unraveled

June 2003 Archive

Postcard

Postcard

About Posted Elsewhere

Posted Elsewhere is a new feature of unraveled, accessible from the right-hand menu. It’s simply a miniblog of my selected comments on other weblogs.

I previously mentioned this idea when I spotted it on A Whole Lotta Nothing. I emailed Matt Haughey, and he briefly explained how he did it. He installed the standalone TrackBack implementation and used TrackBack’s content aggregation feature to aggregate his comments. (A Beginners Guide to TrackBack, under “Content Aggregation” explains this feature well.)

I followed Matt Haughey’s example, and now have my own Posted Elsewhere and Posted Elsewhere RSS feed. Here’s how to add a Posted Elsewhere feature to your weblog:

  1. Download the standalone TrackBack implementation.
  2. Install standalone TrackBack according to the documentation.
  3. Create a new weblog in Movable Type.
  4. Create a new index template called “Main Index” with this index template. Customize this template as necessary.
  5. If you wish to have an RSS feed to accompany your weblog, create a new index template called “RSS 2.0 Index” with this index template. Again, customize this template as necessary.
  6. Create a new category in the new weblog, and name it whatever you wish.
  7. Click “Edit category attributes,” and set “Accept incoming TrackBack pings” to on.
  8. Click Save, and the TrackBack URL for this category will be shown.
  9. On line 201 of tb.cgi (the standalone TrackBack script) enter value="trackback_url" within the input named ping_url, where trackback_url is the TrackBack URL from step 8.

You’re now ready to send pings to your weblog. After you’ve posted a comment on another weblog that you would like to include, follow these steps to ping your weblog:

  1. Open http://yourserver.com/pathto/tb.cgi?__mode=send_form in your browser.
  2. Copy your comment text up to 255 characters. (I use Word’s wordcount feature to quickly trim the comment text.) Update: See Matt Haughey’s comment below.
  3. Paste the comment excerpt into the excerpt field, and complete the form by entering the original entry title, blog name and permalink URL of the original entry.
  4. Click Send. If the ping was successful, the form will report “Ping successfully sent.”
  5. Check your index and RSS feed to make sure they’re displaying your pings correctly.

I hope you found this tutorial helpful, and I look forward to seeing other’s implementations of Posted Elsewhere.

The Right to Skip, Mute and Delete

Huntsman v. Soderbergh is an interesting court case happening right now that involves “consumer use of software and hardware to skip scenes of sex and violence and to mute profanity on DVDs of films they have purchased.” (via EFFector)

I’m with the EFF on this. If I own a DVD, I have the right to do anything I want with it in the privacy of my own home. I can rightfully skip all scenes with profanity, sex or Kevin Costner. The same goes for books, music, television and the Web. I can take a marker and cross out certain words in my books, listen to my music at two times the normal speed, automatically mute all television commercials, or filter out all images from web pages.

It’s your media. Tear it up if you choose.

Poll: I want to hear Joshua…

I want to hear Joshua…

rambling aimlessly.
bar 42.3%
telling a story.
bar 19.2%
singing a song.
bar 19.2%
reading a poem.
bar 19.2%

The poll is over. Thanks to the 26 visitors who responded. Within the next few weeks, I’ll be posting an mp3 of myself rambling aimlessly. I was hoping that wouldn’t win as I don’t think I’m very good at rambling aimlessly, but I’ll do my best.

Update: you can hear me rambling here.

On Internet Explorer’s Stasis

It’s upsetting to know that there will be no more standalone versions of IE/Win and IE/Mac is dead. At the same time, I can’t help but leave a sigh of relief as a soon to be graduate student, taking leave from web development to study the much broader field of human computer interaction and interaction design. The evolution of web design is and always will be a great interest of mine, but I’m not keen on letting one company’s business decisions affect my entire profession.

My professional forecast calls for blue skies. I’ll always be welcome to web design, but it’s hard to be comfortably accommodating when current conditions are overcast.

Gruber and Haughey on TrackBack

DaringFireball on TrackBack

There’s a nice critique of TrackBack over at Daring Fireball that has a lot of people talking. John Gruber argues that linking combined with referrer tracking “should be enough,” and that “TrackBack is unnecessary as a connector between web sites.”

By itself, TrackBack isn’t necessary, but for many people, referrers aren’t enough. TrackBack becomes necessary because:

There are a number of good comments on John’s critique at onfocus.

Which brings me to…

Haughey’s Posted Elsewhere

Matt Haughey commented on the onfocus post mentioned above and mentioned his Posted Elsewhere miniblog, which can be found on his site on the lower right. I asked him about it via email, and he told me that he does it using the Movable Type standalone TrackBack script. After he makes a comment elsewhere, he uses the script to ping his Posted Elsewhere category with a title, blog name, excerpt and permalink URL, which then show up on his site. The downside to this is that he has to fill in the standalone form whenever he makes a comment. This makes me think it would be great if there was a “TrackBack URL” input within the comment form of TrackBack enabled weblogs. Then he could leave a comment and ping his Posted Elsewhere category, all in one step.

Public Domain, Body Count Revisited

Reclaim the Public Domain

Every year, a large number of works remain under copyright protection even though they have no commercial value. Additionally, due to their copyright, many of these works are not being preserved or archived in any form. This is ridiculous.

Lawrence Lessig has a solution:

One solution in particular that we ask Congress to consider is the Public Domain Enhancement Act. See http://eldred.cc. This statute would require American copyright owners to pay a very low fee (for example, $1) fifty years after a copyrighted work was published. If the owner pays the fee, the copyright will continue for whatever duration Congress sets. But if the copyright is not worth even $1 to the owner, then we believe the work should pass into the public domain.

If this resonates with you, please consider signing the petition and passing the word.

Iraq Body Count Revisited

Min and max, respectively:

Iraq Body Count Counter

Why did we go to war with Iraq again? Oh, because Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Right.

Simplicity Does It Better

Simple Cell Phone Challenge

David Pogue challenged cellular carriers to send him their simplest models that were designed best for that familiar past time: talking. Out of eight contenders, one phone shined through. The winner, by a huge margin, is the Kyocera 2325. (via SVN)

Clip-n-Seal

DL Byron from Texturadesign told me about his new invention called Clip-n-Seal:

The angle of the story is blogger/web designer guy gets tired of slogging through the brutal post-dotcom-bubble economy and decides to invent a product and bring it to market. The result is Clip-n-Seal.

Clip-n-Seal is an innovative product that provides a better way to close and reseal opened bags: “the air- and watertight seal will keep your food fresh for weeks, even months.” Can your bag clips do that?

Downloading Mozilla Is Hard

I’ve been thinking about this luxury web idea and getting users to try Mozilla over Internet Explorer. So I’m over at mozilla.org, browsing their site and wondering how we’re going to convince people to try Mozilla when it’s so hard to download the browser from their site.

When I want to download software, the first link or button I look for is one that says, “Download.” Internet Explorer’s homepage puts a download link front and center. Opera’s homepage includes a download link in the navigation.

If The Mozilla Organization wants people to use their browser, why are the download links pushed to the bottom right of the homepage, probably the last place that people look? Why not include a download link in the navigation? I realize Mozilla is an open source community, and no one is getting paid to maintain the site, but surely there’s an information designer or information architect out there willing to give mozilla.org some volunteer time.

Recording Live MP3 Files

I need a handheld device that records live voice in MP3 files (or another Mac compatible file format). I found the PoGo RipFlash Player, but it’s only Windows compatible. Does anyone know of any devices like this one that work on a Mac? If not, what’s my best option for getting MP3s into my iMac from a portable device?

The Luxury Web Experience

I spoke too fast, both here and on Web Graphics, after learning about the latest Internet Explorer news. In my mind, and perhaps in others’ minds, it was quickly becoming another browser upgrade campaign.

Thankfully, Dave Shea has steadied the boat:

Repeating the same campaign would be disasterous [sic] for any credibility the web development community has garnered in the past few years…Destructive reasoning against IE isn’t going to solve any of our problems, it’ll only work against us. Instead, let’s address why a user might want Opera, or Mozilla. Sell a new browser to them by luring, don’t shame them into upgrading…Start a marketing campaign.

Dave is absolutely right. If this campaign is going to do any good, it needs a positive, constructive message. And Dave already has an idea of what that message should be: The Luxury Web Experience.

Update: Dave has created a new post to get volunteers for this evolving campaign.

IE 6 CSS Bugs on This Website

Brian Countryman from Microsoft says, “there will be no future standalone installations [of Internet Explorer]. IE6 SP1 is the final standalone installation.” He also remarks, “Further improvements to IE will require enhancements to the underlying OS.”

IE 6 has between 50 —- 64% of the browser share, more CSS bugs than any other major browser that visits this site, and they’re not going to fix it. This has got to be a mistake. On top of that, they’re saying that fixing the bugs requires enhancements to the underlying OS. Do they really think we’re that stupid?

If all holds true, web designers will have to deal with IE6 and all of its bugs until Windows 98 —- XP (01) is phased out of the market. Windows 95 is still in use. You do the math.

My answer to this ludicrous annoucement is “IE 6 CSS Bugs on This Website,” now at the bottom of the right-hand menu.

I have patience for buggy browsers. But I have no patience for a multi-billion dollar company who makes the most widely used web browser then says they can’t update it until their next OS release, screwing over both developers and users. Send a message to Microsoft and tell them that you expect more from a company of their stature and influence.

Update: Craig Saila has a great entry on petitioning browsers to fix CSS bugs, especially Internet Explorer.

(Hat tip and a happy anniversary to Zeldman)

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