Turns out he is the primary perpetrator of Websearch.COM.AU Notice they claim to have been online for more than 10 years. Here's to hoping they won't be for much longer, if spamming is going to remain an important business tactic. Also note the brilliant spelling on the site. Very prefesiunal.

Just for a quick review, here is the dump I got by scraping the site the other night (and/or day) This is temporary, and will disappear. Soon. It's just for you to comment on before I do the next round (tentatively, I'd do this weekly). Please review the details of the YAML formatting in particular, if you think you know how it should look. *** This is a 770,167-byte file on a slow server [now up to 1,3 Mb]. Don't click if you're impatient. I deleted entry #247 altogether. Other than that, the data is as I got it off the server. I obtained the data by going through the /entry/nnn for each nnn up to number 2519 [now 4259], which for some reason I believe was the highest entry number at the time. Then I extracted the actual data out of the web page for each entry, and converted it to (some sort of) YAML. The /entry/ page doesn't show the modification time, so I don't have that. I have reserved a field for it in the format nevertheless. I also have this in something resembling XML, of course without any formal DTD or anything. Let me know if you think getting that would be more useful (instead, or as well). For the context impaired, the "and/or day" refers to time zone confusion.

/me pontificating on the question being begged Turns out that the linked page is not quite as stupid as the headline makes it seem. But nevertheless, I think it would be good to realize that this is all a question of understanding your audience's needs. Audience: You yourself, or a close-knit group of people. Needs: None you can't handle yourself anyhow. Strategy: Don't bother to tag or organize anything just for the sake of being organized. Audience: Any size. Needs: Data is easy to classify unambiguously. Strategy: Just do that then. Audience: You yourself, or a close-knit group of people. Needs: A significant amount of data but not important or complex enough to spend "real effort" on. Strategy: Come up with some ad-hoc tags, and try to stick to them. Audience: A larger or more diverse group. Needs: Data is hard to classify unambiguously. Strategy: This is not a solved problem, but ontology, controlled language, terminology, taxonomy, etc are some of the strategies we have. It's never wrong to spend more time on using a more advanced strategy than you absolutely need, if somehow you can find the resources to keep on doing that. Needs evolve and it's very hard to upgrade to a better strategy later, so if you can imagine that what you have now might not be sufficient one day, it's a good idea to spend some extra effort now. Who should be responsible for standardizing tags, when that need exists? I don't think that's an important question. When a tag is already in widespread use, and/or likely to be the one your audience will search for, it would be stupid not to use it, though. This can incidentally be generalized to another principle -- if some other categorization system already exists for the data you are tagging, it's likely that you are doing something wrong. (But of course, using tags in parallel with some other system might make sense.) The other mistake to watch out for is whimsical tagging. It scares me to see what tags people use (that includes my own tags, when I revisit them, more often than I like). If you don't know what a tag means, don't use it, or find out more about it.

A new version of Rubric is out. It should fix some glitches on de.lirio.us The software that de.lirio.us runs on is out with a new version. See the change log for details about what's new in this release. On the whole, nothing major, but it does contain a couple of useful bug fixes.

While steve@de.lirio.us is broken ... Steve Mallett's "about" page at fooworks.com includes contact information, in case you need to get a hold of him urgently regarding something at de.lirio.us. I exchanged email with him last week about the problems we are currently seeing ("internal server error" whenever you try to do anything even remotely heavy, such as, oh, say, view your own entries ... duh!) and apparently he is working on solving them. While we are holding our breaths, I have found that the RSS feeds seem to work even when you otherwise can't seem to get anything to work, although of course, they are only updated with some delay, and there's no way to get to a page where you can edit an entry. (I frequently need to go back to an entry I just added ... but I guess I should just learn not to click "save" too early.) If somebody has a pressing need to switch to a different provider, I may be able to help you collect all your entries (except the @private ones of course) -- I still have the simple mirror script which I have used for the "delirioussitedump" (see this tag) although of course that too has been working less than perfectly during the last few weeks. Get in touch or ... oh heck, I'll just make it available again at the previous location. I'll post an announcement in "delirioussitedump blog erablog" when it's there. Update 2006-02-06: click on the "delirioussitedump" tag above to see the announcement.

I guess this one will be a lot harder to fix ... The RSS validator complains when the front page has two occurrences of the same URL. I don't know if that can be easily solved ... Either don't put the link in the "rdf:about" field, or somehow make each occurrence unique? (Or maybe just link to the actual entries in the RSS feed. I've been sort of annoyed that it doesn't work that way by default, but chances are I'll regret wishing for this. :-)

mieses: Not within your control, obviously, except you could try to rephrase the offending entries See also http://de.lirio.us/rubric/entry/2636, by mieses. My own bookmarks also contain an error; the RSS feed I see in Firefox for the "live bookmark" ends with the last entry before the error. Now that mieses has an error already in the first entry (unescaped ampersand in title), his/her/its feed is completely empty. Update: Rubric 0.08 contains fixes to RSS parsing.

When you've copied a link, you end up looking at your own bookmarks We speculate that just adding &when_done=go_back to the end of the URL would fix it. ... Nope, didn't work. So I guess it requires a software fix. Update: As a workaround, use tabbed browsing (as if anybody who is serious about bookmarks wasn't already doing that).

Distilling one of my suggestions into more of a proper wishlist bug When adding a new entry via the de.lirio.us bookmarklet, and the