brentashley

I’m reading David Weinberger’s Small Pieces Loosely Joined, an enjoyable insightful commentary into the social impact of the internet.

David has a kids’ version of Small Pieces that reads very well for 10-15 yr olds. As one of the online comments says:

[the kids version is] Like a scalemodel (clue) train

I’m at one of those awkward passes, where I’ve got so many things lined up to do that I’m at an impasse where to start. I’ve just been sitting here frozen in front of the keyboard, my mind swimming with the daunting array of tasks ahead of me. Time to kick my butt into gear.

One of those things is to get some blogging flowing again. I’ve always leaned towards blogging only when I have something to say rather than forcing a regular blurb out perhaps before one is ready. There’s a middle ground to that though, I suspect, where I encourage myself to seek blog inspiration in order to whet my appetite for a good rant or discourse, thus keeping up the flow.

I guess it’s my duty to link to a few people too, and quote lots of stuff I’m sure you’ve all seen elsewhere anyhow, lest I get branded a narcissistic snob by the demablogues who contend that there are right and wrong ways to blog, and those who open their blog at the little end are deserving of pejorative labels.

From BayswaterFarm[ via scripting.com]:

Tolerance is all very well, but how does a tolerant society tolerate the intolerant?

That just about sums up the popular misunderstanding of Pim Fortuyn’s views.

I assume you’ve been following the Pim story, and have read Adam’s thoughts.

Tim’s been doing some programming with RSS and learning a thing or two.

Not to get behind, I’m working with Scott Johnson on some RSS stuff and wrote a test harness for a routine to clean up the descriptions in a feed, removing or escaping html, truncating description size, etc.

I’ve been following the debate about whether Jenny should truncate her feed., so it occurs to me it doesn’t matter any more whether she does or not. As long as I use my new handy-dandy RSS cleansing proxy, I can control it myself.

I’ve saved a piece of Scott’s feed as an example since he’s got some html in it and his entries are long. Here’s the raw feed

If you use my cleanser, you get this result

The feed parameter of course is required. I’ve added optional parameters too –

limit sets the byte limit to truncate the feed at, or 0 for all of it. defaults to 500 bytes

method allows you to specify whether you want all tags removed from the feed (remove) or just have ampersands escaped so it doesn’t mess up your aggregator output or cause script security concerns (amp). Defaults to remove.

More examples: limit to 50 bytes, amp method

I’ll leave this available for a day or two, but after that, you’ll have to do it yourself – I don’t need the entire world’s RSS calls proxied through my server.

I recently had a remote scripting support question about Netscape to which I responded:

You don’t say what version of Netscape. If it’s 4.x, I don’t even have it
loaded any more, so I can’t debug it at all. It’s time to let it break and
force people to wake up and get a decent browser.

The response I received said (edited for clarity):

The version I use is 4.79. The application has to be compatible with every browser.

No it does NOT have to be compatible with EVERY browser. Are you making it work with Lynx? Are you making it work with Spyglass Mosaic 1.0? Are you making it work with Cello? Are you making it work with Netscape 2.0? Of course not. They’re all irrelevant to web applications. So too is NS4.x but it won’t ever lay down and die as long as people keep propping it up with superhuman hacks.

I was describing Netscape Communicator 4.x today in a BlogChat discussion with Albert Delgado, who runs the Whittier School site and is a very active guy in education and technology.

10:08:35 brent: Netscape 4.x is DEFINITELY not up to the task.
10:08:51 brent: it’s a horse and buggy.
10:09:10 brent: or rather it’s hoarse and buggy.
10:09:12 brent: heh heh

Tim Aiello has noticed that big publishing is realizing there is some value in the internet. Go read what Tim has to say.

I worked closely with Tim on the QuikkTutor product – a remarkably advanced live internet collaboration tool that works entirely within the browser.

Wired News reports that the Dallas Morning News has a daft, impossible to enforce Terms of Service page forbidding deep linking on their site. You MUST link only to their main page, they say, as they contend that by using their site you have entered into a legal agreement to be bound by these terms that are behind an unobtrusive link at the bottom of their page that you’re not forced to view.

Of course, they do nothing at all to enforce this via the web server. Anybody with even the remotest clue of running a web server could enforce single-point entry. But NOOOO, they’d rather fritter away their lives in petty litigation about linking than simply stop it from being possible.

It makes you wonder whether their web services people must be in collusion with the guys they get to do their cease and desist letters.