phil ringnalda

Having agreed to actually do something in a weak moment, I need to clear some decks, including all the stuff I’ve been pretending I might write about. Woohoo, it’s linkdump time!

• Neutrino – an XML file you subscribe to, that tells you the current URIs for a person’s distributed feeds. Probably going to be useful, as everyone rushes to outsource to Flickr, and del.icio.us, and Feedburner, and the like.
• Subscriptions hijacked by a misconfigured hotel proxy. When you ask why don’t Firefox and my aggregator properly support HTTP 301 and 410 and automatically change or delete my bookmarks and feed URIs?, that’s why: people screw things up all the time. Maybe a Firefox infobar with a button offering to rewrite/delete would work…
• Niall’s responding to Mena Trott, and Mena takes the bait from Jason’s whole new internet?. Much as I’ve bemoaned the 6A black hole for bloggers, every time I get blocked posting because there’s so many people who can’t see what I want to say, I get closer to Mena’s vision of much more private weblogs.
• One hour of (update.mozilla.org) terror: if you are using Firefox 1.0, please update to 1.0.3, for the sake of the servers (and the security fixes, too).
• Anne changes to his own weblog system. There was a time when that was the in thing; then there was a time when lots of people went with something off the rack, because keeping up with all the added features and toys like *back got old. It’d be good if handrolling made a comeback, now that we’re pretty much in feature-stasis, since rolling your own can be even better for driving innovation than plugins.
• Lachlan’s guide to HTML comments in scripts does a great job of covering the things you should be thinking about, rather than just throwing in those comments out of habit, and taught me something I hadn’t realized: since scripts are parsed character data in XHTML, you can say i < 5 as i < 5 (as long as you aren’t going to also serve it as semi-barely-sorta-valid-ish text/html as well as application/xhtml+xml)
• DreamHost’s self-service snapshot backups. Huh, who knew?
• Jeremy on NDAs. Unfortunately, it’s all voodoo, guessing at how much you gain on your competitors and lose on coverage, hiding your light under a bushel.
• I bet his car says “STEEL” in big letters on the bumper. Heh. From the look of the soup, only if it’s actually a plastic bumper.
• Experiment in resentment: I really like the title, and the sentiment, too.
• Even though there’s a few serious bugs still, Fastback/bfcache really rocks. I’ll have to relearn using Back instead of always opening tabs.
• Spamsters!
• Syndic8 spams search engines. I’ve had to explain to several people that “no, that’s a topic that you simply cannot search the internet for information about,” but I still hate seeing “one of us” adding to the problem.
• Ms Pancake and Let’s keep the blogroll and throw away the writing do a nice job of illustrating why I sometimes just do things without discussing them.
• Jesse’s security holes and security tips, including tips that would have saved me doing really stupid things if I’d read carefully enough.
• Validation quiz that should make you think twice about parsing HTML with a handful of string functions and a regex or three.
• The right place for data in your feed: XHTML microformats for getting feed extensions past the aggregator gatekeepers.
• Launching a librarian: doesn’t seem like more than two years
• Weird feeds: to see ourselves as others see us… :0
• Feed autodiscovery: well, it could have been a lightweight editing job. The good news is that tearing up the pavement might be a win for application/rdf+xml.