One of the many changes that Jessamyn suggested for MyKidsLibrary is that the URLs should be comprised of meaningful text rather than just numbers.  In addition to being more human-friendly, it is, apparently, an important search engine optimization technique.

Ruby on Rails likes to construct URLs that end with a numeric identifier that is used to look up a specific record in the database.  It is an efficient, effective solution, and the software engineer side of me never considered why you'd have it be otherwise.  I have come to think of URLs as being things that are as effectively meaningless and worthless to my brain as printouts of UNIX coredumps.  I click on links, I bookmark pages, I never pay the slightest attention to URLs.  I use tools -- browsers, bookmarking services -- to work with URLs just as I use tools to write software.

Once I decided to go about making the change, I set out to find who else had already done this work.  The Rails ecosystem is vast and densely populated; I knew that there was but a very tiny chance that I'd actually have to start from scratch.  Sure enough, a little work on Google revealed ...

I've been working a lot recently on polishing MyKidsLibrary.  I felt that it was essentially feature-complete and that I was ready to move on to the hard part, doing all of the marketing and advertising to build up a good community of users.  I had a haunting, nagging feeling that it wasn't really ready, but I attributed it to the normal jitters that come from the anticipation of launching a web project that -- hyopthetically -- very large numbers of people could see and use.

Almost on a whim, I sent the address of the site to one of my oldest friends, the illustrious Jessamyn.  She is, after all, a librarian and is deeply web-savvy, so it seemed likely that she might have a valuable insight or two.  In just a few minutes, she compiled a lengthy list of concrete, specific weaknesses that I could act on.  I was stunned.  I'd been asking friends, family and professional associates to give me feedback for at least eight months, and I'd rarely heard anything other than that it lacked "flash", needed "stickiness" and wasn't "pretty."  I was already well-acquainted with those grim facts, and I had tried to address ...

I've been a willing, full-time user of Windows since 2000 or thereabouts.  I transitioned back in from the Linux world on Windows 2000, and while its start-up time was gratingly-awful, I grew to understand and even appreciate what it had to offer.  When I tried XP, I was sold, delighted, converted.

Of course, Windows has its limitations, and you don't have to look very far to find people crying them as a reason to convert to Linux.  It's not enough for me, especially since it is relatively easy to write to code to extend and modify the Shell.  I've had some fun, over the years, doing just that.  While it is not technically a Shell Extension (it started out as one and grew into its own funky thing), my utility SmokeyBox adds fun and useful features to the Windows desktop.

The latest tool in my making-Windows-better toolbox is StExBar, and I am deeply impressed  with it.  Written by the fine, brilliant gentleman who brought us TortoiseSVN, it adds an extensible toolbar to Shell windows.  It comes with many excellent features that make any software engineer's/power user's life much easier.

I can't recommend ...