Monday's recommended links

Written by Adrian Holovaty on September 9, 2002

Editor and Publisher: As 2003 Nears, Where Is Online Newspaper Biz? In the gutter, according to an anonymous source quoted in the article: "Most media have stopped talking big talk and launching big projects and are making do, for the most part, with just slapping their print content online."

Jared Spool: Evolution Trumps Usability Guidelines -- A practical alternative to following Web usability guidelines, such as "Always put your search box in the upper-right corner", blindly. (Link from Small Initiatives)

wannaBrowser lets you see what happens when you visit a site with a user-agent string of your choosing. (Your user-agent string is an internal description of the browser you're using; sites you visit sometimes will perform certain actions based on this information.) Some sites ban particular user-agent strings, such as those of harmful spam robots. For example, WebmasterWorld bans the user-agent string EmailSiphon, which searches Web pages for e-mail addresses. On wannaBrowser, you can see this for yourself by entering http://www.webmasterworld.com for the location and EmailSiphon for the user-agent. This is useful for testing, if you're setting up your server to ban particular user-agents (as discussed lately on WebmasterWorld).

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