Opinions and Rants

By me

A Macromedia Flash rant. A rant in Dutch about spam in the Netherlands.

By others

Opinions on

how to set up and check the quality of your website:
- Bobby: check for accessibility with other interfaces (not webbrowsers, e.g.)
- The GNU/FSF Web Site Guidelines
- W3C MarkUp Validation Service
- (Of course, my own flash rant can be helful too here.)
how to write email and news messages
- in English:
  - "HOWTO Edit Messages" by Sven Guckes, and
  - one with hints on how to "fix" mail software which has a broken default configuration: http://www.lemis.com/email.html. (Tnx lambo for this pointer, and thanks Fruit for comments.)
  - Another one, mainly about posting to mailing lists, is on http://www.gweep.ca/~edmonds/usenet/ml-etiquette.html (tnx Robin S. Socha for this pointer.)
  - Here's an article from Eric Raymond's Jargon File on quoting, including some historical notes.
  - A really excellent one about dealing with PGP signed email messages, by Karsten M. Self is on A (not so) Short Rant / FAQ on the Subject of Signed E-Mail and Public Key Infrastructure,
  - and, related to this: Simon Josefsson rightfully considers Inline OpenPGP in E-mail harmful.
- in Dutch: Erik Hensema's "Hoe te antwoorden op berichten in nieuwsgroepen" documents (he's written 3 about this subject :)
- in both English and Dutch: Why HTML in E-mail is a Bad Idea (tnx Ivo "zarq" for this pointer), and the email styleguide Make Juerd happy with mail by Juerd Waalboer (non-webarchive link) from april 2005.
how to deal with spam and other email annoyances. from an administer's point of view (in English) (thanks to Ian Eiloart for posting these links to the Mailman Developers list on 28 Mar 2008).
- How To Do Autoreplies Without The World Hating You
- UK Joint Academic Network provides network connectivity and services for UK HE institutions, here's their guidance to victims of backscatter
- A talk given at a UK Unix User Group meeting. Look for the 5th abstract on this page.
- And some more on spam backscatter.
- The inevitable "...considered harmful" article: Bouncing Spam Considered Harmful.
how to write shell scripts: The Useless Use of Cat Award.
how to manage a mailing list: Reply-To Munging Considered Harmful. See also D.J. Bernstein's page on Mail-Followup-To and Mail-Reply-To. (O my! Some guy considers Reply-To Munging Useful...)
how to report bugs: Simon Tatham's essay. See also D.J. Bernstein's notes on reporting bugs using the dns mailing list. See also: how to ask questions: How To Ask Questions The Smart Way (Tnx Fruit for this pointer.)
software licensing: why you should use Free Software:
- in English: Why Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS, FLOSS, or FOSS)? Look at the Numbers! by David A. Wheeler
- in Dutch: some links to articles are on the Windows page.
how to communicate with geeks (or nerds):
- Tact Filters, by Jeff Bigler: "Most "normal people" have the tact filter positioned to apply tact in the outgoing direction. [...] "Nerds," on the other hand, have their tact filter positioned to apply tact in the incoming direction." Thanks Arvid Gibas for passing the url.
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