It’s not often that I can exactly say how I stumbled across a particular site or a webpage that interests me. Most of the kewl links that you see here are like that, their history forgotten the instant I found them interesting. But it’s often very interesting in itself to know how I stumbled on some of them, for a geneology of interesting things will lead me to a place which points me to interesting things often – and that is a very good thing to know.

Off-topic: The XML specification by the W3C aims to make what I described above easier. Although it has not been implemented yet, the Xlink specification contains a feature known as back-links or bi-directional links – every hyperlink is “aware” about its referers, so when you ask a page to translate how exactly you came to be there, it’ll tell you that. It’s much more complicated than a back-button because information can be passed both ways through such a hyperlink whereas now it just moves forward. It’s one of the things in the spec that might change “browsing” the net forever.

Well, all that was because I stumbled on a most interesting story today in a very roundabout manner. You would have to be dead to not know that the Alfonso Cuarón directed Potter movie – The Prisoner of Azkaban is to very shortly hit the big screen. Cuarón also directed another movie called the Little Princess, and it was largely because of it that he was chosen for this one. And that is how I stumbled upon A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

If you like Anne of the Green Gables by L.M Montgomery, you’ll like this book. It’s an adorable fairy tale that is written so wonderfully that you’ll empathize with Sara – a little princess who goes from riches to rags and back – so much that the book will keep you mesmerized. I loved this.

You can read A Little Princess online thanks to the Electronic Text Center of the Univeristy of Virginia Library.