Jeff Cutsinger → Semantic Nonsense → Site Update

I’ll just come out and admit it. I’m pathological when it comes to my site. If I spent half the time I spend upgrading it technologically on content, I’d have a lot more traffic. But I’m pathological.

I’ve built an adhoc php-based (I know, adhoc and php-based are practically redundant) CMS for my static content. Its features include:

• Advanced caching. The pages themselves support ETag based conditional get (I might add Last-Modified at some point, but for now, ETags will have to do). External resources have caching based on a far future Expires date. If I need to update an external resource, I bump the “version” which changes the URI.
• Speaking of URIs, they are now pathologically clean. I’ve made it so resources that aren’t collections don’t end in slashes. The old URIs now redirect to the new ones.
• And speaking of redirection, any variance in the URI requested will cause a redirect to a canonical version of the URI. I do mean any variance. If your query string parameters are out of order, it will redirect with the correct order (for that matter, if you use a parameter that is unrecognized, it will redirect with that parameter removed).
• Pages now respond with 405 Method Not Allowed for any verb they don’t recognize. This is, by default, anything other than GET and HEAD.
• Besides the obvious template changes, there are some niceties under the hood, like all my scripts using type='application/ecmascript' instead of type='text/javascript' (this is also the media type my script resources send). It’s true that the browser that shall not be named doesn’t recognize this media type and thus ignores the scripts. It’s also true that I really could not care less.
• Also, my site is no longer valid HTML. You have no idea how much this pains me, to the roots of my soul. I am going to kill myself. My site is no longer usable in any browser, brutalizes the disabled, and eats tiny fuzzy bunnies live. Darfur, move over. Iraq? Ha! jeff.cutsinger.org is no longer valid. Woe to you, world, for I am your undoer.
• I’ve been using the time element in place of the abbr design pattern in my microformats, because it is broken.

So you see, I’m pathological. Guess what? I’m still not happy with my site.

1. I want to get rid of PHP. I’m not just talking about on my site, I’m talking about in all of the world. But my site is probably the best place to start. While I’m at it, I wish I could lose mod_rewrite.
2. I’d like to support pingback on all of my pages.
3. As before mentioned, I might like Last-Modified support.
4. I’m thinking about throwing caution to the winds and just using HTML5.
5. 1812 is pretty cool, but I’m working on my own replacement.
6. I wonder how much work it would take to use FastCGI.
7. Maybe I’ll actually add some real content one of these days.