[thelist] wtf happened to whatis.com?

rudy limeback r937 at interlog.com
Mon Aug 14 17:41:58 CDT 2000


i guess this is going to be a rant, so there's a tip at the end

what the heck (to paraphrase the subject line) happened to whatis.com?

it used to be such a handy, friendly site (despite being a seven frame
frameset, if i recall correctly)

now it's a fucking IT portal, for crying out loud!

(sorry, but IT portals make me puke)

when did this happen?

it's so s-l-o-o-o-o-o-w-w-w

and talk about buggy!

have they bothered testing in netscape?  i keep getting javascript errors
like "layer468605 is not defined"

i tried their alphabet index, discovered that the term i was looking for
wasn't on the first page (alphabetically),

so i hit the Next link and got

  "Our apologies!
   The good news: whatis.com has a new look!
   The bad news: your requested page was not found."

give me a break, i was using one of *your* links,  you idiots

and their urls used to be self descriptive, like

  http://whatis.com/icejello.html

(one of the links in my Liquid Tables article)

which is now broken, it takes you to a 404 page

all the self descriptive urls are now these vignette abominations like

  http://whatis.techtarget.com/WhatIs_Definition_Page/0,4152,212307,00.html

also, the search just plain doesn't work -- type ipx into the search box,
you get nothing, but go to the alphabetical listing for i and there it
is...


"Our site doesn't just look new... it is new!"

hey techtarget -- get a clue and debug your shit before unleashing it on
an unsuspecting public


whew, i feel better


<tip>
always use root relative addressing within a site
for example, say you are inside the baz directory --
   http://www.yoursite.com/foo/bar/baz/fap.htm
and you want to reference a document in the zot directory which is at the
same level --
   http://www.yoursite.com/foo/bar/zot/zip.htm
then there are three ways you can make the reference
1. relative -- "go up one level and then down" (the "dot-dot-slash"
method)
    a href="../zot/zip.htm"
2. root relative -- "start at the root"
    a href="/foo/bar/zot/zip.htm"
3. absolute -- "type the whole url"
    a href="http://www.yoursite.com/foo/bar/zot/zip.htm"
one advantage of the root relative method is that no matter at what level
you are in the site, the href is the same, and you don't have to worry
about portions of the site suddenly breaking their links if they are moved
around within the directory structure
also, i think with the "dot-dot-slash" method, you could end up with
different expressions for the same page, from pages at different levels of
the directory structure, and i think this might affect things like visited
links and caching (willing to be corrected on this point)
</tip>


rudy.limeback
r937.com
evolt.org





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