phil ringnalda dot com

topost

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.

He returns!

Wonderchicken Resurgent:

Wonderchicken returns, brethren and sistren! He returns! Dance dervish, and spill the blood of politicians in tribute and walleyed joy!

Damnitall, I thought this time he'd really made it, broken free of the addiction of textareas and "862 unread items." Welcome back to the Pit. God damn it's good to have you back.

Monetizing your competitors

I go back and forth about agreeing with the belief, common in SEO circles, that the entire splog and comment spam problem is Google's fault, and that they should bear the complete responsibility for fixing it, but I absolutely love graywolf's comment on ThreadWatch about the explosion of splogs on Google's Blog*Spot which make money (for both the splogger and Google) from Google's AdSense, even though Google's, um, Google now generally sandboxes new sites so that they aren't going to come up in Google's own search results:

Now of course if you run a search engine with a time/quality delay ranking function built in you can say how "much better" your index is because you don't rank the drivel that Yahoo and MSN do. Here's where it gets priceless, Google has found a way to monetize the other search engines that do rank the drivel.

The more AdSense-bearing spam blogs there are on Blog*Spot, the more money Google makes. That seems like the sort of situation where being not-evil would be not-easy.

If you can't leave a comment...

... eh, the "please leave a comment" thing is probably overdone. Still if you've got ideas about what I've broken along the way to upgrading to MT 3.2, I'd love to hear them. I don't have any problem commenting, and at least a few human spambots have been able to comment since I upgraded, but at least three people have now told me that they just keep getting told "Please preview your modified entry before posting it." when they already did.

In theory, that should mean that something's different between the SHA1 hash of the comment text, the entry id, the author name, the author URL, and the subject that were posted for the preview, and those same things that were posted hoping to actually submit the comment (minus the IP address that I just pulled out, in case that was it). In fact, since none of that's changing, I must have screwed something up. Works for me, so I guess you can always just email your comment (anything at this domain, I'm still foolish enough to use a catch-all), and I'll post it, since my form still likes me.

At least one thing pleases me about this: this post strikes me as perfectly appropriate for what MT tells me is my 1000th entry. No sense not being rambling and nonsensical just for a round number.

Wanting to get it right

I knew there was something about the projects I'm happiest hanging around the edges of, the feedvalidator and Firefox and Gecko, but I wasn't quite clear on what it was until I read Robert Sayre quoting Kent M. Pitman about "purports to conform":

Well, "actual" compliance means bug-free. That's hard to assure in a system of the size of a CL.

This is the reason I created the term "purports to conform", which a lot of implementations do. In effect, what that means is "willing to receive bug reports where non-conformance is detected".

I think in practice the notion of purporting to conform is much more meaningful than the notion of actual conformance. In fact, it's theoretically possible to actually conform without intending to and without a commitment to continuing to be that way on an ongoing basis... or even without detecting the fact. It's the commitment that matters, not the "incidental" fact.

That's it! In both cases (all three, really, since Firefox and Gecko are essentially separate projects that happen to ship together), there's a bit of "we did it, this is how we did it, if you don't like it then shut up and go away," but for the most part it's a thing in progress, a thing we know isn't as right as we'd like it to be, and if you can tell us how it's wrongness is actually affecting you, and we can stop hurting you without hurting someone else instead, then that's just exactly what we want. We got as close as we could with the things we saw, and now we need you to help us be better.

My only connection

Deane's almost apologetic reposting of a link ganked from Boing Boing, saying I try not to re-post from Boing Boing too much since most everyone who reads this blog also reads that one, reminded me of something that bothers me off and on: just because "everyone" reads a blog doesn't mean I do, or she does, or your five most loyal readers do, much less that someone who would leave an interesting comment on your post will have already left it there.

I'm a contrary bastard, and I only read two or three things on almost any "Top 100" or "Top 500" list. Instead, I'm counting on you to read them, filter out the really interesting things, the ones that are interesting to us, and pass them along. (Yes, I know that you are counting on me to do the same, with other feeds, and I'm falling down on the job. So sue me, Firefox 1.5 is going to be a tiny bit better thanks to this hiatus.)

I wish I wasn't too lazy to do the data crunching and pretty picture drawing, but I'm sure there's a surprisingly unconnected graph hiding in our subscription data. I'm reasonably sure I'm the only connection between Leigh Dodds and Paul Kidd, but I suspect that there are a whole lot more single paths like that. At least in theory, if not in practice, I say "if it seems interesting, throw it up against your weblog wall, because you just don't know what's going to stick."

Empire of (white on orange) XML

I actually felt a brief and surprising flare of hope the other week, when Dave was saying that rather than the incomprehensible and unlocalizable white-on-orange "XML" button to indicate the presence of an RSS feed, people ought to use a white-on-orange "Subscribe" button. Sure, it's problematic on newspaper sites, where they tend to use that word to mean "give us your credit card number, and we'll ship sliced dead trees to your house," but a step away from "XML" as button text is a step in the right direction.

Unfortunately, that was apparently a brief detour, and in reaction to the Microsoft RSS Team's heretical use of a white on orange image with no text, now we're back to:

Note to those who think the white-on-orange XML icon isn't suitable for international use, consider that the People's Daily, of the People's Republic of China, uses the icon, as-is, without reinventing it. I figure if it's good enough for the Chinese, it should be good enough for Microsoft.

Um. Dave? That's the English edition of the People's Daily. That's why everything looks familiar to you: it's supposed to. If instead you look at the GB-2312 Chinese edition, you'll find that virtually nothing looks familiar, and the only things that do, URLs and email addresses and one lonely link reading RSS订阅, are the result of us insisting that the whole world use our character set. Try this on for size: how about if everyone around the world, no matter what language they speak, uses as the label on the submit button for every web form (picking a couple of characters at random, which I hope don't say something like "dog puke") "搜索" and for the reset button, "希索"?

Cuddling up to rss/item/link

In MS embraces RSS, I pointed out that the way their Simple List Extensions spec made the RSS title element mean something completely different when it's in <cf:listinfo><cf:sort><title>The title</title>... than it normally does was a really bad idea. I'm quite happy to see that there's a draft update to the spec, which uses their own element rather than using parents and attributes to say that a core RSS element means something completely different than its usual meaning.

But, that message, do not redefine the meaning of core RSS elements, create your own instead, apparently hasn't been very widely disseminated in Microsoft just yet, since Start.com's Gadget manifests use an attribute on the item/link to say "not only is this not really an item/link, it's actually a code binding, but in fact this whole thing isn't really a feed, and these aren't really items, just a list of bindings."

I look on the dark side of things, always seeing the worst that might happen, both professionally and avocationally, but that seems to me like a really awful idea: I can't picture a good outcome from saying "create things which look just like RSS feeds but aren't actually RSS feeds, for your own and other people's sites, and put things that look just like RSS items, but aren't actually RSS items, in those not actually RSS feeds." And I really hope that Microsoft comes to realize that new elements are better than "extending" existing elements, before I run out of synonyms for "embracing" for my post titles.

Update: Scott says in his comments that they will change it, and Dare says he'll be working with them on finding a way to do Gadget manifests that won't make me scream, which calms most of my fears (since Dare's far better about not breaking RSS than I am).

..., glorious spam

Not much over two years after Andrew "I see the Googlebots walking among us" Orlowski incorrectly announced it as both imminent and likely to involve removing weblogs from the general search, Google Blog Search has launched.

I swear it's not ego, just a useful testing set where I'm familiar with the possible results. I generally start testing anything that searches with my last name, and then maybe fiddle with it a bit. So, my second search was for ringnalda -site:philringnalda.com sorted by date. Yuck.

I was actually a little bit amused by the search engine spammer who quoted Shirley Kaiser's

I was absolutely horrified when I read Phil Ringnalda's comment spam alert story last year in which a Las Vegas real estate agent used a script to try to autogenerate comments to every single one of Phil's entries, including links to the spammer's real estate site.

in a Las Vegas real estate spam blog, when I saw it flicker through a PubSub feed the other day, since it rather nicely combines irony and nostalgia, but other than that? I got as far as page seven of the results, without seeing anything but page after page of identical mortgage spam posts. True, I haven't been doing much lately to cause anyone to take my name other than in vain, but that's just awful. Right now, the only way I'll ever use Google's Blog Search again is if I see someone's post saying "finally, at last, Google has cleaned the spam out of their Blog Search."

O'Reilly joins the search engine spam parade

You growled at the thought of The Stanford Daily advertising "diet pills" next to articles about their dangers.

You roared in outrage when WordPress let a search engine spammer onto wordpress.org.

So, how do you feel about this?

O'Reilly's ONLamp.com site, home of tons of interesting articles on Linux/Apache/MySQL/Perl/Python/PHP over the years, now also features (at the bottom of the left-hand sidebar, under the "oh, but it's related, really" headline "Travelling to a tech show?") eight links to the sort of garbage hotel sites that make it utterly impossible to find any useful information about hotels on Google.

O'Reilly's OSDir.com, where amusingly enough I was looking to see what had happened to Danny O'Brien's To Evil! column, is brought to you by things like Cuban cigars, mortgage refinancing, Jack Daniels (no, I didn't click to see what sort of scam involves wanting to be highly ranked for "Jack Daniels"), online degrees, and cheap hotels: basically, the same folks who are spamming your comments, minus the rape porn.

O'Reilly's XML.com, a site I used to take very seriously, because of all the scary-smart people who write there? Brought to you by hotel spam, mortgage refinancing spam, and one of those "directories" that only exists to feed off confused searchers by sending them right back around through Google's AdSense division when they arrive from a Google search.

How horribly low have we sunk, that I'm not willing to link to O'Reilly sites without a rel="nofollow", because they are a bunch of low-life search engine spammers? X-bloody-ML.com, something that I won't touch without a nofollow condom? This just sucks.

Google News feeds: meh

Yay, Google News now has RSS and Atom feeds.

But, boo, they have RSS and Atom feeds. Both. With no real reason to choose between them: both have heinous escaped table-and-font HTML as the only content, both have escaped numeric character references in the titles (which in Atom, without declaring a type, is invalid, and in RSS is just the usual "what the hell was this supposed to be, HTML or text?"). Having pioneered the "here's my feed, in the format I'm going to produce, now deal with it" attitude that the rest of us are coming around to with Blogger and GMail's Atom-only feeds, now they've decided to go back to the bad old days of expecting people to choose when they have no basis for a choice.

I certainly hope that the lack of autodiscovery links just means that they haven't gotten around to doing them yet: with Safari and Opera and Firefox (and of course all feed readers) all doing autodiscovery already, and IE 7 getting ready, now is not the time to blow off autodiscovery for your feeds. If DiBona hadn't pointed them out, I probably wouldn't have noticed the little text links in the sidebar.

Then, there's the content, which I don't think I've ever bitched about before. None of the categories sounded good to me, so I tried a search for Firefox. Along with the usual non-news and interviews with Blake, that would give me an item linking to Mozilla Foundation wants at making RSS usable by mere mortals. Right, I can ignore the wants at making, for a good enough story. However, the story, an aside from a press conference relating to the September releases of Firefox and Thunderbird 1.0 (um, pretty sure we did 1.0 last fall, not this September), just has chofmann saying Our researchers are looking at new ideas now, but we aren't ready to talk about it now. Um. How much digging would it take to find the wiki, or the first-pass code that's been in for a week, or the second-pass patch that's close to landing? If you are reporting about what's coming up in the next version of a closed source browser, then yeah, you interview people and what they tell you is what you get. But Firefox? Maybe we do drop things in with a loud thump right before branches, but that still gives you plenty of time before a release. If you're going to wait for an official statement, you're already last month's news to anyone who really cares.

So, if you like the sort of content Google News delivers, and especially if you enjoy making a political choice between RSS and Atom feeds, yay for you! Google News has feeds!

Different types for different feeds

This is a rather strange and unlikely to be successful question, but I'll ask anyway: do you, or anyone you know, have autodiscovery link elements for an equal number of different types of feeds, where the contents are actually different?

If you see

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="/index.xml">
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rdf+xml" href="/index.rdf">
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="/comments.xml">
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rdf+xml" href="/comments.rdf">

you might guess that an equal number of each type meant it was the same content in different formats, but is something like

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="/index.xml">
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rdf+xml" href="http://del.icio.us/rss/user">
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" href="http://user.blogspot.com/atom.xml">

too common to make that a safe guess? (And the bonus question, how many browsers failing to show more than the first feed would it take to make people change, by faking the type I guess?)

Extra credit for real-world example URLs, and for speed. Thanks.

More delight, please

The other day, as I was going into the store, I saw a guy coming out. He looked to be in his mid-fifties, maybe an office worker or middle-manager. He was holding some sort of ice cream bar or frozen yogurt pushup or something like that, and looking at it with the most amazing expression of raw delight I've ever seen on an adult. Chances are he was really "cognitively challenged" or whatever the euphemism of the day is for a six-pack shy of a case, since anyone who shows that sort of emotion jist ain' right, but to me he looked like just some guy who'd spent a long hot afternoon in an office, thinking about how good a Frozen Yogi-Yum would taste, and now he was thrilled as could be that he'd arranged his life so he could just walk into a store, and walk out with one, and just eat that sucker. It lightened my mood for the rest of the day, and I can still picture his expression days later.

We need more of that.

In related news, I finally got to someone's instructions for building Firefox on Windows quickly enough, before all the external links and patches rotted away. Between Jeff Walden's instructions and the updates in the comments, unlike the previous three sets of instructions which led to bruised knuckles and more holes in my walls, this time (eventually) make -f client.mk build actually built something, and firefox.exe -p actually ran, and I'm typing in a 2005080519 build that only cost me a few dozen KB of downloading today's checkins over dialup, and has several of my pending-review patches and a few others, right now, this minute.

All in all, I suppose it's a good thing that when you live alone, there's nobody around to see the Happy Dance™, but I doubt I danced it that well since the first time I typed something in Blogger's textarea, and clicked a button, and pointed at the screen and shouted "look at that, I just clicked a button and it built all that, and that archive page too!"

Please, sir, may I have some more delight?

The 'monkey's back

Okay, sure, he was willing to let strangers read any file on your computer, for a while. Now he's reformed his ways, and promised to be good (and what did you expect? Surely you read Curious George, and know what living with a monkey can be like.). And what's more, he's learned some very impressive new tricks.

Go ahead, install 0.5 if you haven't already, and MagicLine. I'll wait.

Wander around a bit, especially among weblogs with autodiscoverable RSS and Atom feeds, and autodiscoverable FOAF, and links with rel="tag" or XFN tagged links. Then press Ctrl+Shift+L, type a letter, and tell me it's not worth the trouble of living with a monkey.

Now that's autodiscovery

Go to feeds.my.aol.com. Yet another web-based aggregator. Test it the way you've tested dozens before, by typing the URL for your feed in the text input. Wups, not found. Now, try typing in the URL for your blog's front page (assuming it supports autodiscovery).

Now that is some serious support for autodiscovery, and unwillingness to go down the rathole of how to link three-letter-icons to incomprehensible spews of XML. Either that or it's just broken in beta. But I love the thought of an aggregator so unwilling to get its users involved in the whole "here are my feeds in five different formats, you choose one without any idea why there are so many" that they flat out refuse to let their users enter a feed URL directly.