The Macintosh crowd is all abuzz about the new Apple web browser, called Safari. It’s apparently based on the KHTML rendering engine, and has a few bugs. The problem is, this makes Yet Another Browser that web designers have to worry about, because Safari has it’s own unique set of bugs different from other existing browsers. Mark Pilgrim asks should Safari be intentionally buggy? My answer would have to be, “Yes. Temporarily.” Since the Safari … Continue reading
Yesterday was just full of map references. Another cool thing I found out about is the Jabber World Map. If you are a Jabber user, you can register with the map notifier, and your status will show up on the map. You’ll have to email your location name and lat/long coords to the administrator (instructions are at the bottom of the web page, below the map). I’ll probably hack some Jabber features into my blog … Continue reading
Looks like Rev. Jim (no relation to the evangelist who used to visit college campuses, I’m sure) has also been thinking about blogware. “A weblogging application? Okay, that’s pretty easy, really. Just build a model to access the data and work from there. Well, what should the model include? Weblogging stuff, obviously. How about comments, trackback and pingback? I guess I could stuff that in here, but that might be overloading things a bit. They … Continue reading
Geography rules. GeoURL Bomb my house GeoTags The Pepys Project I’ve been trying to work out some sort of concensus for how to include location info in FOAF files. It seems that my current implementation is too US-centric. The folks in the UK don’t like the use of the “StateOrProvince” terminology. I’m going to try switching to vCard terms (“Locality”, “Region”). vCard also has support for lat/long coords, so that might be better all-around.
One of my favorite science fiction authors has a blog. Gibson is often called the father of the cyberpunk movement. His descriptions of console cowboys cruising cyberspace definitely struck a chord with many a nethead in books like Neuromancer and Count Zero. He’s made the classic mistake, the one he’s sworn he’d never make. He stole from his employers. He kept something for himself and tried to move it through a fence in Amsterdam. He … Continue reading
I’ve hacked together support for Pingbacks. There are pros and cons to Trackback and Pingback. Pingback is more automated. Trackback has wider support because it is integrated into the popular Movable Type blogware. To speed implementation, I borrowed some of my code from the b2 blog system. Specifically, the code for sending a Pingback ping. But I coded the XML-RPC server-side pingback.ping method for incoming pings on my own. Currently, it’s still not fully tested. … Continue reading
When I implemented Trackback support here, one snag I ran up against is that I typically post to my website via the MetaWeblog API (using the very cool w.Bloggar client app), and the blog posting APIs don’t provide any inherent way to provide Trackback URLs. Nor should they, as that doesn’t really fall under the API’s core functionality. However, it still seemed wasteful to have to set up a separate web form just for doing … Continue reading
I worked on a couple of new features for this blog over the past couple of weeks. The first is an About Page, with information about the site and its author. It’s still incomplete, but at least it’s a start. The other is that I’ve added Trackback support. I’m also working on support for Pingback. Trackbacks and Pingbacks are methods for weblogs to recognize when another site has referenced them. For example, I’ll ping a … Continue reading
I hope everyone had a good holiday. We had loads of fun at Castle Campbell. The kids got so many presents that they still haven’t opened them all up. We got to take a road trip to visit my mother and grandparents, which meant that we ate lots of good food. Not that we don’t get good food at home, mind you 🙂 I received several nice gifts, including a ZipZaps mini RC car (a … Continue reading