Eccentric Flower:199905/meta-ranting
From Eccentric Flower
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may tenth meta-ranting An afternoon in CGI-land. I'd explain what I'm doing to Heliotrope, but your eyes would glaze over. Suffice to say that, since I am no longer the only person using this system, I'm attempting to make my maintenance as low as possible. The best programmers are the somewhat lazy ones. Not so lazy that they don't do things right, but lazy enough that they automatically hit on the simplest and most efficient way of doing something. Lazy people hate wasted energy even more than busy industrious people. Most programmers will only repeat the same monotonous task three times or so before they decide to automate it. My sites aren't run by pixies because I'm in love with the gadgetry; it's because I'm lazy. - - - I do not like these little public webcounters, like extreme-dm and nedstat and so forth. I do not like them one little bit. They are slow - oh, lord, are they slow! They contain bad Javascript which makes Nibelung unhappy. They are a bad way of accomplishing a task which the ISP's server should be doing instead, and the only reason they exist is because so many people are on lousy free providers which can't be troubled to provide real stats for their users, or on private servers whose admins don't know how to work a stats program. I get more cranky every year, I know ... but honestly, you get what you pay for. Free web counters and free web space are not worth the cost. I am increasingly convinced of this. (And don't drag money into this. Dreamhost is ten bucks a month; my full-featured ISP is about thirty a month. I recognize that you may be poor - and believe me, I've been there - but neither of these are Big Money.) I'm sorry if I sound like I'm being a snot. I'm honestly confused. If you are on Geocities or Tripod or Xoom or some such, and you're bristling at my nasty words, would you please write me and tell me why you're there? Really. I don't understand it. In a perfect world there should be no reason for these places to exist.
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