Blog Not Needed

I’ve been getting a small trickling of emails asking me to add their link to Diysearch. This is not a new phenomonon, that has been happening since day one.

And my typical, canned response has been to refer the particular individual to the create account page and tell them they can add links themselves.

So, here’s the deal. We cannot add links to the site. There are philosophical as well as technical problems with this. The philosophy is actually tied to the technical in that every link in the database has an owner. An owner is a registered user. If I were to add your link, then I would own that link entry in the database, and you (who actually “owns” the URL) would have no way of making changes.

The philosophy being that because this is a DIY effort, ownership must be made very clear, and control must be in the hands of the owners. I know its mostly a symbolic reference, in a philosophical sense, but in a technical sense the relationship is at the very core of the system. The User ID (the number assigned to your account when you create one) is then used to associate everything you do in the system. No, this is NOT to watch you, in fact, we have almost no reporting mechanisms in place to do extensive reporting (aside from what Google Analytics gives us). The relationship is for your benefit, in that it allows you to add your links, multiple links, it enables you to have a universal login to the blogs and other systems coming on line, it will play a key role in the new DiyShare system for the rating/ranking/commenting sub-systems.

So, the long and short of it is that please don’t ask us to add links to the system for you. I mean, its not like we are jerks, but I wrote the system to enable you, the user, the controls to do just that.

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