I read this article from Elliotte Rusty Harold yesterday, and its kind of stuck in my mind [1]. He writes about what the different types of HTTP requests were actually intended for; the difference between the verbs GET and POST. His point is that to view information, GET should be used so that the page can be bookmarked (or indexed, or emailed) and reused. POST is just for actions that shouldn’t be repeated – and he’s right.

His article is here: http://cafe.elharo.com/web/post-considered-inconvenient/ and its well worth the read. I don’t think I’d ever really thought about this before, or not in these terms. Thanks, Elliotte, for a great and thought-provoking article!

¹ Possibly because I’m writing a big search form and sorting mechanism for a big set of results at work! Since I work in manufacturing its all dates and partcodes and supplier codes and so on, not terribly exciting but a good illustration of when to use different posting methods.

Opera has sneaked in a fabulous new search feature – and I missed it completely! In looking up how to set up some shortcut searches, I stumbled across this and thought I’d share.

Opera 9 (and I think earlier versions) comes with a preconfigured search function, where you type the letter “g” and then the search terms you would have typed into Google’s search box and the search is performed for you. I have a couple of other searches set up as well, previously it was necessary to work out where in the query string to put your search and hack about with an ini file to get it working.

Not any more! On any site with a search box you can right click in it and choose “Create Search …”, you will then be asked to choose a shortcut letter to use with it. That’s so clever! And very non-techie to use.

Self-promoting example

In opera, go to lornajane and right-click in the Search box on the right-hand bar. Choose “Create Search …” and type “l” into the search box. Now in a new tab, type into the address bar:

l opera search

And guess where you’ll end up??

Usage

I have p for the PHP Website and w for Wikipedia, and am lost without them!

Following my brush with RSI, I’ve become very mouse-averse, which is difficult on a windows computer! There are a couple of shortcuts that I use to launch programs, mostly revolving around use of the Start->Run dialog (press Windows and R and it just pops up).

PuTTY can have saved sessions which is very useful – for example I use a different coloured background for the production server at work, so I remember which window it is and don’t type into the wrong one. To launch a saved session from the command line (or Run dialog box), use:

<path to putty.exe> -load <saved session

I have to look this up every time I need to change my machine or set this up somewhere else, so its here for safekeeping!

My partner asked me the other day if I would like a new watch for Christmas. Actually I would really like a new watch for Christmas and I’m touched that he had thought of such a gift. He asked that I choose, so that he could be sure of getting something that I liked.

As a first step, we grabbed the Argos catalogue and he started to browse. I brought some drinks in and asked how he was getting on. “I’m looking for a ladies watch that actually does something”, he replied. But we didn’t find one.

Why is it that men need dates, alarms, lights and interesting energy solutions on their watches (not to mention ones that are manufactured from interesting stuff, like titanium), when women just need the time (often with no second hand and no accurate markings) and plenty of bling? I don’t get it. I want one with a backlight so I can see the time at night, and an alarm to set in case I fall asleep on the train.

With women being target market for phones, music players, and even games consoles these days, it seems very odd that such a fundamental market hasn’t caught up. I’m not a gadget freak really (not much anyway) and I don’t need something which remote controls my talking entertainment centre and is waterproof to 100m or anything. My current watch was an emergency buy from Next when the last one died and its pretty good – it has minute markings and a second hand – and a diving bezel thing that I use when I’m cooking to remind me when something will be ready.

I suppose the answer is to buy a man’s watch. I’m a big girl after all (at almost six feet tall) and I do have big hands. The trouble is that I have tiny wrists, ladies watches are too big even after I’ve had links taken out – an average man’s watch is big enough for both my wrists at one time, which isn’t practical!

Short of starting my own gadget accessories range, I’m not sure how I’m going to solve this!

Something wierd just happened …. I was trying to do something on the PHP Community Book Site (more about them another day), to get dokuwiki to hyperlink to sections. I was confused about the syntax so I googled for it.

Can you guess what happened next?

My own website was one of the hits

Wow. I was eighth hit for the search term “dokuwiki internal hyperlinks”. That has never happened to me before.

The only downside is that I don’t know the answer to my question and its certainly not on this website – never mind :) The actual way to do dokuwiki’s internal links is by looking on the syntax page that comes with each wiki (hyperlink to it above the box on the edit page, if you have one) – or you can use the syntax page on the dokuwiki homepage, http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki:syntax