Posts in the Tech Category

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.

Oh, sure, Kat and I have a baby and suddenly everybody wants to get in on the act.  I mean, honestly, how unoriginal can you get?

Okay, all kidding aside: our deepest and most joyful congratulations to the Zeldmans and their soon-to-be-larger family.  I can personally attest that, as many people told me, becoming parents is one of the hardest and most amazing things they will ever experience.

Carolyn’s in the range of four and a half months old now, and appears to be developing very nicely.  She discovered her hands a couple of weeks back, and is now busily trying to sample the taste of every object she encounters.  She’s almost to the point of rolling over; she can get onto her side for a minute, and then she rolls back onto her back.  She’s also a stander: she’ll stand upright for ten or fifteen minutes, if someone’s willing to hold her steady for that long.  We put up the “bouncy seat” a couple of months early, and she absolutely loves it.  She doesn’t even sit upright yet.  The pediatrician was actually kind of impressed by the strength and head control she has at her age.

Of course, we know of a baby two weeks older than her who already has two teeth, and another that’s rolling over constantly and getting close to sitting up on his own.  So it’s not as though we have a super-baby (though she is, obviously, a super baby).  She’s just ahead of the curve in some respects, and no doubt behind in others, the same as every other baby.

All I know is, whenever she looks at me with her gray-blue eyes and she breaks into an enormous smile, I can’t help but think she’s the most perfect baby in the history of the universe… the same as any other parent.

Congratulations again to Jeff and Carrie!

• Little Bundles was published on Friday, April 16th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Carolyn, CSS, and Personal categories.
• There have been no replies.

One of the great privileges of writing More Eric Meyer on CSS was having two wonderful technical reviewers: Porter Glendinning and Dave Shea.  Even better was the chance to have Dave create a CSS Zen Garden design, give it to me as a graphic comp, and creating the CSS needed to make it work.  I describe that process in detail in Project 10 of the book, but as a preview, the design is now available as—and here I take a deep breath to avoid giggling like a celebrity-struck schoolgirl—the one hundredth official Zen Garden design.  The photographs used in the design were all taken by me at the Cleveland Botanical Gardens, but the design itself is all Dave, baby.  Interestingly, I never told Dave where I’d taken the pictures, so the faint thematic echoes of 15 Petals and the Garden’s web site are coincidental.

I will say here and now that design #99, Wiggles the Wonderworm, is an utterly fantastic and delightful concept.  If I could, I’d switch his design with mine, so he could have the #100 slot.  Wiggles rocks my world.

As you can tell, the syndicate hasn’t yet silenced me.  In fact, I got a message from an operative deep inside their organization who says that his boss has met both Mallett and Watterson.  Obviously his boss is a part of the conspiracy.  I’ve let him know that he needs to be extra careful.  Trust no one!  I mean, look at today’s strip.  How much more C&H does it get?  Until next time, courage.

• 15 Petals was published on Wednesday, April 14th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Humor categories.
• There have been no replies.

I got my first paper copy of More Eric Meyer on CSS this morning, so I had to accelerate my update process for the companion site; the project files are now online.  Apparently on many machines, the cover and site colors are a startling dark pink, which isn’t the intent.  On my machine, the color is a deep red, as is the actual book.  Imagine a fire engine made out of tomato soup—that’s pretty much the shade of red.

Either way, it’s still fairly startling.

It’s kind of a weird feeling to have two books come out at almost the same time.  CSS:TDG, Second Edition, arrived just two weeks ago.  Now here’s MEMOC, forming something of a weird acronym duet.  So now I have this small stack of two new books.  The covers are still shiny and creaseless.  They have that hot-off-the-presses crispness.  I almost hate to open them.  I’m always afraid I’ll break their spines, and then I won’t be able to move them any more.

• Wow, Is My Book Red! was published on Monday, April 12th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Books, CSS, and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.

You’ve probably already seen the Gurus vs. Bloggers matchup over at Design By Fire; I quite enjoyed it, and not just because it’s funny.  I found it to be gratifying because I took a close look at the designs, and I think there’s very little doubt about it.  meyerweb’s design just screams “guru,” don’t you think?  (David Robarts does.)  I’m kind of hoping that I get into a future round of the matchup, so I can by completely demolished by the likes of Dave Shea or Doug Bowman.

Of course, I can always counter with cute pictures of Carolyn. She’s suffering through another cold, but that doesn’t seem to prevent her from being just too adorable for words.  Now, I know it isn’t the right finger, but I still can’t help thinking, “One billion dollars!”

For some reason, Kat and I like the show $40 A Day, where host Rachael Ray visits a different city each week and goes through a full day without spending more than $40 on all her meals.  One of this past weekend’s episodes had her visiting Cleveland, calling it “one of the most underrated cities in America.”  Kat and I found it fascinating to watch, getting an outsider’s perspective on the city.  We don’t have the time or space for me to enumerate everything great about this city.  Nonetheless, it was still interesting to hear words of praise from a visitor, even one hosting a show that does what are basically puff pieces about the visited cities.

It didn’t hurt that two of the three restaurants she visited were the always-excellent Tommy’s (where the waiter shown on-camera is one of those guys who’s been there forever) and Trattoria Roman Gardens down in Little Italy, not to mention spent some time at the West Side Market.  I thought the show could have done with a few less “___ ROCKS!” jokes—okay, we get it, the only song the rest of the country associates with us is “Cleveland Rocks.”  Thank you.  It’s time to move on.

Of course, I suppose I might be tired of the whole “rocks” thing because it’s a lot like having people always tell you the sky is blue.  After a while, it gets to be a little bit wearying to keep being repetitively told something you already know.

• Guru By Design? was published on Sunday, April 11th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Carolyn, Cleveland, and CSS categories.
• There have been no replies.

I got word yesterday that More Eric Meyer on CSS has already come back from the printers, so it ought to be available within a week or so.  Woo hoo!  I’ve put up a companion site with the table of contents; the project files will be online soon.  And yes—that really is the cover.

Speaking of books, the second edition of Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide is now available pretty much everywhere.  Over at Amazon, its sales rank has been hovering around 200 for a couple of weeks now, so that’s pretty cool.  I’ve heard from a few readers who already have their copies, and some errata reports have started to come in.  Joy!  It’s always frustrating to finish a book, because I know that the errors that got missed will immediately be spotted by all the readers.  No matter how hard we tried, some errors are going to slip through.  The perfectionist in me quails at that knowledge.

But then, releasing a new book does afford me the chance to be amused by reader reviews.  Here’s one that had me chuckling:

i understand the basics of css already, i just needed something to outline the syntax and concepts in css2 and then just function as a reference. this book did neither, and i’ve found it to be a complete waste.

Yeah, I guess you probably would.  Say it with me, sparky: “Definitive Guide.”  Not “Reference.”  It’s not an outline, and wasn’t when the first edition came out.  If you need a reference with a quick outline, you could always try the CSS2.0 Programmer’s Reference, which has, of all things, an outline of the syntax and concepts of CSS2 and provides a full property reference.  Amazing.

I know you aren’t supposed to judge a book by its cover, but sometimes you can get a little guidance from its title.

Anyone who reads Italian might be interested in an interview with me conducted by Marco Trevisan.  For those who don’t do as the Romans do, the English version should be available in the near future.

Update: Gini‘s sister is doing better, although she was evicted from the hospital even though still suffering a lot of pain.  Ferrett tells me that it looks like some of meyerweb’s readers did contribute to the support fund, and again, Kat and I both thank you for reaching out.

• It’s On Every Channel! was published on Friday, April 9th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Books, CSS, Interviews, Personal, and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.