About com.devpal.com…

This is a place for information about those interesting technical tidbits that we encounter as we wander through the Internet, presented through a weblog format to you.

Why com.devpal.com?

For decades, as I would encounter interesting content, I’d typically store the URLs… and then promptly forget that I found it. Later, whenever the topic came up again, I found myself searching for the content again. Of course, as certain search engine(s) have expanded the collective datastore, the amount of indexing and advertising seems to have escalated so much that it has become more difficult to find the meaningful content.

Various advances have made the accumulation of URLs more convenient, like bookmarking utilities. For a time, it seemed as if bookmarking would be the ubiquitous solution that people were looking for… but it wasn’t. Bookmarking did not improve the situation after all: instead, it further increased all of the raw content that would have to be sorted through, and sometimes even searched, to get the desired results. So, back to search tools once again.

There were even early attempts at search aggregators, initially as rich clients that would submit search requests to multiple search engines in some sort of sequential or parallel fashion. And some aggregators even came in the form of Web-based applications. But there was still a lot of confusion over the lack of relevancy to the results.

Then we came up with social media platforms to somehow improve information flow between people of diverse interests. And this further increased the bulk of content that may (or may not) have sufficient meaning and utility for current endeavors. So, having a better way of handling, categorizing, and making convenient access for this potentially useful content has become even more crucial.

So, years ago, when I was mulling how to position interesting content as blog posts for Javamancy (the Weblog), I kept wondering what to do about the more technical content that I would frequently encounter. I even briefly toyed with idea of just placing the URLs and other content on Javamancy itself. But, of course, while Javamancy is a nice place to express those day-in-the-life meanderings of an adventuring technologist, frequently materials would be encountered that would provide a deep dive in content or knowledge base that, while fascinating, would fall far from the notion of light entertainment and be seated deeply in the realm of the possibly arcane… or at least “too-techie”.

Hence, com.devpal.com.