July 30th, 2013

Sometimes people can be so helpless: Finding the owner of a Web page

Internal to Microsoft are thousands of Web sites. This is a story about one of them.

On an internal discussion list, somebody asked

We just created a new Flurb. Does anyone know how to get listed on http://internalsite/newflurbs?

I hadn’t heard of that site before, but I checked it out. Neat, it’s basically a blog which announces new Flurbs. I can see how somebody would want their Flurb to be listed there. I also saw lots of pieces of information on the page which the person appears not to have noticed. I replied,

Um, how about the Email link in the navigation bar? Or did you try that and it didn’t work?

Also, each entry has the same name at the bottom. You could try contacting that person.

Just giving you some ideas on problem-solving techniques.

Pre-emptive snarky comment: “Hey, Raymond, where’s your contact link?” I was forced to disable the contact link some time ago because it was being used primarily to send spam. Finding my email address is left as an exercise. (It’s not hard.)

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Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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