 I've been developing websites for twenty years and what the utter heck is this bloke even on about? https://notfunatparties.substack.com/p/inside-a-viral-website I understand about half of what he's saying and I understand that it's useless filler to make things run more slowly, and the other half I don't understand but I'm 95% confident that it's useless filler to make things run more slowly. 6 comments
...articles into an article-writing page on your website, click the save button, and the article would go into a database. Then instead of someone going to mynewtablesaw.html they'd go to article.php?articlename=mynewtablesaw and the site would retrieve the article from the database, generate all the stuff around it like navigation links, add comments and stuff - it's WAY slower than just mynewtablesaw.html, like at least one maybe two orders of magnitude slower but it does, kind of, make some things easier for the writer (at the expense of making other things much much complicated). Anyway there I was, fiddling about with joomla, and I wanted to make a sidebar of links so people could navigate around the sections of the site. So here's how you make a link in HTML: <a href="https://www.improbableisland.com">Click here to play Improbable Island, my text game</a> So the "a" there is shorthand for "anchor," which I guess is what links were called for the five minutes between having the idea and deciding the spec and someone coming up with a better name. The "href" bit is where the link goes. The bit in between > and </ is the link text, and </a> means you're done talking about a link.  @ifixcoinops specifically re: "anchor", the "link" was originally the connection between two anchors, which is why you can link to a named anchor by putting the name in the fragment part (after the octothorpe/hashtag) of a URL  @bonzoesc @ifixcoinops yes! specifically, an "anchor" in real life is a thing that a chain link hooks on to on either side. So in graph terms the "anchor" is the node (which is what you are defining with <a>) and the link itself is the relationship or edge between the nodes. Of course it makes more sense when links are bidirectional... |
Gregory's Server
There's a distressing trend in computing where the computer tries to prevent you from having to know anything, and in doing so creates a LOT more work for you. I first noticed it when I was working with a content management system called Joomla about ten years ago.
A content management system or CMS is a kinda framework of scripts to (theoretically) make running a website easier. Instead of making a bunch of pages like about.html, faq.html, contact.html, tablesaws.html, you'd write your...