congypsy.com until recently had a single validation error (XHTML 1.0 strict), and I can’t stand for that sort of thing on a site I work on. The source was the “Latest updates on Twitter” section; I was using Twitter’s pregenerated code bits with just a little modification, and their script expects the <ul> it uses to have a particular ID. The problem came in when I had two of them on a page; obviously, you can’t have two objects with the same ID on one page! But to my surprise, everything worked as expected in Firefox, so I left it alone for a while. (Fail)

So then I realized I could just download the script from the Twitter site, modify it slightly, and free myself from the horror of invalid XHTML. UnFail.

I don’t tend to like short posts here, but I must announce A List Apart’s annual survey for web professional type folks:

This post is a test of some structural stuff.

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I just spent a weekend in Cape Cod, and had some time to think while I was relatively unplugged. Since coming back, I’ve seen a lot of comments out there claiming that people are making too big a deal out of NetFlix removing profiles. I disagree - NetFlix has repeatedly shown themselves to be a bad company, and boycott may be the only rational response. At the very least, after observing the complete lack of professional ethics in those at NetFlix, I regret having given them my personal and financial information. And so I decided that here I should outline a little more thoroughly what’s wrong with what NetFlix has done.

UPDATE: NetFlix is now not getting rid of profiles. But they’re still evil.

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Netflix just informed me that it will no longer have account profiles. Profiles are a useful feature that let multiple people on one account have different queues. We also use them to separate “movie” and “series” queues, so that if we send back a disc of Lost, we get a new disc of Lost.

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So I was poking around the Internet Archive’s WayBackMachine today, and found out it does a terrible job of indexing blogs. Split posts (”read more”) are frequently dropped, as are comments. I think it just doesn’t do well with very dynamic content.

I’m afraid of what this might mean for the future. I’ve always assumed that we’ll have at least a crappy, slow, hard-to-access record of all of this information. It looks like it’s still possible for much of it to be lost to the sands of time.

I say we should have better internet archives. There should be a lot of wealthy people now who have an interest in making sure this stuff stays around forever. It could at least make for an interesting Google Labs project.