Aaron Hillel Swartz

Name: Building for Search Engines: Following REST
Author: Aaron Hillel Swartz

Building for Search Engines: Following REST (2013)

Summary

“Building for Search Engines: Following REST”, published in 2013, is a work by Aaron Hillel Swartz. It explores elements such as Web, server and blog.

Quotes from Building for Search Engines: Following REST (Aaron Hillel Swartz)

Aaron Hillel Swartz, Building for Search Engines: Following REST (2013)

“ Sweeping is fun at first—it gives you a little time to get lost in thought about your web application while you’re doing an ostensibly-useful repetitive-motion activity—but soon you grow tired of it. But liberal guilt and those Barbara Ehrenreich articles you read make you resistant to hiring a maid. So instead of importing a hard-up girl from a foreign country to do your housework, you hire a robot. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Aaron Hillel Swartz, Building for Search Engines: Following REST (2013)

“ You make sure the place is set up so that the robot can do its job without doing any real damage.
It’s exactly the same on the Web. (Except without the dust, crumbs, Jetsons, maids, tire treads, vases, coins, or blinds.) Robots (largely from search engines, but others come from spammers, offline readers, and who knows what else) are always crawling your site, leaving no nook or cranny unexplored, vacuuming up anything they can find. And unlike the household variety, you cannot simply unplug them—you really have to be sure to keep things clean. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Aaron Hillel Swartz, Building for Search Engines: Following REST (2013)

“ But, of course, if you do bad things like use session cookies and ignore the rules about GET and POST, the server cache will just screw everything up. (Notice that only GETs can be cached; you wouldn’t want to cache the result of something like adding a new blog post or the next blog post would never get added!)
GET and POST are, of course, part of the next piece of architecture, which Fielding calls “Uniform Interfaces.” Every web app works the same basic way: there are a series of URLs which you perform methods on. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Aaron Hillel Swartz, Building for Search Engines: Following REST (2013)

“ Now here’s the thing about robots (and some maids, for that matter) : it’s not at all clear to them what is trash and what is valuable. They (the robots) wander around your house trying to suck things up, but on their way they might leave tire-treads on your manuscript, knock over your priceless vase, or slurp up your collection of antique coins. And sometimes it gets caught on the pull-cord for the blinds, causing the robot to go in circles while pulling the shutters open. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Aaron Hillel Swartz, Building for Search Engines: Following REST (2013)

“ All do it for the same basic reason: they’re software for building Web apps that want to hide the Web from you. They want to make it so that you just write some software normally and it magically becomes a web app, without you having to do any of the work of thinking up URLs or following REST. Well, you may get an application you can use through a browser out of it, but you won’t get a web app. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Aaron Hillel Swartz, Building for Search Engines: Following REST (2013)

“ Instead of having each client tie up part of a particular server for as long as their conversation lasts, stateless conversations get wrapped up very quickly and can be handled by any old server, since they don’t need to know any history.
Some bad web apps try to avoid the Web’s stateless nature. The most common way is thru session cookies. Now cookies certainly have their uses. Just like when you call your bank on the phone and they ask you for your account number so they can pull up your file, cookies can allow servers to build pages customized just for you. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Aaron Hillel Swartz, Building for Search Engines: Following REST (2013)

“ Similarly, servers can run caches. Instead of browsers visiting the server directly, they hit a server cache (technically known as a reverse proxy) that checks to see if it already has a copy of the page and, if so, serves it, but otherwise asks the real server for it. If you build your web app to follow REST, you can often make your site much, much faster just by sticking a nice server cache (like Polipo) in front of it. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Aaron Hillel Swartz, Building for Search Engines: Following REST (2013)

“ Every time you request an old news story, it uses up electricity, and moves the heads around on disk drives, and adds a line to the server’s log, and puts a note in your NSA file, and so on. Which is all true, but pretty obviously not the sort of thing we had in mind, so let’s not mention it again. (Please, NSA?) )
The end result is pretty clear. It’s fine if Google goes and reads old news stories, but it’s not OK if it goes around posting to your blog. ”

Aaron Hillel Swartz

Summary

Quotes from Building for Search Engines: Following REST (Aaron Hillel Swartz)

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