Wikicliki:Community Portal

Here is where I put draft articles up. [NOT TRUE.... jUST HALF DEAD ARTICLES FROM YEARS AGO!!!]

jQuery

The first time I started making webpages was when I was around fourteen or fifteen. It was 1998, I still used floppy disks at school, talked on IRC and frequently played a text-based MUD over telnet pretending to be a Level 6 elven bard eating out of a magical brownie basket. I was horribly dismal at computer games, but I probably spent a bit more time than most people trying to figure out how things worked. Like numerous teenagers back then, I toyed around with notepad and made a string of ridiculous websites on places like geocities and tripod, with a list of books I had read and how much I wanted to live in a castle in Ireland. It was the stuff of HTML, all frames, awful tiled backgrounds, clunky tables and blinking gifs which had been compressed as tiny as possible so they wouldn't choke up your 14.4kb/s modem. For me, CSS and layers came a few years later But DHTML and complicated javascript was still out of my reach.

Until...

Gmail separator hack

One little known fact is that although Gmail allows you sign up with one fullstop in your email (and in fact encourages it by prompting you with possible options with fullstops as the separator), it actually ignores the dot when sending and receiving mail.

Thus, if you had sent an email to user.name@gmail.com, it would be no different from sending emails to username@gmail.com or u.s.e.r.na.me@gmail.com, or any permutation of the username littered with (or devoid of) fullstops.

The possible usefulness of this lies with spam detection; you tag the email address with a unique mark (in this case, the extra separator) and then you could conceivably trace your spam back to the point where you submitted your tag. The plus separator is technically an acceptable character in the local address (the part of the email before the "@" symbol) under standard Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, but some web forms will intentionally reject addresses with plus symbols for "security reasons" (although there has been widespread use of the plus separator to filter tagged mail into mailboxes) even though its accepted by RFC2821 and RFC2822.

The fullstop is more ubiquitous as it is generally allowed, except in the case of two dots next to each other or a dot at the beginning or end of the local part. So it MIGHT just be a better way to filter your mail than using the plus symbol. That is if you actually bother...

Google

When I was very young I thought the internet was like a book. A big digital encyclopedia about bookish subjects like plants and animals. I distinctly remember an incident in primary school where a school friend of mind was excitedly copying down a URL and I thought to myself, who needs to write URLs down when you can probably just flip the page to the entry? Then of course now there's Google...