April 08, 2004

Quicklinks newsfeed

You may or may not have noticed that I have for about a month maintained "quicklinks" separately from my weblog's main content. If you are viewing the main page, you'll see them rendered to the right. I use the quicklinks to capture stuff I don't want to (or don't have the time to) write about in detail, and I have explicitly excluded them from all of the main feeds I provide so as not to bore regular readers to death with mindless link propagation.

In case you are interested in the stuff I stumble across during the day, you can now also subscribe to the quicklink RSS feed (only RSS 2.0, since nobody is picking up the main Atom feed anyway right now).

Normalizing Syndicated Feed Content

Mark Pilgrim describes how to access feeds in Atom and different RSS flavors. Extraordinarily useful stuff for anyone writing any feed-processing software.

March 18, 2004

Quicklinks

If you're reading this weblog with a browser, you might have noticed that there is now a Linkblog section (on the right side of the main page) — a place for me to put quick links that I don't want to comment on (or don't have the time to). If you're mostly following the stuff here in an RSS reader, you won't see the link blog entries, since I don't currently include them in the syndication feeds (but you may have noticed that the frequency of new entries went down). My plan is to do the mindless link propagation in the linkblog, and only put "real" entries (i.e. those where I actually write or at least add some content myself) to the main part.

As of yet, I'm undecided how to handle this. Having a quick an easy way to put links in my blog is nice, especially if I can just publish them without having to take the time to write detailed comments. I'm not sure whether it makes sense to have the quicklinks in the RSS feed. I could do a second feed, or I could do multiple feeds - everything, everything but the German stuff, everything but the quicklinks and so on. What do you think?

(In case you're interested in how this works: The entries for the linkblog are put into their own category, and this is included/excluded appropriately by means of the MTCatEntries plugin.)

March 09, 2004

Sun and RSS

In an eWeek interview, Sun Executive VP Jonathan Schwartz explains Sun's plans to "adopt RSS".

I wonder why I feel so totally unimpressed.

February 29, 2004

Blog Anniversary

It's been a few days over a year since I started this blog, so maybe it's a good time to reflect on some issues.
First of all, writing a weblog is fun in a strange sort of way, and it's also very hard not to do once you have started. Sometimes, my motivation for writing here is to get something off my chest, sometimes it's only to have a place to store some references — often so that I can find them myself later on.
The few occasions where I actually feel that having the blog is really beneficial for me is when I write about something and the writing itself helps me to find out what I really think. It's one thing to talk to people about issues, it's a totally different one to try to put it into decent writing.
While I still can imagine that I will stop the writing some day in the future (but not anytime soon), it's hard to imagine that I will stop the reading. I strongly feel that I'm learning a lot from the bunch of weblogs I follow, most, if not all of them, much better than my own.
What I find hugely interesting is that I seem to have a bunch of readers I know next to nothing about, apart from the fact that they are using strange browsers or news readers that I can positively rule out being used by anyone I do know.
Two things I plan to do in the future are:

• Properly categorize existing entries, and use meaningful categories from the start for new postings. The few categories I have right now are not very useful; once I have changed this, I'll provide separate RSS feeds for them so that you can take you choice (and filter out e.g. private or fun postings).
• Write more original content. This is, of course, a matter of having the time to do so; still, it's not really my goal to link to other people's work so much (although I'll still point to stuff I find interesting).

Please let me know if there's anything else you'd like to see here ...

February 26, 2004

Pardon the Outage

After some struggle with our ISP, innoQ's hosts in the domain innoq.org should now slowly start working again. If you have tried to send me an email, or leave a comment here, and received some strange error message - please try again. If it doesn't work immediately, give the global DNS a few hours more to sync our changes.

February 22, 2004

REST interface constraints

Bill de hÓra (one day I'll find out why I can't enter his name properly) has an interesting post about the debate kicked off by Russel Beattie:

I take the opposite view to Russ; not having mainstream availability of PUT and DELETE is the singularly most broken aspect of web technology today.

I like REST, and I believe that Russ's problem is a stupid omission in the J2ME standard, not a fault of the Atom spec. On a purely theoretical side, though, I wonder whether there really is a difference between having a uniform interface that contains just two verbs (GET and POST) and one that contains all four (DELETE and PUT as well). Isn't the point that the interface is constrained, not that it is constrained to something specific? You can't avoid a certain amount of overloading, no matter whether you have 2 or 4 or 10 verbs, since there's more than 2 (or 4 or 10) things you will want to do.

February 15, 2004

REST and Atom

Russel Beattie, occasionally pretty informative, writes a post which is amazingly clueless. The only reason for mentioning it is that the comments to it are very entertaining. I hereby declare Sam Ruby my role model for blog conversations.

A letter to my Spammer

Dear John,

I just wanted to let you know that I feel sorry for you - you spent about one and a half hour posting comments to about 20 different entries in this blog, linking to some useless mortgaging site, and it took me about 30 seconds and 2 mouse clicks to get rid of all of them.

I cannot imagine that anyone would pay you for something as useless as this, so I hope you find other ways to feed your kids.

Best,
Stefan

February 08, 2004

FloodMT Attack

Somebody started massively flooding my blog with comments, obviously automated pretty efficiently. I've reattached the comments to this entry.
Update: A quick Google search shows that the script to do this is freely available, which sucks, but there's probably not much one can do about it.
Update: There's some discussion about the crap flooders going on; some patches I may apply are available from Phil Ringnalda's blog.
Update: I had left the comments for possibly trying to find out more, but it seems this is actually old news (an excellent step-by-step guide to a safer blog is available at Burningbird). I'll remove the comments and leave only one of them, so perhaps somebody looking around as I did today will stumble across the instructions.

February 06, 2004

Related Entries

You might have noticed that my weblog now display related entries for most of the posts. In case you are wondering why these sometimes don't seem to make sense, the explanation is that they are generated automatically. (In case you're interested how, here is the recipe, which will only work for MT and MySQL). Basically, every time I rebuild, a full text search is performed, using the posting's title and keywords as the search terms.

I'm not really sure whether this is something I want to keep or not. Sometimes it works so well that people actually take them for having been created manually . Sometimes they don't seem to make sense at all.

I think having related links displayed is very useful, but I'd much rather avoid having to provide the necessary metadata myself.

February 04, 2004

Atom API 0.8

Joe Gregorio has written an article about the new version 0.8 of the Atom API.

February 01, 2004

ecto 1.0

Jio Ito reports that ecto 1.0 has been released. Definitely the coolest blog client on earth.
Downloaded, paid, registered.

RSS Bandit

For my Windows-using readers: Take a look at the new release of RSS Bandit — it's a nice non-commercial alternative to the excellent FeedDemon.

January 23, 2004

RSS not ready for prime time?

Dare Obasanjo makes some valuable remarks about an article that tries to find reasons why RSS is not that great.

January 07, 2004

Blog Design

I can't remember how I came across this, but the Blog Design Showcase Archiv is a list of some of the coolest designed blogs I've seen so far.

January 02, 2004

CSS, again

I played with the site's CSS layout again; once again, the most important lesson learned is that my talent for Web design clearly leaves a lot to be desired. Since we're having the company website redesigned professionally in the next few weeks, anyway, I'll postpone a major refactoring until then. In the meantime, I'm almost satisfied with what I have now.
There's just one annoying detail left: The body element has a light grey background. It contains only one element (#container) that contains all of the rest and has a white background and a border. For some reason, though, it seems that CSS is too intelligent for me - the box is not drawn for all of the contents (scroll down to the end of the navigation stuff on the right to see what I mean). I can't seem to find out what is causing this, and as both Safari and Firebird show the same behavior, it's obviously not a bug ... maybe I have some knowledgeable reader who can suggest a workaround?

December 23, 2003

Dave Orchard Blog

BEA's Dave Orchard has a blog, and has written a very interesting article about XML versioning.
His layout still needs some work, though ;-)

December 17, 2003

Common Sense at MSFT

Reading these two postings should give you enough reason to understand why this guy is my favorite Microsoft employee.

I honestly believe that people like Dare do a lot more to make others appreciate Microsoft than those who appear brainwashed.

November 26, 2003

Enterprise Weblog Software

Scoble points to an enterprise weblog software called Traction, which was reviewed by Jon Udell some time ago. Very interesting.

October 10, 2003

Weblog Tools

A quick summary of links to tools I use while weblogging: This site is of course hosted by the excellent MovableType. I use FeedDemon as my news aggregator. To post, I usually use Zempt.

August 16, 2003

CSS, again

I had committed myself to not doing this again anytime soon, but when I started an IM session with Radovan about CSS design for MT, I just couldn't resist tweaking my own templates and stylesheets a bit - and once again, wasted a few precious hours of my life with this stupid CSS stuff.

I'm pretty happy with the result (which you can see now); the only thing that bothers me is that it's completely out of proportion to the amount of work it took. For me, CSS is hard, and I don't really think that this is my fault exclusively. After all, I'm a programmer - using a language like that shouldn't be hard if you can program in Perl or C++ or Java - or should it? Do web designers intuitively grasp box models, the float concept, relative and absolute positioning?

One problem remains: I have all of the content nested inside a <div id="container"> - this is used because the body itself has the grey background, and the container has a white background and a border. The blog entries float to the left so that the menu becomes visible on the right. But why the heck is the border and white background not rectangular? Scroll down to see what I mean.

And a bit of final advice to novices: Don't rewrite the MT default templates and stylesheets from scratch - try to stick with them and modify them in small increments. Unless you're a) absolutely sure you know that you're doing or b) don't mind spending time on Friday nights fixing your stupid blog layout.

July 17, 2003

Weblog Images

Two great resources for images to use in weblogs: Steal These Buttons and Bill Zeller's ingenious button creation script.

July 15, 2003

KungLog

BlogApp refused to connect to the blog, with some strange, unidentifiable numeric error. Probably just a simple configuration issue, but while looking for an answer, I came across KungLog, which seems to be a pretty cool solution. Let's see whether this post comes through as planned ...

July 08, 2003

What a beautiful site

Antipixel | Blog

July 07, 2003

FeedDemon 1.0 Beta 2a

FeedDemon Beta 2a has been released - read the release notes, download it.

(Re-)Design

I spent a lot of time redoing the MovableType templates and the CSS for this site, as well as setting up a weblog for my wife. The latter experiment led to some good and bad revelations about weblogging in general and MT in particular: I thought some time about how to create thumbnails for my wife's sketches, only to find out that MT can do it on-the-fly when you upload the images files - very nice. The bad news is that I find it next to impossible to explain to the wife how to use her weblog, especially for uploading this stuff.
Consider: She can operate the scanner, but the steps required to go from there to a posting in her blog are multiple: crop the scanned image to the right size, change the images size, upload it (answering MT's questions correctly), and finally editing this obscure HTML stuff before finally seeing anything.
This is not going to work - things should be a lot easier. I know there are tools to move pictures from digital cameras directly to a weblog - why doesn't the same thing exist for scanners? Or does it?

July 05, 2003

Zempt

Zempt is a tool to post blog entries to Movable Type. I don't think it's a lot different from a couple of alternatives (like w.bloggar, for example), but what's nice is that you can call it via a bookmark or favorite.

June 27, 2003

FeedDemon

Cool. Great. I'm so impressed, I don't know how to express it. Finally an RSS aggregator for Windows that looks comparably good as NetNewsWire does on Windows, with a very cool feature: synchronization with a publically accessible OPML file.

Here it is: FeedDemon Beta

Issues:
It's still a beta.
I couldn't find any blogging support.
Probably more to follow (it's a beta after all).

June 24, 2003

Sweet Pie

Sam Ruby points to the Road Map for creating a new weblog syndication format, developed as a joint effort by a number of impressive people. Being rather new to all of this weblog stuff, I've started out to find out what the motivation for this is; one of the best sources for RSS's history is written by Mark Pilgrim. I'll risk one prediction for the name, though: Unless someone comes up with, and the others agree on, a decent name or abbreviation, it's going to be called "Pie" - simply because people will start referring to it this way and there'll be no chance to stop it ;-)

May 21, 2003

OPML and Blogroll

Note to self: This seems to be a nice way to keep my list of RSS subscriptions in sync, which are currently redundantly stored in a local OPML file on my hard disk as well as at blogrolling.com.
It's a nice idea to use the XSLT service at W3C, and with XP's support for opening files from a URI it should be easy to import the server-side OPML into SharpReader.

May 15, 2003

SharpReader 0.9.2

Moved to SharpReader 0.9.0.2, hoping that it fixes the problems I had with uninitialized handles after putting the notebook to hibernation mode and starting it up again.
I tried out several others, e.g. RssBandit, Syndirella, and AmphetaDesk, but clearly SharpReader still rocks, despite the problems.

May 14, 2003

Google Search RSS feed

Somebody has to have built this already: Every few days, I monitor google hits for specific terms, such as a specific company or product name - most likely some I'm affiliated with to find out whether there is anybody linking or talking about this.
So the basic idea is this: Allow for a service that performs a search for a particular list of words, and returns the result formatted as an RSS newsfeed to be used in RSS aggregators. Preferably usable from everywhere and everyone ...
Note that I'm not talking about Googlenews, I'm aware of a service that does this (although I have lost the link).

May 08, 2003

Note to Self: XHTML validation

I need to incorporate this to make the "valid XHTML" button less of a lie than it currently is.

April 25, 2003

RSS2

Thanks to a pointer by Dave Seidel, I now have an RSS2 feed. I simply added a new template to MT and pasted Mark Pilgrim's RSS2 template for MT into it. Works perfectly!
Although I'm probably the only one using it right now ... seems like a sort of masturbation to subscribe to your own newsfeed, but what the heck - perhaps I'll someday be surprised by the new items I post myself ;-)

Weblog Design

plasticbag.org | about | faqs | What the hell is this site for? - this is not only a very nice explanation about weblogs in general, it's also one of the best-designed weblogs I've seen so far.
I plan to steal gain some inspiration from its design soon.

April 24, 2003

World Blogging

Found via Sam Ruby, who found it via Sean McGrath:

This is so cool.

April 22, 2003

Tim Bray

While my own weblog clearly leaves a lot to be decided, I can take the opportunity to comment on Tim Bray's ongoing, the very clear winner in my own personal contest for Best Weblog of the Month. Tim's thoughts do not always concern topics that I'm interested in, and I don't really like the design ... but what clearly differentiates his from most other blogs is that his style of writing is just great, and that there is not a single posting that does not immediately show how much care he took in writing it. So if you regularly read blogs, make sure to include his RSS feed.

April 18, 2003

SharpReader

Just trying the BlogThisUrl SharpReader plugin - seems to work just perfectly ...