Mike Blonder: Thoughts on Technology, and the Web

Dynamic pages (really just one HTML page that is filled with information as per an immediate request from someone at your site) is the approach most widely used for

• web sites that require regular updates, or for
• web sites that are produced by personnel who may be heavy on images and words, but light on computer programming

These dynamic pages are supported by databases. Most of the publishing work is actually done on the database side through commands written in Structured Query Language (SQL). These commands are embedded within the scripts that are invoked through tags on the dynamic HTML page.

I don't like this approach for several reasons and have chosen to go a different way with Best Plain Web Pages. The reasons are as follows:

• Security: business customers typically use a database for other reasons. The same SQL calls can run on the customer database that is not facing the web, but may be accessible through a back door. Better not to have tags calling scripts with SQL calls.
• Long URLs: Since the pages are dynamically published, information from different tables and/or rows of the database may be required to publish the same one page. The page address is written to reflect the various actions taken to publish the page, resulting in a long page address. Long URLs are not friendly for Search Engines.
• So-called Short URL schemes don't work well: systems developers at the various Nuke Content Management Systems (CMSs) like PostNuke, have spent lots of time trying to modify the .htaccess file that the Apache WebServer uses to set up the browser for the page address with limited if any success. My experience has been that the number of Page Not Found errors (404 codes) goes up dramatically which, once again, negatively impacts on Search Engine rankings.

Best Plain Web Pages uses scripts that 1) do not run on the client site and 2) produce static HTML pages. I think this is a much better way to go. The scripts we use are written with Open Source components like VIM and Python. Any large-scale changes that we need to make on client sites are effected with VIM functions like argdo, or with tried and true simple programs including SED.

I'm happy to say that our primary client maintains very high Page Rankings for a site in a very competitive consumer market. Long live static HTML.

© Mike Blonder, 2006, All Rights Reserved

If the state of Vermont is a useful example of present-day rural USA, The disparity in the availability of data services to rural and urban markets is exploding. Consider that a very large chunk of Web 2.0 is entirely unavailable to Vermonters who live outside of the center of any of the country towns that fill the state, or the 5 cities: Burlington, Rutland, Brattleboro, Montpelier, St. Albans. Network connections are either too slow to support video, or, ominously, bandwidth is metered. The latter situation is the case for folks who try to get the necessary bandwidth from a Satellite "broadband" data services provider such as HughesNet. We use HughesNet and recently suffered a 24 hr "throttle down" as the result of exceeding a daily limit of 375 MBs of data. Anyone who knows video, or for that matter, MP3 audio, knows that 375 MBs of data is "nothing," hence my assertion that Web 2.0 does not play in this state very well.

Consider also that mobile telephony cannot be characterized, in any way, as ubiquitous in the rural areas of the state, which I ought to note, also comprise in excess of 50% of the geographical area. Vermonters don't like the look of towers on hills (don't ask me, I had nothing to do with it), therefore, service is non existent hereabouts. Non existent mobile telephony translates into no value from internet banking over a mobile telephone, mobile telephone cameras, etc.

The worst to be hit by all of this are the young folks in the rural public school systems. They are growing up in a world where they cannot develop familiarity with services that are easy to find anywhere else . If the job market treats video over mobile as a no-brainer, a young geek from Vermont is not going to make the cut when a content provider fills some high paying slots in its developer roster.

The point of this article is to describe the situation with the hope that influencers (government, private industry, etc) will hear the alarm and move forward, aggressively to get real broadband to these areas right away, not ten years from now.

© 2007, Mike Blonder, All Rights Reserved, No Reprints Without Prior Permission