phil ringnalda

One of the nice things about getting older is that I no longer surprise or disappoint myself as much: now, I start something knowing I’ll fail to follow through, so I don’t feel the need to kick myself over it. When I started using the very nice Ajax tagging feature in my lovely new aggregator Gregarius to add a topost tag to interesting posts that I ought to write about, before using the so wonderful it makes me laugh double click to mark read plugin to banish them from my sight, I knew right away that there would be a <ul> in our future, and so there is:

• QOTD: This is, as the woolly mammoths said right before they froze solid with the contents of their stomachs still undigested, a bad sign.
• Close Other Tabs must die: it’s a shame that Firefox has so many brutal traps for the unwary and uncautious, but it’s awfully nice to be able to rework the UI with just a little CSS.
• QOTD2: Opensource’s central dogma is “scratch your own itch”, usability’s central dogma is “you are not your own user.”
• Using nuSOAP with the NewsGator API: never know when it’ll come in handy.
• Guided Content Maps: Jakob’s “classic hits are buried” didn’t excite me much, but tying together your best posts on a particular topic makes a lot of sense.
• The Bottoms Up RDF Tutorial: I’m really happy to see the focus on practicality among the RDFheads I read lately, and nobody does Practical RDF better than Shell.
• funny characters are not ☢: best title for a post on i18n evar! (though the URL’s a bit of a copout).
• How to Hack RSS and Atom Feeds: Les goes into syndication (yeah, I kill me).
• The Zen of Microformats: I need to do some serious thinking, to like the idea of “do the easy 80%, and then plan to ignore the hard 20%” since that’s exactly what I hate the most about several macroformats I struggle with all the time.
• Still enthusiastic about RDF: if it’s really as useful as many very smart people say, then easy and solid tools, and maybe a public store of interesting data to get started on, really ought to be all it needs to take off.
• I, Robot.txt: if you fetched the RSS feed for this post before what I assume was a corporate editorial comment was edited out, you would have seen navigates to http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/[DO WE HAVE TO USE A SPECIFIC SITE? CAN WE KEEP IT GENERIC], which for all the bad things it says about how unauthentic and unindividual Infrablog may be, amuses me so much that I’ll probably have to start inserting my own lawyerly editorial comments in my posts. In all caps.
• IngentaConnect RSS Feed Tweaks: nice that Leigh added a foaf:Person alongside the dc:creator, rather than instead of; that “RDF’s like a box of chocolates” problem was one of the things that made me stop playing with it (wow, that was) three years ago.
• Akismet: Matt Mullenweg’s web service for cleaning the spam out of your incoming comments. I’m amazed at the numbers: currently, 79% of what it sees is spam. Of course, if you don’t have a problem, you’re not likely to use it. Not counting comments that skip my forced preview, which are quite literally just another GET to me, I probably see something closer to 1%.
• Over and out: Srijith.K pulls the plug on TriNetre. I try not to argue when someone realizes that they don’t want to have a weblog any more, but that puts a big hole in the number of weblogs accepting PGP-signed comments.
• ICANN’s proposed changes to IDN registration: when the best thing Paul can say about your proposal is that since it is phenomenally unlikely that these rules will ever be enforced, the fact that the are confused and technically flawed may not be all that important, you’ve got problems.
• OpenID Comments for MT 1.4: I have seriously got to get around to trying OpenID.
• Wilma: somehow I sort of forgot about this hurricane. Bryce says Please send gas. Or gas cans. A generator would be groovy.
• Some Thoughts On Google Print: Markets are conversations, to succeed in the marketplace you have to dominate the conversation and control it to suit your needs. Heh.
• In the Line of Duty: somehow, Hixie saying he loves drawing on his Tablet PC in his dolorous MS Paint style makes me more interested in having one than most serious evangelizing ever has.
• Leaving CNET: Matt goes full-time with the things he loves: outstanding!
• OpenID: Jacques musings on giving Musings OpenID support.
• Merlin: The Opera Magician: oh, it’s such a wonderful time for browsers now :)
• Spam Barriers (Redux): I suspect that Blogger’s got their anti-spam-posting CAPTCHA tuned close to right, since on a mailing list that includes suspect spammers there are complaints that it’s too strict, and on a ping-consuming list there are complaints that it’s not enough. If everybody vocal is unhappy, you must have hit the sweet spot.
• But the WiFi is free: I really would like to know why the same people who want to make their living off the web absolutely, and very loudly, expect that they should never have to pay to access it.
• Recognition at last: can’t beat that: Australia recognizes same-sex partners as “family members.” Though only for suspected terrorists; for anyone else a same-sex partner isn’t family. A rather dubious micro-step forward.
• FeedDemon 1.6: Automatic Unsubscribe: very slick. I want to steal it.
• CoLT 0.9: a tiny Firefox extension that adds a “Copy Link Text” item to the context menu for links. I love tiny extensions that do one simple thing well.

And of course there was more, much more, but expecting myself to link to, and write about, everything that interests me is another thing I don’t really seriously do these days.

Update: bleah, my server seems to have decided that building individual entry archives, even one at a time, is just too much work. Apologies for any annoyance that causes.