sp8

I personally am tired of the April Fools stuff too but I have enough faith in the HN community/mechanism to trust that only those things deemed worth it will make the front page. I'm not against humour either, so can't/won't object if good/funny/clever April Fools links get posted.

tl;dr: special measures not required, IMHO.

I'm sure there's a perfectly good reason why I clicked on a link that told me it would kill my browser...

Yes, killed Chrome 33.0.1750.146 m on Win7 here.

This may be exactly the photo sharing software I've always wanted. Will definitely be setting this up soon.

It appears they've also changed the name servers on twitter.co.uk as well - http://whois.domaintools.com/twitter.co.uk

This is OT but Ghostery blocked 20 different tracking scripts on that page. I've never seen such a huge list from one site!

I present you http://www.fabricland.co.uk/ - real shop (with a branch near me) and actually a pretty good place, just with a hideous (and genuine, as far as I can tell) web site.

We've been recommending this as an alternative to Dropbox where I work (in the UK) for a few years now, for exactly the reasons given in the title text. Yes, its a shame its Java-based, but they do have clients for Windows, Mac, Linux iOS and Android.

(No, I'm not connected to Wuala in any way, I don't even use the service myself, but as an alternative to Dropbox I think its a good one.)

Point taken (though presumably you do tag other things about each page - language, direction of reading, cache length etc). Tagging each page would give you the ability to nominate that different sections of a site target different countries though?

An alternative then might be something akin to robots.txt - place a geo.txt (or whatever) file in the root of a site to indicate its relevance to particular country or countries?

Personally I've been against the 'abuse' of the domain name system in this way (using ccTLDs as if they were gTLDs) for years, but the world disagrees with me. So at this point there seems little point in hanging on to geo-targeting by ccTLD, might as well flatten the playing field.

But we do need some country-targeting and while we do have the Webmaster Tools thing (but that is only Google-specific, you'd end up having to do this for any and all search engines, if they offered it) I'd like to see control put back into the hands of the sites themselves, and have some way of tagging available in the HTML of the page.

It'd also get rid of the ridiculous assumption that search engines make that if your site is hosted at an IP in a country, then that's the country that should be targeted in their results (if there are no other signals, ie ccTLD). Here in the UK there are many web hosts which are based in Ireland or Europe, and at the moment I worry that using them would hurt the site's reach into a UK search result.

The UK University I work at is experiencing problems with IMAP connections and intermittent problems with Google Drive. I believe other UK Universities are also experiencing similar problems.

Web access to the same services seems OK though.

I thoroughly agree. Its astonishing the number of times I've had projects stumble, sometimes collapse, at the "writing the content" stage. And only ONCE have I had someone hand me (nearly) complete copy before I started designing.

> 6. Country code top level domains give context

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! I'm a self-proclaimed domain name pedant and this gradual decline into mainstream abuse of ccTLDs drives me mad on a daily basis.

I'm surprised that no one appears to have mentioned the main reason I was always taught not to use "click here".

From W3C: http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/#gl-facilitate-navigation

"Link text should be meaningful enough to make sense when read out of context -- either on its own or as part of a sequence of links."

This is especially true when you consider users who use screen readers.