- David Gianatasio: I Followed You Through a Shopping Mall (a romantic fable). [via Michael]
- The Baen Free Library. Great for, um, insomniacs. [via Kellan]
- Ian Davis: 7 Habits of an Anti-Blogger.
- Kendall Clark: At Microsoft’s Mercy.
I honestly don’t see why they bother with WordML; what is the point of storing data in XML if the schema is so hideous and proprietary than no one can use it without proprietary API support?
- MS-Word is {Not} a document exchange format. Apparently, neither is WordML.
- Buzzword Bingo! Does someone know of a version that doesn’t require Javascript? I want to combine it with blog poetry. Hey, here’s one. Thanks, Eric.
- John Gruber: Command Line Fun for OS X.
- Joe Gregorio: XHTML + XForms + XLink = Xanadu.
And that’s not a good thing.
- Simon Willison: Supporting Conditional GET in PHP.
- Sell sell sell! BlogShares is going live in 7 days. All your cash reserves will be carried over, but all your stock holdings will be reset. This is the stuff market crashes are made of. Sell sell sell! (I just sold all my holdings in
dive into mark
after hitting Daypop and Blogdex, and made a killing.) - Slate: Monica the Chaperone. Yes, FOX will soon be airing a dating show hosted by Monica Lewinsky. I have long believed that FOX is simply biding their time, waiting until they can legally televise live public executions.
- Excuse me, I just noticed that
Slate
is nowMSN Slate
. Boy, that just rolls right off your tongue likeGNU/Linux
, doesn’t it? I was a regular reader of Slate in their early days, back beforewww.slate.comredirected toslate.msn.com. Back when you could actually pay them money to subscribe for a year ($20 I believe), and get emailed stuff, and get a free umbrella that saidwww.slate.comon it. Which I did, and I got, and I still have. I’m so behind the times; even my umbrella is legacy. - Leslie Harpold: A Call to Action.
It just shows no matter how hard you try, your dignity is largely out of your control.
- Dan Benjamin: Now Available: Enkoder Form v5.0.
The Enkoder Form will encrypt your Email address and convert the result to a self evaluating JavaScript, hiding it from Email-harvesting robots which crawl the web looking for exposed addresses.
- Jeffrey Zeldman: Unsyndicate.
But most smokers would rather puff than inject nicotine, and most of us used to be as hungry to see a site as to read its words.
I just got off IRC with a bunch of people who each keep up with 300 sites via RSS. I’m happy to read your words in their native environment, but a simple change notification system would be nice. - Anil Dash: I work for Six Apart.
It’d be a dream job by anyone’s measure. That the realm we’re working in might actually turn out to be important makes it even better than a mere dream.
It’s important to have a job that makes a difference, boys… - Six Apart: TypePad Personal Publishing Service. Hosted Movable Type weblogs. The TypePad site looks pretty but doesn’t do anything useful yet. Stay tuned.
- CMSimple is a lightweight GPL-licensed content management system with a quasi-pornographic logo. What more could you ask for? Besides puppy pictures, of course.
- Dean Allen: Oliver and Hugo.
- Taylor McKnight: Steal these buttons! This is getting way out of control.
- Why don’t I know more about Twisted Python? *sigh*
- Paul Ford: Letter to Senator Santorum.
- Gareth Simpson: JTextile 1.0.
- Sam Ruby: RSS Namespace Proposal, RSS: It’s not just for syndication anymore, Ghosts of RSS past, Future of RSS, DC:Creator. It appears that the future of RSS is in good hands.
- Mark Nottingham: Let’s try this. Internet Draft of RSS 2.0.
- Phil Ringnalda: Getting the RSS 2.0 namespace right.
I think RSS 4.0 is still available (or maybe 5.0), but I doubt that very many people really have the stomach for it.
I propose that RSS 4.0 be represented entirely in whitespace. - Tim Bray: RSS Needs Fixing. No it doesn’t (at least not this part). RSS clients, on the other hand, could use a lot of work.
- Slashdot FAQ: My RSS Headline Reader Tells Me I Was Banned!
You have 2 options: First is to stop beating the crap out of our servers.
What’s the second option? - Dan Sugalski: Better blog distribution, part 1 — the assumptions. Followup discussion.
- You know what would be a cool feature in an RSS newsreader? Colored diffs of a post when it changes.
- You know what else would be cool? Newsreaders that updated their fucking subscription lists when I give them an HTTP Response Code 301 (
Permanent Redirect
). I serve 4000 permanent redirects a day in my/xml/directory alone. Which part ofpermanent
didn’t you understand? - Sam Ruby: HTTP 301.
- Bill Kearney: Bad RSS readers.
Before we bother with extending all this, let’s get the core stuff working first.
- Sterling Hughes: Isn’t it supposed to be getting easier?
XHTML and friends seem to sacrifice transparency for the sake of extensibility.
- Jeremy Zawodny: MySQL 4.x.
- Ian Hickson: Buzz: Hallucinogenic drugs?
In what world is MSIE 6.0 a standards supporting browser?
- Jonathon Delacour: Shishōsetsu and the myth of sincerity.
- Tantek Çelik: What to do with things to do.
Most things just need to be maintained, and it might help to make a list of all the things that demand maintenance (how much and how frequently) in your life. Some of those things should probably be pruned away.
[via Simon] - Dan Benjamin: Status. Unemployment is a full-time job. Been there, done that. Good luck.
- Joe Gregorio: RFC-822. Well, at least someone noticed my HTTP header joke.
- David Mertz: A Primer on Python Metaclass Programming. My brain hurts. [via Daily Python-URL]
- Mitch Kapor: Chandler 0.1 available immediately. Download. Note: it’s not supposed to work yet. It includes the beginnings of an RSS aggregator, which uses my ultra-liberal RSS parser. Note: the RSS aggregator doesn’t really work yet. I was unable to subscribe to new feeds, and even if you hack it to be able to subscribe, it doesn’t work on my site because they commented out precisely half of the gzip support so that it correctly requests gzipped content but then crashes if it receives any, and even if you compensate for that, it only displays the excerpts from the
descriptionelement, not full posts. And I don’t believe they’re taking advantage of its ETag support, and they’re not taking advantage of its support for changing the User-Agent (it just reports itself asPython/urllib). Bug reports have been filed through the proper channels. But let us not dwell on the bugs of a 0.1 prerelease. Let us instead dwell on the fact that, soon, we will have a major piece of GPL’d end-user software. - Boing Boing: Madonna diluting own trademark. Do not miss the linked remix from Digital Cutup Lounge.
- The Register: Like a virgin — Madonna hacked for the very first time.
- The Smoking Gun: Screenshot of hacked Madonna site.
Faithless:
Make my way to the refrigerator
One dry potato inside, no lie
Not even bread, jam
When the light above my head went bam!
I can’t sleep, something’s all over me
Greasy, insomnia please release me
And let me dream about
Making mad love on the heath
Tearing off tights with my teeth
But there’s no relief
I’m wide awake in my kitchen
It’s dark and I’m lonely
Oh, if I could only
Get some sleep
Creeky noises make my skin creep
I need to get some sleep
I can’t get no sleep….
Postscript: is it just me, or did all the lyric sites suddenly become evil while I wasn’t looking? Search Google for Faithless Insomnia lyrics
; all the top results feature either drive-by ActiveX auto-installs of spyware, or multi-spawning pop-under ads from hell, or both. Just another day in the hinternet, I guess. Thank God for Mozilla (Camino, Opera, Safari… pretty much anything but IE/Win).
There is a serious niche waiting to be filled by a community driven, ad-free lyrics site. One that had elements of a Wiki would be great, or at the very least some feedback mechanism that kept the lyrics as accurate as possible. And throw some RSS in there too.
Comment by Matt — Wednesday, April 23, 2003 @ 3:32 am
I’ve raised bugs against RSS Bandit to fix the issues Tim Bray pointed out in is post. You’re right that these aren’t problems with RSS but with clients. However since Tim Bray is primarily the spec authoring he [correctly] believes this is something that should be clearly spelled out in the spec instead of leaving it as implementation defined.
I’ll also look into fixing the 301 issue, can you provide the URL on your site which sends a 30 so I can use that for testing?
Comment by Dare Obasanjo — Wednesday, April 23, 2003 @ 3:51 am
/xml/rss2.xml redirects to /xml/rss.xml
Comment by Mark — Wednesday, April 23, 2003 @ 3:54 am
“My brain hurts.”
Oh good. I was thinking it was just me.
Comment by Michael Bernstein — Wednesday, April 23, 2003 @ 4:07 am
I’d be all over a lyrics Wiki, provided that the people who used it respected the Wiki nature. Fourteen year old girls looking for the lyrics to the latest Christina Aguilera fluff may well panic, or mutilate.
Comment by Raena — Wednesday, April 23, 2003 @ 5:37 am
Faithless, awesome. And I agree with comment 1 about needing a decent lyric site. Be nice to tie it into the CDDB, but then who am I kidding right?
Comment by Adrian Sevitz — Wednesday, April 23, 2003 @ 5:46 am
The problem with a community-based music-oriented anything is that it will not be allowed to last long. For instance, there used to be a really amazing web site devoted to collecting and making available guitar tablature. For those who don’t know, guitar tablature is a music shorthand notation for guitarists, which makes it very easy to learn to play a song without having to learn to read standard 5-line staff notation. Most of the “tabs” on the site were written by individuals who listened to a CD/tape/LP and transcribed the song, and thus were unlicensed. Some of the tabs were copied from commercial tablature transcriptions that were properly licensed and published in book form — you can find these at music stores. These copies, though, were unlicensed copies of the commercial transcriptions.
As you might be able to guess, the site was sued out of existence by the RIAA — in multiple countries, IIRC. The content hopped the pond to Europe, but the recording industry followed them. This wonderful little series of events happened a few years before MP3s became really popular, circa 1996 or so.
My memory is fairly foggy, so don’t hold me to dates or details. Chances are, though, Google or the Wayback Machine might hold references to the full history, if you are interested.
Point being: don’t hold out hopes for being able to collect lyrics without either paying for them or being sued.
Comment by Peter Herndon — Wednesday, April 23, 2003 @ 11:27 am
I hold a little hope. They tried to block blank audio tapes too and heralded it as the end of music as we know it. Eventually sometimes somethings sneak through and become normal. Like taping music compilations for a friend without being sued.
Comment by Adrian Sevitz — Wednesday, April 23, 2003 @ 11:40 am
re: Twisted, I feel the same way.
It was covered in several seminars at PyCon … there may be notes online:
http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/moinmoin/PyConPapers
Comment by Joe Grossberg — Wednesday, April 23, 2003 @ 11:48 am
I have a vague memory of some lyrics site I used frequently that was sued and then forced to display the lyrics via some crappy java applet that didn’t allow you to cut and paste the contents, and scrolled the lyrics so fast that it was impossible to write them down manually. It effectively killed the site.
Comment by Johan Svensson — Wednesday, April 23, 2003 @ 1:45 pm
“This is getting way out of control.”
Agreed.
Comment by David — Wednesday, April 23, 2003 @ 2:08 pm
Unfortunately RSS versions 4.0, 5.0, and 7.0 are all spoken for. There is a gap you could wedge something into for version 6.0. Also RSS 2000, and RSS ME have been premptively spoken for. Alas
http://use.perl.org/~gnat/journal/7774
Comment by kellan — Wednesday, April 23, 2003 @ 3:11 pm
I want to kiss Paul Ford full on the mouth.
Comment by Gina — Wednesday, April 23, 2003 @ 4:43 pm
“I’m happy to read your words in their native environment, but a simple change notification system would be nice”
I use Web Site Watcher (from aignes.com) which works pretty well to tell me when site have changed and then open them in their native environment. It has room for improvement, but does the job and covers non blog sites too (Useful for watching Ebay etc). What would be good, which it only half does, is download the presentation of a site and update the content as and when required.
Comment by Adrian Sevitz — Wednesday, April 23, 2003 @ 4:58 pm
Now that is one heck of a lot of links!
“I’m happy to read your words in their native environment, but a simple change notification system would be nice.”
I’m one of those rare people who doesn’t bother with aggregators, because I /have/ that change notification system in the form of a blo.gs powered blogroll. I keep up with a fairly respectable number of blogs without spending too much time doing it by only reading them when they pop up at the top of my blogroll. Of course, if they aren’t pinging weblogs.com or blo.gs I never find out about their updates (Zeldman is guilty of this) but generally it works just fine.
Comment by Simon Willison — Wednesday, April 23, 2003 @ 6:20 pm
Re: Jeff Goldberg on MS Word and Doc Exchange
Jeff makes a great argument. For my senior project at NJIT, we’re using Word as a document exchange format. Two of my four teammates cannot open the files, which are “standard” Office 2002 .doc formats.
Unfortunately, Jeff doesn’t offer much enlightenment as far as alternatives are concerned:
http://www.goldmark.org/netrants/no-word/attach.html#tth_sEc2
I *want* to use open formats that can be shared effectively with other people (I gave OpenOffice a shot for about half of the semester before compatibility problems became prohibitive). But, what sort of tools are there available to leverage those formats in a way that is easy for a “knowledge worker” to understand and integrate?
Mark, I know that you use docbook as a format for writing extensive documentation. Are there any tools that you would recommend?
Comment by Ken Walker — Wednesday, April 23, 2003 @ 11:59 pm
Buried in the Baen Free library are a series of essays by Eric Flint[1], called Prime Palaver[2]. The most interesting of these, in my opinion, are #4 (Macaulay on Copyright), #5, #6, and #9. They all make for interesting reading, though.
[1] http://www.ericflint.net/home.htm
[2] http://www.baen.com/library/palaver_index.htm
Comment by Michael Bernstein — Thursday, April 24, 2003 @ 12:21 am
Re: docbook. I use Emacs with the docbook-ide mode and a few custom macros. Not really a mass-market solution.
Comment by Mark — Thursday, April 24, 2003 @ 12:48 am
My brother uses Emacs to write docbook-based documentation too. Sounds painful. Reminds me of the days when I used to write books using vi and troff….
Comment by ralph — Thursday, April 24, 2003 @ 7:40 am
Since when can you use your own user-defined schema in OpenOffice?
BTW, WordML is perfectly fine for document exchange.
Comment by Anonymous — Thursday, April 24, 2003 @ 8:57 am
Lyrics.ch was once a pretty complete lyrics site (I found lyrics to some pretty obscure old songs there). Needless to say, it was forced to remove most of what made it a useful resource.
Comment by Adam Rice — Thursday, April 24, 2003 @ 11:42 am
My bookmarks page (http://ucc.asn.au/~trs80/bookmarks.html) is fed by a dodgy python script that works on a line-by-line basis, ignoring various cruft, and diffing the result to get updates. Currently it supports variable checking times, but not much else. WebSiteWatcher looks great, except that I need something server-side since I use a variety of Windows/Mac/UNIX/Linux computers every week. My email is the obvious from my URL.
Mark: You probably already know this, but ditm.org/mt/mt-comments.cgi uses the old theme (with the circle).
Comment by James — Thursday, April 24, 2003 @ 3:08 pm
re: Chandler RSS
The RSS support in Chandler is a demo written by the product manager to illustrate extensiblity in product.
Comment by gary burd — Thursday, April 24, 2003 @ 7:40 pm
GZip support for RSS Bandit implemented and successfully tested against your feed.
Comment by Dare Obasanjo — Saturday, May 3, 2003 @ 1:27 pm