Archive for September, 2002

From: Google To: Phil Message: You Suck.

Monday, September 30th, 2002

It looks like our year of living abnormally high in Google’s search results is coming to an end with this update. Probably as a result of not having enough current news results last September, Google has spent the last year tweaking their algorithm and their crawling habits to make frequently updated pages appear higher in […]

Extending RSS 2.0

Thursday, September 26th, 2002

Curious about how to go about Extending RSS 2.0? Morbus has you covered with a gentle introduction to namespaces. (Curious about when I’ll shut up about RSS? Not yet, I’m afraid. There’s still plenty more to come.)

My next browser?

Wednesday, September 25th, 2002

Posting from Phoenix 0.1, a re-casting of Mozilla as a browser rather than a bloated suite. No mail client. No IM client. No Composer. No spreadsheet. A browser. It’s already pretty quick, and they’ve just started throwing away the cruft that has built up in Mozilla. Another milestone or two, a few prefs added back […]

pre considered harmful

Wednesday, September 25th, 2002

Dorothea says that using the HTML <pre> element to display formatted code in weblog posts is a bad idea. She’s right: since a <pre> line can’t be broken, everything else in the page has to break, and break it will; floats will float down to the bottom of the page, things will overlay the code, […]

RSS needs: redirection

Tuesday, September 24th, 2002

Jon Udell points out the need for a way to redirect an RSS feed. He was subscribed to the RSS feed for Olivier Travers’ Webvoice blog, which used to be powered by Julian Bond’s RSS scraping service at voidstar.com/rssify.php. Now that Blogger Pro produces RSS directly, Olivier’s feed is at webvoice.blogspot.com/rss/webvoice.xml, but Jon accidently subscribed […]

Putting on the brakes

Monday, September 23rd, 2002

First, the glowing vision: I take all the RSS 1.0 feeds from my circle of weblogs, plus RSS feeds of their comments, plus FOAF files that tell me that this nickname and this name go with this homepage and this email address, and I parse them all, throw them in a database of RDF triples, […]

Just say no to TrackBack in index.html

Monday, September 23rd, 2002

Sam also asks if he should have TrackBack RDF in his main page. I say no, for two reasons. First, it just encourages foolish behavior: if you are pinging a TrackBack entry you are replying to a specific post, and so you should be linking to that post, but if you click your bookmarklet on […]

Another TrackBacker

Monday, September 23rd, 2002

Thank Ghu, Sam Ruby has Trackback. I’ve been commenting so much over there of late that I’ve got more content on his blog than on my own. Thanks to his integration of local comments and TrackBack-delivered remote comments, now I can have my comments appear both places.

A little RDF help, please?

Monday, September 23rd, 2002

I’m having yet another problem with (anonymous|blank) nodes: I think I’ve pretty well got the concept down (either you’re talking about something intrinsic to the feed, like the accursed rdf:Seq, or you’re talking about something that you can’t give a resource for (what’s the URI that will return Mark Pilgrim himself?), or something that you […]

MTEntryAuthor considered harmful

Sunday, September 22nd, 2002

If you are just merrily producing RSS 1.0 with the default MovableType template without ever having given it a close look, you might want to look now. Down amongst the <item> tags you’ll find <dc:creator><$MTEntryAuthor encode_xml=”1″$></dc:creator>. If you are the cautious sort who uses a secret login name for MT, so that people would have […]