Spam

My email address is hidden from spammers without being obscuficated. I just used an image of it. (The ALT text spells my e-mail address out phonetically for accessibility.)

Robots

I've written and used a robots.txt file for the first time, so it'll be interesting to see if this stops robots from chasing down links to PDFs, etc.

Webservices Actually Work Now

I have an entire book section driven by the Amazon REST APIs (What is REST?) , so I think it's fair to say that this stuff really does work now.

PHP vs. J2EE

My entire site is driven by Drupal, a PHP portal script. I'm technically aware of how horrible PHP based system are. But Drupal has been far easier to use than any supposedly enterprise-scale J2EE apps I've struggled with at work. Clearly several thousand man hours of testing are better than 2 months of internal beta, no matter what platform you use !

Caches Everywhere

It's only when you develop remote sites that you realise how much HTTP traffic is cached by proxies you knew nothing about. It took 24 hours for some image changes to flush through, and I'm still waiting for my new favicon to come through. I now have a little more sympathy for naive banking developers who keep stuffing proxies with confidential customer data - but still not much...