Matt Clarke noticed today that IBM have "fixed" their site. I'm not impressed with the way they solved the empty search box. Try pressing the search button at top of this page without typing in the search box. Notice that the form is submitted and then told to go back a page. This is what us Domino developers were doing in '97 when JavaScript was even less well-known than it is now.

Looking at the nerdy plates people in America have on their cars I thought of some nerdy ones for British Domino developers. How about R5 CLP or R5 NSF? Hey, it's Friday. If anybody fancies a friday-challenge have a go at writing a regular expression to validate a British car registration (pre-2001).

To me, the measure of this site's success is that it's ranked third by Google in their Notes Development directory. Only got DominoCafe to beat now. Shouldn't be too hard.

Google's Page Rank is based on the Open Directory Project. The beauty of this directory being that you can't buy your way in there. I'm honoured to be listed at the top of their Notes Development directory and with a gold star too. I'm also listed in the JavaScript directory. I dread to think what a true web-developer must think when they arrive here looking for JavaScripts - "Domino, what's that?"

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Some messages of thanks:

To NotesTips' Mike for pointing out that yesterday's ~;o) emoticon (mental note: must stop using them so much!) looked a lot like my namesake from the Tweenies.

To Jason Collier of the Domino SiteAtlas for pointing that I should practice what I preach and do something about this. Not that you can do any harm... I don't see what all the fuss is with the $DefaultNav "issue". If you design your apps properly it shouldn't be an issue.

To David Frahm for pointing me to Microsoft's SharePoint technology. Lotus beware, they can support a huge 75 users ;-) Damn, there's another one.

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I feel like an accessory to a crime now. You guys had to go and prove a point by creating Anonymous documents on IBM's site yesterday didn't you ~:o)

Is this really hacking though? I have no idea. There is an interesting article I found that might make it clearer. All I know is I don't really want to go and upset a company the size of IBM!

Talking of hacking. There's a strange side-effect of the method I used in my latest article, as discovered by Kurt Denolf. My surprise soon turned to shock...

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Today seems to be a case of Small-World Scenario.

Vedant Kulshreshtha works in the London office of Merrill Lynch where I used to work. He mailed my today about an amusing error on the IBM AlphaWorks site. Go to their front page and hit the search button at the top without entering any query. You get (as of writing this) an "Agent Done" message. Play with the parameters in the URL and have some fun. Vedant seems to think IBM are "expected to built[sic] websites that serve as a benchmark and are an inspiration". Wishful thinking Vedant.

Update: Apparently they haven't even taken the basic security measures. You can access the $DefaultNav element and get to the Search Scope view, from where you can create new "Scopes". Obviously I don't condone this kind of behaviour and I leave out the name of the person who tried this first as I've never been sure if this counts as hacking or not...

Also today I got a mail from Scott Freeman thanking me for the site as he's currently learning Domino. Apparently his boss thinks he is a genius. Nothing strange there. Turns out that we went to the same school though. Now that is strange - not that many geniuses (genii ? see what I mean?) leave that school.

Another mail today was from Warren Muckell who happens to work in an office just round the corner from my flat. He's had a great idea for a simple way to create bar charts using a fairly basic view. The end result is something similar to this but sans JavaScript. May well end up as an article of sorts. So I thank him in advance...

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In this month's Domino "Power" magazine Andrew Stuart issues a belated acknowledgement of source. In it he refers to my site as a weblog. This got me worried. It's not a weblog. It's a site that happens to have a weblog as its homepage. I hope you guys aren't forgetting that I also spend time writing articles. A new one was published yesterday. Are people still reading them? Feedback has been slow on my most recent efforts.

Is it me or does anybody else find SearchDomino.com extremely hard to use? For instance, where would you expect to find my site's listing among the Best Web Links section? HTML? XML? Nope - LotusScript! To make it worse they describe the site as "code snippets". Snippets!? They also say I cover WAP, COM and CORBA. Do I? Not to my knowledge. I mailed them a week ago and there has been no reply or change. To coin an Americanism - that site sucks.

Having a generic title like Codestore almost guarantees you won't be the only one out there. I found this software called codestore a while ago and was impressed by how simply useful it was. Another similar example was mailed to me today by my mate Matt Clarke. Dev Pad is a little more advanced though... both are freeware.

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