Competition

October 17, 2005

Bloglines gets hotkeys
It's been great to see the new Google RSS Reader the last couple of weeks. It's the closest an online RSS reader has come to being great. I haven't yet tried the NewsGator online tool that I'll be entitled to as a Net News Wire customer but of the free newsreaders Google has a great one. However the competition has been good. As seen here Bloglines which has been around for a while and could have done hotkeys at any point in the past didn't do it until Google forced them to.

Frustration with IE 6

October 15, 2005

It has been a frustrating day trying to deal with the CSS bugs in Internet Explorer. This site shows up nicely in Firefox, Safari and other browsers using CSS style sheets to handle the display. However if you're looking at this site in Internet Explorer 6 the sidebar doesn't show up. The bmannconsulting.com site has the same problem (and is another Drupal site). Is there something in the default Drupal .css that causes this or is it some oddity of IE we're left to battle on our own. It might be necessary to re-design the CSS with the advice from webreference.com. Something to do this evening I guess.

The editorial eye

October 11, 2005

In commenting on Yahoo News search Dave Winer suggests "Blogs don't belong in the margin, they belong in the main results."

Looking through a search presents some problems with this idea. An average search shows several copies of results of posts from this blog repeated on several other spamertising blogs. This means that to decide which blogs should be included an editorial decision needs to be made on the part of the information provider. An offhand suggestion says perhaps you go to the first copy of the post as authoritative. However this will just cause the illegitimate sites to backdate their posts to appear to be the original.

Rapidly this becomes an area where the authority of the editor becomes important. With the New York Times for example I'm able to judge from many volumes of history what I think of their editorial policies. How do we learn to apply that same judgement to collections of personal publications?

When private is public

August 16, 2005

Did you sign up for a private domain with GoDaddy? A school librarian recently found out that the private registration is for the time that GoDaddy wants and they cancelled the "private" registration without telling anyone.

RegisterFly, another discount registrar has some similar vague language in their terms of service for private registrations:
Read more about When private is public

Fact checking please

August 15, 2005

Perfect timing. Listening to a podcast this morning I was heartened to hear Amber Mac tell Mac Cast listeners about the importance of the editor to users. Way too much hype is out there about "unfiltered" being better. In the real world people only have so many hours in a day and don't have time for unfiltered content. Last week I mentioned why this makes Google's news feeds so great to feed into my newsreader.

Today is another prime example. TNL.net says in a story "I did not expect I would end up getting something that few others are aware of and maybe even a scoop." Maybe. Well several people who should know better like Doc Searls, Phillip Torrone and Dave Winer all announce the news as well. Read more about Fact checking please

XMLRPC vs. Direcway Web Acceleration

August 14, 2005

Searching for any recent work on the DirecWay XML-RPC problem I came across a WordPress post. When I looked into the problem last spring, however, the problem seems to be with DirecWay's Web Acceleration product. Reboot the modem (thereby killing the accelerator) and XML-RPC calls work fine. Wait for the accelerator service to start and the XML-RPC calls fail regularly.

Maybe someday in the future DirecWay will fix this problem with their service. Or maybe someday rural customers won't be held hostage by this truly poor service provider.

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