dive into mark

Other, non-Hixie-related improvements around here:

1. An about page, which is wholly unremarkable except for the fact that it is generated on the fly from my FOAF profile by this Python script and rdflib, an RDF library for Python. When people rave (or rant, or both) about the Semantic Web, this is what they’re talking about. RDF is a way of making assertions, using URIs instead of words; my script just takes those assertions and translates them into plain English (marked up as HTML). I still have serious doubts that RDF can or even should gain widespread acceptance (especially given its current XML serialization, which sucks), but I don’t let that stop me from tinkering.

2. My accessibility statement now lists all the acronyms and abbreviations I use throughout the site. I have taken great pains to mark up my acronyms, but the expansion information is only available to visual browsers (generally through a tooltip which pops up when you hover your cursor over the acronym). None of the current generation of voice browsers, screen readers, or text-only browsers offer any options for viewing acronym expansions. To keep all that markup from going to waste, I wrote a script that scrapes my own archives looking for acronyms, and aggregates the results.

   I can’t believe I just used the phrase to keep all that markup from going to waste in a sentence.

3. Taking a page from php.net’s incredible URL-based search engine, this site now uses a custom 404 error script to do some funky stuff. For example, if you type diveintomark.org/python, instead of getting a 404 page not found error, you will be redirected to the Python category archives, and similarly for all other categories. It even matches partial results, so diveintomark.org/30 redirects to the original 30 days to a more accessible weblog series.

   You can also do month names, like diveintomark.org/june to go to the June archives. (In June 2003 this will take you to the June 2003 archives instead.) Or project names, like diveintomark.org/pygoogle to go to the PyGoogle project page. diveintomark.org/find and diveintomark.org/search take you to the site search. These are mostly for my benefit, so I can save a few keystrokes while digging around for old posts. But anyone is welcome to use them, or suggest other helpful expansions. (I also added similar shortcuts on Dive Into Accessibility; diveintoaccessibility.org/toc takes you to the table of contents; diveintoaccessibility.org/1 takes you to day 1, and so forth.)

4. I added several people to my recommended list (available on my home page). This brings the public list in sync with my private subscription list of sites that I read through my homegrown news aggregator. I also discovered, and added, about half a dozen interesting new people based on suggestions from my new social network tool, Recommended Reading, which I mentioned a few days ago.

5. Album pages in my photo gallery now have clickable titles beneath each picture. Some albums have better titles than others. My skydiving pictures have great titles. You did see my skydiving pictures while I was out, didn’t you? Can’t imagine how you missed them, given the splash screen I had on my home page. Oh, you must be one of those people who reads my site entirely in your news aggregator. You know, so you don’t ever miss anything. Silly rabbit.

6. My site statistics page now tracks how much bandwidth I’m saving now that all major desktop news aggregators support conditional GET, which is a way for web clients to be more intelligent and not re-download pages that haven’t changed. Based on statistics gathered on October 31, during which I updated repeatedly throughout the day, conditional GET support cuts down my RSS-related traffic by about 40%.

7. I am no longer styling my links; they will display with the default colors you’ve set in your browser. This follows a complaint from a reader who had configured his browser to never underline links, but had not overridden my colors, thus making my links virtually impossible to find. I hope to eventually achieve web design nirvana, a state in which, if anyone can’t read my site, it’s their own damn fault.

There are some other small Secret Gardens stuffed in various obscure corners. Though I suppose I’ve always known the concept, I take the name from Mark Iron’s excellent Patterns for Personal Web Sites, which you should read immediately. Although it was written long before weblog got started on its long arduous path towards being added to the Oxford English Dictionary, much of it applies to weblogs. In fact, it may help to explain why weblogs (somewhat accidentally to be sure) took off where previous personal web site genres had failed. New content daily helps immensely, because it Rewards Return Visitors by creating a Living Site. You also generally get Freshness Dates, Unchanging URLs, and Consistent Format for free. And, to varying degrees, Guessable URLs. Radio and Manila are excellent about producing guessable URLs; Blogger is mediocre; Movable Type can be made to do whatever you like, but it’s non-obvious for beginners to configure and the default configuration — permalinks by entry ID — sucks. Luckily, the excellent Movable Type documentation shows you how to configure your permalink URLs for your monthly, weekly, daily, individual, or category archives.