MovableBlog: Asides: May 2003
May 31, 2003
Don Park thinks the actual content of CSS Zen Garden sucks 
He's not kidding. Another thing: it disables keyboard access to the File, Edit, Go, Bookmarks and Help menus in Firebird by assigning 'f', 'e', 'g', 'b' and 'h' keys using accesskey. That's a whopping 5 out of 7. Another triumph of style over usability. [#]
ESPN 'optimized' for IE? Eric wonders where ESPN's commitment to standards went. [#]
Your Resume in XML Mid-June, when my resume needs updating, I'll be marking it up. [#]
Intro to the Web Services Architecture Working Group [#]
When did linking begin? Yeah, but when did metadata begin? Same time as when linking began? [#]
Brad Choate wonders if Microsoft should just dump IE for a Gecko-based browser [#]
Create a print store in Movable Type Yeah yeah, he spells it Moveable Type. It's scary, though, how good his photos are. I'd nominate him for a Spotlight Site (top right corner of the MT site), that is, if his sidebar photos weren't powered by Greymatter. Update: Photodude reports that he's working on a switch to MT for that part of the site. [#]
May 30, 2003
Electronic voting in Ireland encounters criticism As a political science degree holder, I oppose all measures that introduce electronic voting. Seriously. Canada's system works nicely: place an X next to your candidate of choice, on a piece of paper, which gets counted by elections officials, supervised by scrutineers (y'know, people) from each party. [#]
Anil Dash on blogs in business [#]
a summary, well after-the-fact, of the Emerging Technology Conference [#]
Photodude: Ted Turner doesn't deserve sympathy Links to Ted Turner's comments about media conglomerization (is that even a real word?) have gotten some links without comments from Zeldman and Kottke. Photodude has criticized Turner before. [#]
Bray: CSS should be like rocket science Also interesting is his assertion that Mozilla is on the rise. True enough, as my stats show almost half (!) use Mozilla. But! Weblog readers (especially technology-related weblog readers) are—almost by definition—more technically-inclined than your average bear, and are therefore more inclined to experiment with browsers alternative to IE. [#]
LaughingMeme on counting RSS subscribers [#]
Figuring how to determine RSS subscribers It doesn't matter how many so much as who. [#]
Weblog Standards? Standards schmandards. I just copy what the big boys (and rarely, girls) do. Seriously. Ask anybody. [#]
Forms, usability, [accessability] and the W3C DOM Up until now, I've only heard good about IE 5/Mac. Anyway, looks like something worth experimenting for other platforms. [#]
cool implementation of mouseover effect in weblog posts It works nicely in Firebird 0.6 and Opera 7. IE users need not bother. [#]
Dave Winer: What makes a weblog a weblog? Pretty good summary of what a weblog looks like. I have some quibbles (as I do with everything) but that's for later. [#]
May 29, 2003
Pinder on the MS/AOL settlement Netscape declared dead (again). MozillaZine covers the, uh, coverage. [#]
May 27 build of Thunderbird is pretty The toolbar icons are nice, but the other icons (e.g. when Alt-Tabbing) still need work. It accepted my old profile, however, which is good news. [#]
May 28, 2003
'nicknames' for Microsoft What?! No "MicroSloth"? [#]
May 26, 2003
winterspeak tackles iTunes from economic perspective Too bad IANAMU (I am not a Mac user). [#]
Asides 'shareholders' get screwed Blogshares thinks that Asides is an alternative URL of the main site. Hopefully the sharesholders (I sold my shares a long time ago) got compensated. [#]
blogs hide bad information, show the good With neato flowcharts, comparing blogs to discussion groups. [#]
Have you changed your MT RSS Feed yet? Yup. It's funny though, I can (but would rather not) point out at least two RSS nerds who don't have full entries in their feeds. Zeldman strikes a nice middle ground with his feed: informative excerpts. [#]
Rounded CSS Tabs Gecko browsers only. Uses Netscape CSS Extensions. [#]
May 25, 2003
The RSS Feed Game Hammersley suggests a league table. [#]
Jeff investigates RSS Categories A flamewar regarding Trackback ensues on RSS-Dev. [#]
Why Dave Pollard blogs Hopefully everybody knows why they're blogging. [#]
Domain Purity Test movableblog.com (at this writing) is 100% pure, richarderiksson.com 88%, vancouverwebloggers.com 56% and...not enough data to get a percentage for chinaweblog.com? [#]
Goodbye to the A element's NAME attribute [#]
Kottke: First good look at TypePad Good discussion in the comments area. Be sure to check Anil's comment. Note to mathowie though: adjusting for inflation, the Model T (at least the first one) would also cost in the tens of thousands of dollars today. [#]
May 24, 2003
Photodude on spam and 'challenge' emails As is his wont, he elaborates in the comments. [#]
Open Books Project Mmm, free books. Creating Applications with Mozilla looks most interesting to me. [#]
When Do Web Services Make Sense? Goes into the reasons reasons for and against deploying a web service, but doesn't adequately justify them. [#]
May 23, 2003
MeTa poster fails to carefully read comment to a post See mathowie embarrass the poster, the poster persist, then admit to finally reading the comment in question. To misquote Dave on this one: people don't click before they write. [#]
Timothy Appnel: Web Services, Weblogs and the Future Links to most of the better posts involved in the current web services debate. Argues that RSS over HTTP is good enough for weblogs. [#]
Add 'entry' attribute to MTInclude tag An alternative to David Raynes' MTEntry plugin. [#]
Official list of DTD's Even for HTML 2.0! This is good, because, mea culpa, I used to copy & paste from other valid sites. [#]
MT-Textile Reloaded Okay, bad joke. I'll wait for the final version before installing, but Brad's looking for testers. [#]
Save entry instead of rebuilding after editing a comment in MT Good tip. For your added pleasure, see me nit-pick the hell out of it while essentially agreeing. [#]
May 22, 2003
Permalink free associations In reference to MT, yes, that's true of the default. But you can have pretty much any URL structure you want for permalinks using the Archive File Templates. dive into mark, an MT-powered site, uses a combination of date and post title in the URL, and it seems to be an emerging standard (at least for MT weblogs that want a custom URL structure). [#]
Zeldman: the power of PNG Duuuude! [#]
May 21, 2003
Use server side includes to differentiate staging server from the official site [#]
TypePad screenshots [this is good] [#]
Steal These Buttons MetaFilter Thread Friend Bill Zeller gets not only a MetaFilter link, but linked at Anil's links. His hits must be going through the roof. [#]
Introduction to XUL All very good, but this looks as if it's just going to be another poorly implemented technology that will do nothing but waste my time. Oh wait. [#]
Review of May 6th XHTML 2.0 Draft Not written by Mark Pilgrim, but there's a perfectly good explanation for that. [#]
Weblog Search's fatal flaw: Google API keys Why not get users to use their own API keys? They only have to input it once, then save it in a cookie. That way Dave doesn't even need to store them himself. (Flaw of that: who wants to get an API key just to search a weblog? Not me.) [#]
Simon Willison redesigns parts of jwz in CSS Takes on IE5's CSS bugs. [#]
TBL: Web services and Semantic Web are compatible [#]
Behind the scenes at Daypop [#]
May 20, 2003
Button Maker (user interface to Bill Zeller's 80x15 button application) [#]
David Davies wonders about using 'site:' in 'Weblog Search' [#]
Sam Ruby enters 'Weblog Search' fray Will probably end up being the de facto comments page for Dave's post. [#]
Google Myths Google believes that the Semantic Web won't happen, that crawling 100% of the web is a bad idea, and P2P web search solves the wrong problem, so they're not focussing on any of these. [#]
The Scope Not to be confused with Scope mouthwash. Also, if Trackback could do this then, well, that'd be cool. [#]
TypePad looking for feedback She may already have enough people to help out by now. Or not, give her a shout. My two-minute thought process: 'pick me pick me pick me!' Then, 'oh wait, forgot about [various commitments], plus I'm not in her target demographic'. Then, 'Phew, one less thing to commit to.' Good on her though for targetting a more varied audience than MT nerds like me. [#]
Dave Winer introduces Weblog Search I'd be interested to see how this compares to Daypop et al, as well as MT's internal search function through mt-search.cgi. [#]
May 19, 2003
Papers by Googlers As if you didn't have enough to read. [#]
Ten Tips for a Firmer, Slimmer, Sexier Weblog! An oldie but goodie. Tip #3 strikes me as the best, followed by #8 and #10. [#]
Card-Based Classification Evaluation 'OK. Computer off, pens out.' [#]
Simon Willison redesigns part of Scripting.com in CSS [#]
Register article on .org domain registry vanishing is full of crap And Andrew Orlowski didn't write the article. What gives? [#]
Bill Zeller is dynamically creating 80 x 15 buttons in PNG format with PHP Source code is available. [#]
Summer XML-related conferences Evidently SVG Open, which takes place here in Vancouver, doesn't qualify as a summer XML-related conference. [#]
Difference between CSS rules, properties and selectors Part one of Simon Willison's CSS tutorial series. [#]
How Users Participate in Building Google By creating links to sites with relevant text to websites Google doesn't know about yet, natch. [#]
links to Firebird 0.6 reviews Mine is forthcoming. [#]
Google's Gaffe Or, Why HTTP is Better Than SOAP [#]
May 18, 2003
SharpReader wishlist and coming attractions I would add to that wishlist something like 'delete all read items' to both the individual feeds and the entire subscribed feeds list. [#]
Matrix Sequel Has Hacker Cred If one more person IMs me this, I'm going to lose it! (Welcome to those surfing in, looking for people who linked to this story.) [#]
80 x 15 Buttons for Everything Imaginable Yes, I submitted my own, but I had to convert it to GIF. They really need to work on the error messages. alt text can only be an average of 8 letters per word? Say what? [#]
Simple Character Entity Reference Very useful for those who preach and practice XHTML validation. [#]
Promoting your Weblog Three big things that will make your weblog popular: good writing; the post's title with strong, valuable headline words in the title tags (for individual entries if your host allows them), and time. If your weblog is good, the readers will come. [#]
Brad Choate's Mozilla Resources I must have blogged this at some point, but it was in my bookmarks, and now it is not. [#]
Trackback is only part of the answer RSS feeds for individual posts would go a long way in tracking conversations, argues David Davies. [#]
Speaking English to Silicon sucks Power-users (and non-power-users) speak in keywords when searching. [#]
Refolding the Instructions [#]
[x] as craft Replace [x] for something programming- or hacking-related. [#]
Why Markup Languages Matter Or, Why XML in Particular Matters. [#]
Why Scripting Languages Matter Quotes the juicy parts of Hackers and Painters so that I don't have to read it all (but of course, eventually will). [#]
Convert dates to UTC in MT Because MT doesn't handle Daylight Saving Time properly. Six Apart is addressing the problem. [#]
May 17, 2003
Building a Metadata-Based Website A link-rich introduction to metadata, how to incorporate it in the back-end of a website, and how this not only benefits your company but your customers as well. [#]
adot reviews RSS search sites Lots of promise, room for improvement. [#]
Ev on MetaWeblog and Blogger API [#]
Syndirella fork by Simon Fell Adds three features to the Dmitry Jemerov's news aggregator, including xhtml:body and gzip/deflate compression support, and plugins. [#]
Tipping Point for Blogs Compares The Tipping Point to Shirky's Power Law, and comes to conclusions about the tipping point of his blog, and blogging in general. [#]
May 16, 2003
Jason Fried is impressed with MT But not impressed enough, since he's developing his own blog system. He's also utterly ambivalent about Apple (that's sarcasm, people). [#]
Decompress tar.gz and .tar files I always look it up in Usenet when having to do it in Unix. This is a good little tutorial. [#]
Email is uncool Yeah, but I prefer it, but that's only because of having grown up with it, not having done much IRCing in my youth. [#]
Are You Ready for Social Software? It took me a while to figure out what she was doing, but a friend of mine uses the cc: field as a roundabout way to introduce people to me (or me to people) when she emails them. There's an unfortunate amount of typos in that link though. And he calls Dave Winer a 'cyber-culture vulture'. Oh no he di'int! [#]
Hierarchical menus with CSS Evidently only works in Gecko-based browsers, Opera and Safari. And farts in IE's general direction. [#]
Lessig bets on 18-year olds to reduce spamming [#]
Semantic Business Model This is probably a good idea, except by looking at the URL, it doesn't tell you what it is. [#]
Rules Based Design Why design matters. Why CSS matters to web design. [#]
Related Entries Revisited As interesting as that might be, this won't be implemented here. Well, not until some of the PHP and plugin glue that holds this site together solidifies. [#]
Stewart Butterfield Interview about Game Neverending The money-is-no-object games he wants at the end are funny, except for the fact that, in the case of the library game, security guards shoo library patrons (what 'customers' are called in actual libraries) out the door at closing time, not janitors. [#]
Future version of MT make CSS sharing easier Just don't steal other people's CSS. [#]
Context is king when writing headlines People need to think in the language of 'keyword', when writing headlines as well as when searching. With the introduction Google, the #1 reason people can't find something is because they're using the wrong keywords. [#]
Most people in the world are not software connoisseurs Just make it work. (Not that there's anything wrong with elegance.) [#]
CSS tabs with Submenus So far the best implementation of CSS tabs. Goes to show that blogs are good places for designers to experiment. [#]
Email is the serial killer app But email still sucks, says Shirky, because it's ugly. Discusses weblogs, which has the opposite problem: they're too pretty. [#]
CDF discussion at intertwingly.net The ball, as it were, gets rolling. [#]
CDF template for Movable Type Mark is light years ahead of the rest! [#]
What is CDF? Evidently makes your copy of IE into a newsreader. Just like that. [#]
SharpReader 0.9.0.2 has been released Cool new features, like finding out who else blogged the entry, and visiting the page if there's no description. (If only there was a way to do that for the feeds that only provide a brief excerpt.) [#]
Dave Seidel wants XML processing in MT A good idea, but hard to implement I suspect. Then again, this is exactly the kind of challenge MT plugin developers crave. [#]
Blogging Sucks For Non-A-Listers Yes, A-Listers have built-in audiences, but they are also built-up audiences. There are also Trackback variants being developed. [#]
In The Matrix, geeks save the world That doesn't explain why my non-geek friends like it though. Or maybe they're just geeks-of-a-kind. [#]
Dave Hyatt has MT woes Anil reveals in the comments not only that the CSS templates will be fixed up, and that Mena uses Safari, so Safari users will be looked after. [#]
Weblogs often don't appear in top results in Google The latest news stories don't fare well in Google results. As a hypothesis, adding more keywords, and searching for geekier things, of course, would see more weblogs in the top 10. [#]
May 15, 2003
Boxes and Arrows: Six Tips for Improving Your Design Documentation Despite a small grammatical nitpick, a consice introduction to writing effective documentation. [#]
