Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

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…

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 thought I’d spend the holiday writing, but instead I made my own color picker. It’s a table of all 4096 web-smart colors, but don’t go there. The page is half a megabyte, so it’s a bit of a slow download and will also run up my bandwidth quota. I’ve already hit 20MB today just testing it. The page looks like this:

The arrangement leaves much to be desired, but a better one will have to wait for another holiday weekend. When you click on one of the colors, you get a popup in that color, with the hex color value in black and white text. The cell size can be adjusted from 8 to 16 pixels.

To see what it’s like without a long download, try the little version (popup or full page), which gives those 27 colors out of the 4096 total which are closest to the web-safe color #6699cc.

If you like it, you can download the whole thing, unzip it and open it locally in a browser: color.tar.gz (32kb). The main page is the one with 4096 in the title. If you’re sneaky enough, you can even find the real page on-site and play with it at freeshell’s expense.

I should mention that none of the color pages have been tested on IE, only Mozilla and Chimera. Click at your own risk.

I couldn’t find an easy way to add palettes to the Mac OS X color picker, so I looked for on-line color pickers to help me design a seventh stylesheet for the blog. Here’s a nice page of on-line color picker reviews from the web-graphics.com color blog. I also took a look at Google Directory’s list of color pickers.

Here’s a 5-k winning blogger with the world’s simplest on-line color picker. He also has a bookmarklet for identifying the colors used in a website. Rather than steal someone else’s color scheme, you can check out these color scheming links.

A while back, Mac Edition called for more web colors and the web-smart palette was born at more Crayons, which also has a cool color weblog, through which I found a snarky essay on what I’ve always thought of as Eighties colors.

I’ve been looking around for a 2D version of more Crayons’ 3D color cube, similar to the nice color layouts of the 216 web-safe colors at Visibone, but so far, no dice. I haven’t found anything based on the 4096 colors but more Crayons’ own color slider and slices of their color cube. I’d like something I can run off-line, but they have no downloadable utilities and I don’t feel like pagesucking the entire site. So I think I’ll make my own 2D color palette. Later.

I’ve changed the style switching links to gifs, as seen in Talk to Oneself, who replied to my recent ping saying Mozilla had been fixed. Unfortunately, the babelfish translation didn’t throw any further light on the entry. (I shudder to think what babelfish will do to that sentence alone.)

Anyway, try out the images, keeping a couple of things in mind:
 
The LCARS styles work properly only in Mozilla-based browsers.

The page must be reloaded when switching to or from Technicolor because of the extra javascript.

The annoying part is how they go on referring to it as a free service. I get a lot of free services, and not a single one of them comes with invoices due. They’ll get $9.95 for what everyone else gives away free when they pry it out of my cold, dead fingers. This means I’ll go back to using Crosswinds as my mirror, since it’s back up, more or less, and I did finally get all my Voyager fic up there tonight before I heard this bad news.

The email has been resized to fit your screen. Emphasis on free added, though the capitalization is original. If you don’t see it, click “more.”

(more…)

I was looking through my logs earlier today, trying to figure out why my hits had gone up recently, and I found some foreign links. For example, Talk to Oneself 2 wrote about my styleswitcher. I ran it through Babelfish, along with the other two sites linked there, but that didn’t make it any clearer to me. If you go to the main page, the styleswitcher has been implemented with some nice little graphics. Unfortunately, the script has suffered in translation as well - it only works in IE. I tried a few Mozilla-based browsers and they were all broken.

Pretty site of the day: the Phoenix Help pages at Texturizer, though the particular page linked here uses a table rather than pure CSS

I played with Phoenix at work today. The last time I tried it, back in version 0.1, I wasn’t impressed. Now it’s up to version 0.5, and it’s very nice when you add the Preferences Toolbar and a theme. It almost makes Windows livable.

I also found the guy who did the old style-switching Mozilla page that partly inspired my own style-switching efforts.

There’s a new build of Chimera out: 0.6 (2002122004). I’ve been using it all day and it hasn’t crashed yet. It does do this freaky thing where the preference icons go blurry at times, but that’s not enough to drive me back to Mozilla 1.3a.

One thing my new Chimera does better than its heftier parent, Mozilla, is display raw XML with CSS. It did better with this example from the Apple developers site. Maybe my Mozilla problem (that the titles were not turned into links) was just a bug in the most recent alpha release; Mozilla claims to have extensive XML support.

You’re probably in skim mode by now. If you’ve never understood the appeal of XML, take a look at A List Apart’s painless introduction to Using XML. If you know enough about XML to fear the acronym proliferation to which it inevitably leads, check out XSL Considered Harmful, an old article alleging that XSL would set XML back two or three years. I think the author’s dire predictions came true with a vengeance.

My sick fascination with XML stems from my dreams of an ideal content management system. Right now, my fiction is divided between plain text files with ASC headers, hand-converted HTML versions with handmade indices, and LaTeX source for my original fiction. I keep notes and related information in plain text files, in HTML pages (my own, or downloaded from useful Voyager sites), or in the TWiki I run locally on my Mac. TWiki is a nice solution, but it’s perl-based and annoyingly slow at times. I’d rather have something I could edit in Emacs, view in a browser, and convert to other formats easily. I know XML is the way to go, but getting there requires more free time than I’ve had to spare lately.

I’m not looking for fancy ways of combining XML and XHTML, though that sounds cool. I’d like to start with a simple DTD and a basic CSS stylesheet to go with it, so I can view my own stories on my own lovely mac using my own standards-compliant browsers. Conversion to web and printable forms are future goals, as is FicML for all. I’m hoping this teixlite tutorial will get me set up locally.