Posts in the Tech Category

Congratulations to everyone who worked on the Blogger redesign!  I’ll have to start showing it off in presentations as another great example of standards-oriented design.

The PHP problems I was having in the archives should be all fixed up now.  Sorry about that—I had some HTML that was somehow interfering with the PHP calls, although I’m not entirely sure how.  In the course of conducting training this morning, I also discovered that I’d neglected to add alt attributes for the two RSS-feed buttons.  That’s fixed now too.  Apparently this was my day to find broken bits on the site, but at least they were bits I could fix.

Nick Finck, in citing his inspirations, had this to say about me:

One of the first presentations I ever heard Eric do was “CSS For Anarchists” and it really got me to think about CSS on a whole new level. Since then Eric has been a constant source of inspiration for me when it comes to CSS. As crazy as some of Eric’s ideas may seem, there is really some logical reasoning behind all of it.

Hey, whaddya mean crazy?!?  All my ideas are totally sane and rational.  It’s the rest of the world that’s nuts.  Now excuse me while I go adjust the geometry of my tin foil hat.

The “CSS For Anarchists” presentation was interesting for me too, as I was giving it at the same time President Clinton was giving a speech one floor directly above me.  I still wonder how many background checks were run on me, and whether they turned up anything good.  Because if they did, I’d like to know what.

• Blog Bits was published on Monday, May 10th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Redesign category.
• There have been four replies.

Just in case you haven’t seen it yet, John Allsopp posted a nostalgic note about the early days of CSS.  If you want to know who I hung out with back in the day, John’s got most of the names right there for you, and links to many of them.  There’s even a link to the CSS Samurai page, which I thought was long dead, and was greatly amused to read.

To John’s recollections, I would add Chris Lilley, who’s since been much more involved in SVG and other things; and Susan Lesch, who’s now at the W3C but back then was at macvirus.com.  (There’s a reason I didn’t link to that address, by the way.  If you go, make sure you can block popups.)

A more recent event of note is that it was a year ago today that the CSS Zen Garden opened its gates to the world.  Congratulations on an incredible first year, Dave.  I’m honored to have been able to contribute to the Garden in that time, and eternally grateful (and a little jealous) that you created such an awesome resource.  It opened a lot of doors, and a lot more eyes and minds.

• Look Back In Awe was published on Friday, May 7th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the CSS, History, and Web categories.
• There have been no replies.

I spotted a link to PacManhattan over at SimpleBits, and was immediately stunned.  I mean, sure, it’s like an episode of “When Geeks Go Crazy,” what with the use of cellular and WiFi communications to update player positions, and the Web-based arcade view of a live game in progress, but think about it.  These people are running around entire blocks of New York City just to play a live-action version of a 1980’s video game.  They’re actually getting exercise.  They won’t just be toning their wrists; this is a total-body workout.  That’s so not geeky.

Can’t you just hear the guy playing PacMan trying to cross the street?  “Hey!  I’m wakka wakka wakkin’ here!”

• Wakka Wakka Doo Doo Yeah! was published on Tuesday, May 4th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Humor, Tech, and Technovertigo categories.
• There has been one reply.

Andy King, author of the excellent Speed Up Your Site and purveyor of fine content at the new Optimization Week, has posted a very nice review of More Eric Meyer on CSS.  I think this might be the first official review of the book, and if he posts it over at Amazon it will very likely be the first review there as well be one of the first few reviews over there (someone posted the first review some time today!).

According to Andy, Jeffrey Zeldman (who just launched a superfine redesign over at The Daily Report) and I “actually make standards sexy.”  Oh, yes, big boy… mark up my content, you style stud, you…

Okay, I promise never to do that again.

If there are other reviews out there and I’ve missed them, please let me know!

• MEMoC Under Review was published on Monday, May 3rd, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Books, CSS, Standards, and Writing categories.
• There have been seven replies.

So there was a big deal made out of the fact that iChat AV 2.1 and AIM 5.5 can do videoconferencing.  Apple’s iChat page and a press release from AOL both proudly announce how the two can interoperate.  For example, here’s an excerpt from the AOL press release:

The new live video instant messaging feature in AIM 5.5 is fully compatible with iChat AV 2.1, Apple’s breakthrough video conferencing technology. Now AOL users from a PC can tap into the worldwide community of iChat AV users on Macs. iChat AV 2.1, the latest version of iChat AV was released by Apple today…

This would be ideal for me, as my father has AOL and the latest version of AIM for Windows XP.  He’s also moving to Florida, where he’ll have broadband.  So I view this as the perfect way for him to keep in closer touch with us, and to be able to see Carolyn as she grows, even though he’ll be living a thousand or so miles away.  When she gets older, it will be a way for her to keep in touch with him as well.

Now, neither Dad nor I own a camera yet, but we do both have microphones, so I thought I’d test out the audio chat capability.  So far, zippo.  He and I have both made sure we have the right versions of our client software.  We can’t establish an audio connection.

So, has anyone gotten this to actually work, and if so, how?  I’ve opened up all the ports I can find that even seem to be halfway relevant, as per an Apple KB article I found, and have checked my router to be sure it’s allowing traffic on those ports, but I still can’t establish an audio connection with AIM users.  Text chatting, no problem, but I don’t even get an audio-chat icon in my Buddy List.  I do get one for all the iChat users in my List, and have audio-chatted with a number of them.  Do we both have to own a camera for this to work?  I had figured, you know, if video conferencing was supported then audio conferencing must be supported, but perhaps that would be expecting things to make too much sense.

If anyone out there has a solution, or even a pointer to information about it, comments are most welcome.

• Chat Lunatique was published on Saturday, May 1st, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Mac category.
• There have been fifteen replies.

I’ve converted “Thoughts From Eric” over to use WordPress, dropping my lovingly hand-crafted XML/XSLT solution for something packaged.  Since there’s no actual package, I guess I use that term somewhat loosely, but then I was also being very loose with the term “lovingly,” at least as pertains to XSLT.  I decided to go with WordPress because it’s all driven by HTML+CSS layout, and it uses PHP to generate the HTML.  I don’t know from PHP, but I can figure it out well enough to hack in the features I want, and the CSS-driven nature of the layout means I can do my own thing in a jiffy.  In this case, that meant bending the PHP files to produce markup consistent with the old meyerweb, and then applying my existing style sheets to the result.  Thus the visual consistency between yesterday and today.

Some changes that may or may not be of interest to you:

• By default, comment posting will be disabled but trackbacks will be permitted.  I expect things to stay that way until I decide what my policy will be regarding anonymous posting, comment spammers, and the like.  I’ll open up commenting on the occasional question post—I expect to put up one later today, in fact—but I won’t be opening up every post for comments.  I’ve taken note of how that’s gone at some other sites, and have rarely liked what I’ve seen.
• All feeds will continue to use excerpts; I will not be publishing full-content feeds, mostly because if I did y’all would saturate the outgoing pipes.  Yes, dammit, bandwidth does still matter.
• Both RSS feeds have lost their word-count and category information.  As soon as I figure out how to recreate those in WordPress, they’ll be back.  I had them figured out for WP1.0.2, but the very same functions seem to silently fail in WP1.2 beta, which is what I’m using.  I’ll get it worked out eventually.
• The RSS2.0 feed now includes <pubDate> elements for your sorting pleasure.  FeedDemon users of the world, rejoice.
• About 300 back-catalog posts (roughly speaking, December 1999 through October 2002) all got dumped into the “General” category.  You might not want to try to read that category all in one shot.
• I’ll likely fiddle with the categorization of old posts as I come across them, so don’t do anything that depends on a post being in a particular category.  No, I have no idea what that might be.
• The old archive pages still exist, so your permalinks won’t break.  If you want to update them to the new URIs, that would be appreciated, but if not, no big deal.
• The vast majority of posts, including posts up through last month, show as having been published precisely at midnight.  That’s because the old archive file didn’t carry time information for those posts, not because I’m an obsessive-compulsive night owl.
• Posts now show their categories, and clicking on said category names gets you a list of every post in the category.  Right now, that means a page that shows the full post content for every post in the category.  I plan to create a condensed-summary category view at some point.
• I’ll probably also continue fiddling with the layout, displayed information, and various other aspects of the post and archive pages.  Just don’t refer to a particular layout idea in a debate unless you grab a screenshot, that’s all.

That’s about it.  I just thought some of you out there would be interested in the details.

• Switcheroo was published on Saturday, May 1st, 2004.
• It was assigned to the General, Tech, and WordPress categories.
• There have been ten replies.

I’ve remembered what it is I wanted to talk about, thanks to Phil Ringnalda, whose last name I’ve finally learned to spell correctly.  Phil just posted that:

Apparently the in thing to do with your blog this month is to add links to each post’s Technorati cosmos, down in the place where you would have a comments link if you had comments.

I first spotted mention of this over at Tantek’s weblog, and since meyerweb doesn’t (yet) support comments or [track|ping]backs, I was initially intrigued.  About six seconds later, I had lost most of my interest.  There were two primary reasons why.

1. Unlike comments and trackbacks, a “comment cosmos” link (hereafter referred to as “echorati”) offers no information about how many comments will be returned, assuming any at all.  True, we can probably assume that any given Boing Boing post will have at least a few links back to it, and that the popular ones will have dozens or even hundreds.  99.9% of weblogs will have no links to 99.9% of their individual posts… but there’s still no way to know without clicking on the echorati link and hitting Technorati’s servers, which are already kind of flaky.

   (Yes, the service is free, but it also returns a lot of incorrect data, PHP configuration error messages, and so on—when it responds at all.  Echorati links are just going to increase those problems.  This isn’t criticism of the “Technorati sucks” variety; I really like Technorati.  It’s more criticism of that service’s present stability, which I suspect they would agree with me is not as robust as we’d all like.)

   One way to solve this dilemma, as others have suggested, is to have a script that queries Technorati to get the number of echorati links, so you can put right on your site how many there are—again, assuming there are any.  But that leads us to my next objection…

2. Technorati cosmos data expires.  In other words, if a link to something is on a page that hasn’t been updated in a while, that link falls out of the cosmos.  So however many links comprise an echorati cosmos in, say, the first week after a post is published, that count will fall over time to zero.  Let’s say that a year from now, somebody stumbles across the Boing Boing post about using Technorati to create an echorati cosmos.  They click on that post’s echorati link and Technorati returns “Ouch! 0 links from 0 sources.”  The impression is that nobody ever commented on the post, even though we know that’s not true (as of this writing, there were 29 links to said post).

   So any mechanism that queried Technorati for the number of links in an echorati cosmos would have to keep doing it, and the numbers would slowly drop over time until they finally hit zero.  I don’t know what the expiration interval is at Technorati, but it can’t be more than a few months.  If they start getting slammed by echorati queries, they might have to reduce the interval.

The perhaps obvious solution is to modify your echorati mechanism to ask for the links, harvest them from Technorati, and register them locally as you would a trackback.  That works when Technorati can identify a post, but I’ve noticed that doesn’t happen with regularity.  That means you’d just be harvesting their main URLs, not the URL of their comment on your specific post.  I’ll take a recent ‘popular’ meyerweb example: my post “Conspiracy Theory.”  Of the first ten “freshest” results returned this morning for that post’s echorati, three lacked a “Read Full Post” link.  Technorati also returned 20 results and claimed the post had 12 links from 12 sources.  I then hit the “rank by authority” filter and got 26 links from 26 sources—what was that about service stability?—and five of the top ten had no “Read Full Post” link.

I suppose that echorati harvesting could be an interesting minor addition to the linking toolbox, but I don’t see it replacing trackbacking and comments any time soon.  The capability will have to be built into popular blogging packages to gain any sort of currency, and even then I suspect it will be presented as a part of trackbacking.  Maybe they’ll be called “linkbacks.”

On a related topic, check out Ping-o-Matic.  It’s already replaced the bookmark group I had set up to do my own pinging.  Okay, so it replaced a bookmark group with a single bookmark.  It’s still progress, right?

I’m feeling much better, thanks.  It’s a good thing, too, because I have to give two presentations tomorrow at NOTACON, and two more (one of them the conference keynote) on Tuesday at the 5th Annual Webmaster Forum.

• Echorati was published on Thursday, April 22nd, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Web category.
• There have been no replies.

c|net seems to have injected a note of disbelief into its headline “AOL plans to revitalize Netscape?” and I suppose they could be forgiven if that was intentional.  My read on the situation is that AOL is going to put their efforts into the portal; the fact that the positions are in Columbus, Ohio, the site of their Compuserve division, was my primary tip-off.  Apparently there will be a new version of the Netscape browser this summer, based on Mozilla 1.7, but that to me bespeaks a piggyback strategy.  They’ll employ enough coders to wrap the Netscape/AOL chrome around Mozilla, and call it macaroni.  Not that this is a bad approach.  I just expect that it means Netscape isn’t about to re-enter the browser development space, nor will they be asking me if I’d like my old job back.  I’d love to be wrong, but I get the sense that they’re going to chase eyeballs.

Enough about my former employer; let’s have me talk for a bit.  I did just that with Russ Weakley of Maxdesign and the Web Standards Group, and the result is now available for your enjoyment, or for your frustration if you’re of certain persuasions.  Font-size zealots of all kinds, I’m looking in your direction.

There was more stuff I was going to talk about, but a severe cold/stomach bug/allergy condition has my brain operating at about one-fifth its usual speed.  Maybe it’ll come back to me tomorrow.  The only reason I’m even typing this entry is that I accidentally took a daytime medication instead of the nighttime equivalent, so now instead of sleeping off the illness I’m propped up in bed snuffling my way through it.  Bleah.

• Cold Comfort was published on Wednesday, April 21st, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Browsers and Interviews categories.
• There have been no replies.