Six Log: TrackBack and Social Network Tools
“It strikes me that a central service like Blogdex/Popdex/etc, which is already doing a lot of work with determining online social structure via link patterns, could take TrackBack usage one step further.”
Andy did his gradute research on social structures in online communities, mainly in the context of education. We’ve talked a bit about it in the past. It is certainly interesting how a social fabric can develop among people who’ve only ever communicated in writing. I suppose that isn’t new (pen pals, etc), but the ease with which you can find other people who share interests these days is startling.
ckagy Uncategorized
Okay, so the little weather thingie isn’t the current weather after all. I just realized that it does’t update unless I post something.
No matter. I’ll just do it this way — we’re cold. Really cold. In the teens with windchill down around 0F. For us, that’s cold. My blood has really thinned these past years.
ckagy Uncategorized
Lonely Planet Destination Brussels
On the way to and from Uganda I have to stop in Brussels. On the way back home, I’m planning to take a day or two there and turn it into a long weekend.
Here’s the Lonely Planet link for Belgium in general.
ckagy Uncategorized
I’ve added a little thingie with the current weather above the calendar on the right of this page. I’ve made it a link, so that if you click on it you will see a more complete forcast for home. On that more detailed page I’ve also added the forcast and conditions for Kampala, Uganda, my next trip stop. It looks pretty bad at the moment, but I’ll clean it up and make it look good soonish.
I’m getting the weather feed from InterceptVector.
ckagy Uncategorized
I’m on the way to figuring out what to do while I’m in Uganda. Here are some sites I’ve found that I’m exploring:
ckagy Uncategorized
I’ve downloaded a new news aggregator. This little desktop tool lets me monitor other sites for updated content and it fetches the updates for me so I can read them locally. I saw first mention of it on Mark Pilgrim’s site. The developer is actively working on this and posting his progress on a development site (which I can monitor and read using his tool, by the way).
ckagy Uncategorized
Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report
One day I realized XHTML 2 was not coming soon to a browser near me.
Next day I realized the sky was not falling.
ckagy Uncategorized
Semantic obsolescence [dive into mark]
"Which means that, after keeping up with all the latest standards, painstakingly marking up all my content, and validating every last page on my site, I'm still stuck in a dead end."
Really. What’s a person supposed to do? Andy and I have advocated for the use of proper HTML and CSS, etc within our company. Part of our argument was portability, consistency and compatibility going forward. (Being able to separate content from presentation did allow us to scale our work beyond one or two people per project.)
User agent incompatibilities are very real. Accessibility is a big issue with us and a constant source of annoyance is that screen readers aren’t themselves user agents. They simply scrape the page source provided by a browser. Again, standards go out the window. There is no use for some of the CSS media types that focus on non-visual presentation.
Of course the problems are not just that the W3C may be changing the specs around. The companies that produce web browsers, screen readers, handheld devices, etc, do not correctly implement the recommendations either. Progress has been made in this over the last year, but dramatically changing the standard, like the W3C is proposing, will set things back quite a ways.
"Standards are bullshit. XHTML is a crock. The W3C is irrelevant."
Mark might just be right…
ckagy Uncategorized
I’m to travel to Uganda in February. This place was recommended as a nice get-away for when I tire of Kampala. The Jinja Nile Resort is at the headwaters of the Nile on Lake Victoria, about 90 minutes outside of Kampala.
ckagy Uncategorized