LinLog

I spent some time looking through some old links the other day. I imported all my bookmarks into Lnto (which I really need to release one of these days) and I was browsing through some of the ones that I've had hanging around forever. Some of them date back to when I was in college.

Turns out quite a few of them were dead. Some of these were not unexpected. There were a few links to cjb.net, members.tripod.com, and suchlike sites that are now defunct. There were also several links to university web pages, many presumably belonging to students who have long since graduated.

Several of them were also domains that had changed hands. Most were parked and covered with ads. One was an anime fan site that now redirects to the official site of the distributor.

The most interesting one was a Final Fantasy fan site that is now an "escort service" site. Out of curiosity, I looked the site up in the Wayback Machine and found that this is actually a fairly recent development. Apparently the fan site was in existence until 2009. In 2010, the archived copies are just mostly empty directory listings. These continue into 2011, and then there's one copy that appears to be a broken and/or spammy blog. There are no archived pages from 2012, and then in 2013, there's a GoDaddy parked domain page in June, followed by the escort service site in July.

It's strange how the web works. Despite the talk about how digital content lasts forever and how it's virtually impossible to completely delete anything you put online, the truth is that content on the web is surprisingly ephemeral. Sites regularly disappear with no explanation; content gets modified with no indication whatsoever to readers; sites get reorganized, breaking every external link and just redirecting them to the front page. It's a wonder people manage to find anything at all!

This has been on my mind anyway, since I've been meaning to get back to refactoring LnBlog (which is a topic for another post). As part of that, I was going to work on a nicer URL structure. That piece is easy, but I'm committed to keeping all the old links valid. That's less easy, but not unmanageable. (It's actually further complicated by the fact that I'm considering moving off of subdomains so that )

The thing is, I've owned this domain for nearly ten years and URLs are something I never really put a great deal of thought into. But it seems obvious that I need to start thinking seriously about the best way to manage them. I want the content on my site to have true permalinks - I want the college kids who bookmark a blog entry today to still be able to visit that link when their kids are in college.

This will require some planning and future-proofing. And I'm not just about the URLs themselves - those are the easy part - but conventions for different types of content, what constitutes "permanent" content, and how I'm going to maintain all this stuff across potentially many changes in hosting and underlying technology. If I'm going to have this site until I die (and that is the plan), I'm eventually going to have an awful lot of content, and it would pay to have a plan for how to deal with that.

So a couple of weeks ago I bought myself a new Ultrabook - a Lenovo IdeaPad U310. I've been used to using a MacBook Pro for work and I wanted something with a similar form-factor, but that didn't cost $1300, have an unnecessarily weird keyboard, and run OSX. The IdeaPaf U310 was fairly cheap and seemed like it would fit the bill.

For the most part, I'm pretty happy with it so far. I even like Windows 8.1 well enough (after installing Classic Start Menu, that is). There are only two parts that I'm not crazy about:

1. The viewing angle of the screen is pretty limited.
2. The trackpad is harder to use than on a Mac.

While there's obviously not much to be done about the first complaint, I figured the second one could be remedied in software.

Background

Now, the actual problem here is not with the physical trackpad - that works well enough. It's with the click handling. If you're not familiar with a MacBook trackpad, it has no "buttons" as you customarily see on PC trackpads. Rather, you can just press down (as opposed to "tapping") on the trackpad with one finger to "click" - the pad actually gets depressed a bit and makes an audible clicking sound. To do a right-click (or command-click in Mac speak), you just press down with two fingers. It's a little unintuitive at first, but you get used to it and it works pretty well.

The Lenovo IdeaPad, however, doesn't quite do that. It still uses the same "press to click" mechanism, and you can still press with two fingers to double-click. However, it also has two "virtual buttons" at the bottom of the track pad. There's just a small vertical line, about half an inch long, at the bottom-center of the track pad that. You press on the left of that line to left-click and on the right of it to right-click. Even simpler than the Mac. And, in fact, when using a Mac I'd often wished it had something like that.

Problem is, that doesn't actually work out so well all the time. Because there's no tactile feedback as to whether your finger is over the left-click or right click button, it's very easy to accidentally click the wrong one. This is especially the case if you're using the laptop on your lap and so end up with your hand coming at the trackpad from one side.

The Fix

So my solution to this was to try and change the behavior to work like a Mac - that is, make both virtual buttons left-click and use two fingers to right-click. Seems simple enough, but the Synaptics trackpad software that came with the laptop - which is actually quite good and contains a surprising number of options - doesn't support that. The only option it has for the primary buttons is to swap them, which doesn't help.

However, I did find a solution that uses Synaptics in conjunction with X-Mouse Button Control, a little third-party freeware app that lets you remap mouse buttons if various sophisticated ways.

1. In the Synaptics settings, I configured the "Two-Finger Click" action to "Middle Click". (It doesn't have to be "Middle Click" in particular, just something other than right-click that X-Mouse can recognize.)
2. I installed X-Mouse and configured it to set the "Right Button" action to "Left Click" and the "Middle Button" action to "Right Click".

So far this configuration is working pretty well. It's not ideal perfect - two-finger clicking on the left-click button doesn't trigger a right click. However, it does prevent those accidental right-clicks, which is what was really bothering me.