Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I don’t usually read warbloggers, or political blogs more generally. For one thing, they’re more likely to use Blogger, while the geek blogs all have RSS feeds. Blog technology, or lack of it, affects my blog reading more than I ever thought it would when I innocently downloaded NetNewsWire Lite. I’m far, far more likely to read content that’s fully syndicated, like mine, Perversion Tracker’s, and Phil Ringnalda’s, because it shows up right there in NetNewsWire. Next come the blogs that syndicate a summary like Mac OS X Hints - most of the Mac news sites and MovableType blogs do at least that much. The third tier of blogs are those that only syndicate titles, a category which would hardly exist without the half-baked efforts of LiveJournal at providing RSS feeds.

RSS works at the entry level rather than the page level. I don’t right-arrow on nearly as many LJ entries as I used to read before RSS changed my life. I hardly read geek blogs before NetNewsWire, and now I follow a bunch of them. It’s a victory of content over socializing; content won because it costs me fewer click-taxes. Blog content tends to be freestanding and longer, while LJ entries are shorter and more enmeshed in the whole LJ tangle of threads, rumors, memes and wanks. So I get more content per click from blogs.

If Blogger supported RSS, I’d be keeping up better with Lori, who is TNG, and Mike, who’s into politics. Blogger is the only major blogging tool left without free support for some sort of aggregation. I don’t think it’s a wise policy to charge for RSS feeds since it’s not the user who is inconvenienced by their absence - it’s the reader. There’s no direct incentive for Mike to pay money because I want a feed, yet Blogger looks bad for not supporting technology everyone else gives away for free.

Bad Blogger! Get your new sugar daddy to spring for free feeds.

Geek humor: a picture of an end tag

Well, if extensive work on my encyclopedia counts, then I’ve been keeping up with NaNoEdMo and then some. Otherwise, I’m four hours behind schedule already.

The lastest addition to my XML encyclopedia is hyperlinks - or in this case, just cross-references between my entries. I was making them directly with XLink, but that was too much typing so I switched to a method of turning plain text into links using JavaScript. I found it in an article on the Apple developers’ site: XML Transformations with CSS and DOM. It took a bit of time to get them working - trying to loop through the different kinds of cross-references led to many mysterious parsing errors in Chimera (uh, Camino), so I switched to one big loop that covered all crosslink cases. Now when I click on a crosslink, it takes me directly to the appropriate entry, and I only had to type “href” once (in the JavaScript file).

Now if only XML could do my dishes, too…

Mac link of the day: Browsers in the Hands of an Angry God - it’s offensive and silly and despite it all, hilarious.

If you don’t follow all the browser technobabble or if you need a bigger push to convert to the One True Browser, take a look at this article on how one blogger switched to Mozilla. He mentioned an old article, A Standard for Site Organization, which was a nice idea but doesn’t seem to have caught on. I surfed around the latter site, and found this amusing prediction from 1999 that “inside of a year” the blogging fad would have run its course. I preferred a newer theory I spotted in my blog rounds but can’t track down now: blogs will eventually replace the Usenet newsgroups.

Cool image of the day: a hotrod iBook

So I want to buy a new iMac, I really do, but the issue is: where? Do I order it from the on-line Apple Store? Do I hike over to the Apple retail store at the CambridgeSide Galleria for that hands-on, immediate gratification? Do I support my local reseller? Or is an on-line MacMall, with its rebates and free printers, for me?

For reasons I don’t recall, I joined the Boston Macintosh Users Group, and they also have an on-line store for members. The deals look the same as at MacMall, at least on the new macs. By the way, that free memory thing is a scam - they charge you most of the cost of the memory, but call it an installation fee. How about they send me the free memory, I open the bottom cover, pop it in, and close the cover? I won’t even charge them $40 to do it.

So, about that crate… My crates aren’t milk crates, they’re wooden crates with both the top and bottom open - no good for transporting milk, but marginally useful as shelves. Right now the green crates are concealing my beige plastic crates, which are also not milkcrates but the sorts of plastic crates you buy in college instead of stealing milkcrates. The milk confusion arose from the paint I used, milk paint from The Old Fashioned Milk Paint Co. Those who don’t know what color bayberry green is can look at their color chart.

Milk paint is non-toxic and doesn’t stink up your apartment, even in the winter with the kitchen window barely cracked open. I just made the happy discovery that the blah beige crates could be concealed inside the exciting green crates this weekend, and now I’ve reduced the general crate-count in my apartment, leaving more room for the rocking chair.

The rocking chair has been a floor-space problem ever since I dragged it in off the front sidewalk. The crates are also Garbage Nouveau, as are the low bookshelves. There’s also a large selection of Post-Veronica chairs, and the remainder of my decor is Late American Thrift Shop.

The point being, I’m cheap. I don’t even have a TV or a stereo, just a couple of boom boxes that date back to when they were called boom boxes. No VCR, no microwave, no cable. The only piece of furniture I bought new was a set of black wire bookshelves to match the black metal Garbage Nouveau rocking chair, unless you consider the Powerbook a piece of furniture. (The lamp was provided by Veronica.)

So yes, my furniture was discarded by other people, but it’s still nice. If it’s not nice, I paint it green and then it’s nice. I’m also picky about food - you won’t catch me cooking store-brand pasta. Barilla is the brand for me. You only live once, and there’s no excuse for anything less than the genuine Italian article.

So it never ceases to surprise me when people complain about their PC’s. I don’t mean people (like me) who get paid to work with PC’s - I mean non-geeks who buy these things and bring them into their homes and sit in front of them for large chunks of their free time. If you don’t like PC’s, or if you can’t get them to run stable, then you should get a Mac. You only live once, and you shouldn’t be wasting your time fighting with your computer, or retyping the last hour’s work that it crashed and burned. In the long run, the aggravation is just not worth the (apparent) savings. If you’re really all that poor, buy a used mac. The virtual thrift-shop is open.

Life is short. Switch.

Instructions are now up at Ranchero.com for using NetNewsWire to post to a MovableType blog. This will spare me the trouble of trying out EspressoBlog, another Mac-only program that lets you post to MT and (theoretically) Blogger weblogs.

On the down side, I can’t try either of these blogging interfaces yet, because both NetNewsWire (as opposed to NetNewsWire Lite) and EspressoBlog require MacOS 10.2 (Jaguar), and I’m still running OS 10.1.5 (here, kitty, kitty?). I’m getting a new 17″ iMac soon, and my folder of Jaguar-only things to install and/or do with my new Mac is growing daily.

If I weren’t getting the new iMac, I’d be getting annoyed by now. I can understand Apple doing the Jaguar-only thing with new software like iCal - Apple is the one who gets the $129.00 when someone upgrades to 10.2 - but I don’t understand why other mac developers are following in Apple’s upgrade-forcing footsteps. It used to be that mac developers went out of their way to support every version of the OS back to 7. Now no one even feels obliged to provide an excuse for not supporting 10.1.5.

I’m a geek, so I can imagine what sorts of technical difficulties would come up with supporting 10.1.5 and excuse developers for not surmounting them. What I can’t imagine is going around saying you only support 10.2 without saying why, or whether you expect to support 10.1.5 in the future. It makes the buyer nervous. Am I going to have to buy 10.3, and 10.4, and so on, just to run your software? Say it isn’t so.

iBlog is a great idea. It lets you both blog and subscribe to RSS feeds. As far as I can tell, iBlog publishes to a .mac account, not to a pre-existing blog.

I have just one question: how long will they get away with using the Apple website’s look-and-feel? They had me fooled until I looked at the URL.

The Blog Realm has cleared up the mystery of RSS for me. Now I can tell people Rich Site Summary when they ask.

For those unfortunates without a Mac who cannot run NetNewsWire, here’s a popular RSS aggregator that runs on Windows (as well as Mac and Linux): AmphetaDesk. I’m trying it out at work now - the option to run it on a server sounds useful.

I’m still working on that full RSS feed for the blog. I’ll use RSS 2.0 for it, but it won’t happen today. For now, my feed is just extracts.

I should point out that RSS makes weblog reading very much like reading USENET. –Mark A. Hershberger in Phil Ringnalda’s comments

I’m still up, reading all the blogs I never get around to because it’s just so difficult to follow fifteen geek blogs and fifteen fan blogs. At first I found the name NetNewsWire a little confusing, since I think of news as NNTP (e.g., alt.startrek.creative), but now I se that just as newsgroups are much more convenient than mailing lists, RSS is much more convenient than web pages. Less clicking around means fewer fic taxes.

At the moment, I’m trying to figure out how to get a second RSS feed here, one that does the whole entry content rather than the entry summary (which MT generates automatically). Yes, I should be sleeping rather than geeking, but RSS is just too cool for words.

I checked out the Surfin’ Safari blog today and ended up at inessential.com, blog of the maker of NetNewsWire for MacOS X. I also grabbed TigerLaunch while I was there.

NetNewsWire looks like a newsreader or an email program, but instead, it reads blogs and other RSS newsfeeds. I set it up to read my blog and others, along with some of the defaults. Here’s a screenshot for anyone who doesn’t grok RSS, the way I didn’t until very recently. It’s a cool little app, in which you navigate between the panels with the tab key, through the blogs and entries with the up and down arrows, and open the original page in your default browser with the right arrow. It’s much simpler than browsing through all the pages individually, and cleaner than a friends page.

I’ve added a bunch of LJ blogs, whose RSS URLs look like this: http://www.livejournal.com/users/synaesthete7/rss. Not surprisingly, they’re pretty flakey with whether they provide summaries. MovableType does summaries by default in your index.rdf page. I’ve linked the RSS feed (the MT “syndicate” link) using one of the buttons from antipixel:
You, too, can be an RSS addict.