Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

WordPress, web development, and world domination.

Monthly Archives: October 2002

More validation than you can shake a stick at

I spent a few minutes digging through my HTML and my blogging software source, and this page now validates: It still looks like poo in Netscape 4, but if you’re using an 8 year old browser, you should probably expect most modern pages to look like poo. Upgrade, you freaks! For those of you who complain about the size of the download — about 11MB for the Windows version of Mozilla — there’s a version … Continue reading

Back to Daylight Wasting Time

This weekend, we in the United States “fall back”, as Daylight Saving Time comes to an end. Personally, I agree with Rick & Bubba — we should just leave the clocks alone. Oh sure, you might argue that we “gain an hour”, and that it will feel like we’re getting an extra hour of sleep in the morning. But that’s a red-herring, and you know it. Tampering with time is dangerous. Just ask any Star … Continue reading

Spooky!

I’ve spent some spare minutes here and there over the last several days working on a new theme for the site. Try out my Halloween Theme. Theme switching requires Javascript and at least a moderately modern browser. Even Netscape 4 users can get some of the effects (though it messes up the menus on the left for some reason). One of these days I’m going to clean up my HTML and do some more interesting … Continue reading

Widespread Distribution of Thought

Excellent comments on copyright law over on Brent’s site. And that’s only one issue that probably has our Founding Fathers rolling in their graves. The current state of Copyright, Patent, and Trademark law in the United States is really pretty shameful. It seems as though big money interests have bought and paid for the right to “own” any kind of intellectual property in perpetuam, and to control where and when the average citizen may have … Continue reading

Valid RSS Button

You can now vote for your favorite RSS link button. Vote for mine! Vote for mine! I submitted two (one optimized for dark backgrounds, one for light backgrounds). So if you do vote for mine, choose the one for light backgrounds (the one in the lower left — the other one looks like it’s got a black magic marker smear under the checkmark), just to keep the votes consolidated. I’m going to ask mark to … Continue reading

RSS Validation

Another link for Mark…. After his post on RSS validation, I checked my feed and found that it wasn’t valid (improper formats for my language and pubdate elements). Fixed. I’ve also put in fixes to the pubdate such that it will reflect the timestamp of the latest article posted here, rather than always using the current time (and thus negating any caching strategies used by the clients checking the feed).

Oldest Evidence of Jesus?

Scholars are studying an ancient ossuary (burial box) which may contain the remains of Jesus Christ’s brother. The box bears an Aramaic inscription which translates to “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.” “It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that these three names refer to the personages so identified in the New Testament,” said Hershel Shanks, editor of Biblical Archaeology Review. The article notes that while most scholars agree that Jesus was a real person, … Continue reading

Further Reading

Mark Pilgrim is a source of a lot of my web-related reading these days. He’s sharp and stays on top of current happenings in the bleeding edge of the web. I’m not sure I like the summaries in his “Further reading” list (it clutters up the page, IMHO). But I’m all about the new RSS feed. I’ve added it to my FeedReader list.