascinating tools around the Web. It holds over 100 terabytes (100,000,000 megabytes) of material, going back to 1996. You can now see your favourite sites and today’s large companies as they appeared in their ‘diapers’. Here are a few examples:

Yahoo! Inc. in 1996 and today; Slashdot in 1997 and today. Also have a peek at Jeff Zeldman, one of the fathers of Web standards and design, in 1996 and today. Chasing your favourite sites back in time can provide long hours of fun.

Gizoogle offer 2-5 minutes of giggles. The main feature of the site is a Gangsta’ language converter.

Brought to my attention by Dr. Scott Tobkes.

Google Desktop was made public less than a day ago. There is now a free 700k download for Windows.

Quoting the site, here is what Google Desktop offers:

• Find your email, files, media, web history and chats instantly
• View web pages you’ve seen, even when you’re not online
• New! Search directly from your desktop with the deskbar

ll webmasters show interest in the ranking of their sites. It is clear to very few, however, how the ‘Google clock’ functions. Answers to that are usually derived from experience.

According to Google’s information for webmasters, one might have to wait a month for a site to be indexed properly. PageRank (which directly affects traffic and search results) is updated/re-shuffled every 3-4 months according to a rumour at the SEO newsgroups. The rumour also says that the next PR update is in the beginning of April 2005.

A re-direct is said to be the safe solution to preservation of PageRank when moving between domains. Nonetheless, this may not work perfectly, not immediately anyway.

Google Suggest appears to have a long update cycle; Google Images likewise. I estimate it to be about 3-6 months.

here are two Web-based HTML editors which I am aware of. I happen to use neither, but they are worth a mention. One such editor is WysiwygPro and it is provided by my Linux-based Web host. See the example screen-shot below.

WysiwygPro in action (click to enlarge)

 
There is another powerful editor called htmlArea. It can be installed on your site without a cost and it is based on JavaScript and CGI. I installed it yesterday afternoon although I do not intend to use it. In my humble opinion, code that is automatically-produced by GUI tools is still far from being well-understood and well-behaved.
 

htmlArea example (click to enlarge)

Encryption has little practical use outside, for example, the government and defence domains, but signing of E-mail messages is essential as it is the only means of verifying identities. Unlike telephone or face-to-face interaction, there is no vocal identity and people in the past have been susceptible to frauds. To find out on ways of signing your E-mail, consider for example, GnuPG.

Phil Zimmermann explains why PGP (or encryption in general) is necessary:

…
What if everyone believed that law-abiding citizens should use postcards for their mail? If some brave soul tried to assert his privacy by using an envelope for his mail, it would draw suspicion. Perhaps the authorities would open his mail to see what he’s hiding. Fortunately, we don’t live in that kind of world, because everyone protects most of their mail with envelopes. So no one draws suspicion by asserting their privacy with an envelope. There’s safety in numbers. Analogously, it would be nice if everyone routinely used encryption for all their E-mail, innocent or not, so that no one drew suspicion by asserting their E-mail privacy with encryption. Think of it as a form of solidarity.
…

According to Slashdot, advertisers have devised ways to overcome ad blocking.

Pop-ups can always be blocked if the browser aims to do so — that is if your browser is your friend and does not have its conflicting interests a la Microsoft. This is a race between advertisers and angel Web browser developers. As long as you patch up your browser, you should be on safe grounds. Allow me to explain why.

An advertiser can force download of a pop-up window content. It can also force display. It cannot, however, know if the operating system puts the window in focus, hides it, or sends it a ‘kill’ signal. A smart advertiser will request that you press an object in the pop-up, but again, the operating system or browser can fake it. The spammer-versus-filter analogy might help here.

Related link: Pure-CSS ad blocking for Mozilla Firefox