goodbye 29 and heeeeellllooooooooo 30!

and what is the best way that a former true "downeastah" from machias, maine - now exiled in the midwest - can spend the first day of his 30th year?

staring at a 4 pound box of dug-out-of-the-ground-yesterday-shipped-overnight fresh steamah clams! that's right, oh yea envious masses, thanks to the maine lobster company and a little ambition on my wife's part, i'll get to enjoy that little bit o' heaven known as steamed clams.

i've been following with interest some of the latest thinking about rss , mainly via ben hammersley's excellent xml and rss blog .

coincidentally, jenny brings up one of the things i've been thinking about regarding my own feed with a compliment of sorts:

"Those of you that think my posts run on the "too long" side in your aggregator will thank me for simply pointing you to tonight's collection of links over at Eric Snowdeal's Conflux. The topic is high-speed, wireless networks (3G and WLAN), and every article is a good read, especially for getting up to speed on these subjects."

specifically, with regards to her comments about the length of the post, i've been thinking about ways to give further choice to readers who might not enjoy some of my more monolithic posts clogging up their aggregators, while still respecting those who enjoy reading the whole post. back in the day , when i threw together the quick syndication hack , i decided on a quick "truncation" compromise, which could be considered the worst of both worlds, since neither group of readers is completely happy [incidently, the "chomped" truncation style is an artifact resulting from my poor grammer and punctuation collides with Lingua::EN::Sentence ]. in any case, i'm now leaning towards, but haven't fully decided on, offering the choice of abridged and unabridged feeds.

i have a couple of problems with the "multiple feeds" solution. many might think it's silly, but i don't want to start cluttering up the page with syndication icons. it's bad enough enough to have a big orange icon hogging-up acreage that only the tech-savvy are going to what to do with. i mean, how user-friendly is a big orange xml icon? not very. what do i do? make two big xml icons? do i color code them? how many people are going to know what to do with the one that's not described in the instructions of their favorite aggregator software? sometimes choice isn't A Good Thing.

also - and i realize this might sound like a wee bit of over-intellectualization - i don't necessarily want to offer substantially abridged posts - at least for conflux-style posts. despite the superficial appearances, conflux , and to a lesser degree {bio,medical}informatics , are not a mere "newsfeeds" of titles and links. i've usually spent a bit of time to weave and juxtapose facets of a topic, contextualized by quotations from the original articles. this nuance gets completely lost by truncating things down to barely more than a title. then again, maybe that's just my own bit of insansity, and i don't necessarily need to be forcing my elaborate excercises in out-of-context quotations on the unsuspecting masses.

amusingly, as i thought today about how i wished that aggregators supported link tags or a similar type of formalism for finding rss files, so i could have multiple feeds without cluttering the page and confusing readers, i noticed that jon udell has been doing some thinking that sounds spookily similar to my own line of thought:

"I expect that current practice -- either truncating items or not -- will continue. A few people (like me) may bother to offer a choice, in the form of parallel versions. The overhead is no big deal really, XSLT happily transforms one into the other. While aggregators could offer users the choice, within a single feed, of long or short variants of that overloaded thing we call <description> , I doubt this will matter to enough people to get off the ground."

even more spookily, he mentions my site in the same post. excuse me while i freak out in the corner to the sounds of the twilight zone theme.

today is the last day of my 29th year.

speaking of new releases - the fine folks at mozilla have unleashed release candidate 3 on to the world.

hey! jeremie miller, of jabber fame has started not one - but two - blogs. [ via stpeter ]

so, netscape has released Netscape 7 Preview Release 1 and cleverly disabled the preference to stop pop-ups and other unrequested windows.

i haven't tried it, but from the blogzilla thread comments you can still use the hidden-pref to live pop-up free.

via nat i discovered that a draft of an upcoming o'reilly tome, essential blogging , is available for download and review :

"Please download the PDFs of the tech review draft of Essential Blogging and give it a read. Is it good? Did we forget to cover something? Did we talk about something that's not really useful? Our goal isn't to be definitive and show you everything that these tools are capable of, but instead to give the beginning blogger enough to be dangerous. Did I say dangerous? I meant productive.

The book isn't aimed at people who already blog, although many such readers will find useful information such as customizing their blogging software. Picture your coworkers who haven't discovered blogging yet--they know how to work their computer, they've seen a couple of blogs and figure they want to run one themselves. You should be able to give them this book and it'll educate them about choices of software and hosting, walk them through installing and using their chosen software."

Usability and open-source software development :

"We have described the results of usability testing of the Greenstone collection-building software. When we examined the types of problems we found they are typical of ‘classic’ issues of usability (the differences between developers and users). Although Greenstone has benefited from contributions from many people these issues had never been addressed, for a variety of reasons: resources, motivation, access to non-technical users and the development model adopted.

Our experience with Greenstone suggests that open-source development methods may need to adapt if they are to produce software for the desktop of the typical user. A community of developers will not necessarily pay sufficient attention to issues of usability that they themselves do not experience. An interesting question is whether a large open-source project could address usability issues without the well-known benefits of studying real users?"

[ via mpt ]

so, i just started taking zyrtec for my allergies and i'm thinking that my doctor forgot to fill me on the list of side effects :

" Psychological side effects
- abnormal thinking
- agitation
- amnesia
- anxiety
- lowered libido
- depersonalization
- depression
- emotional lability
- euphoria
- impaired concentration
- insomnia
- nervousness
- paranoia
- sleep disorders"

while i could always use a little more euphoria in my life, i'm thinking i've got enough abnormal thinking, anxiety and paranoia. scheez. all i wanted was to be allergy free.

not that i'm trying to make light of the situation, but whenever i think of terrorism on american soil, the movie brazil comes to mind.

the publishing part of mozblog appears to be working fine. it ended up grabbing the prior posts after i published the current post.

and my interest in the syndication sidebar code? well, if you look to the right, you'll see that my "outbound" links, are getting pretty unwieldy and i spent a good chunk of today looking into blogroll and syndication services like blogrolling.com and blo.gs. while these are fine for certain requirements, they both seem to require a lot of extra up-front work, if you have a large amount and/or a frequently changing number of links. i'm not talking tens of links. i'm talking dozens and hundreds of links.

i might be an outlier of freakish proportions, but my personal bookmark file weighs in at nearly a megabyte, and i have developed a load of peculiar behaviors for managing, trimming, and maintaining the bookmarks. so this got me to thinking about taking advantage of the behaviors that i've already developed by using my bookmarks as a filter for a series of related information services. my "public" blogroll might not be the same as my "private" blogroll. my blogroll may or may not be the same as my aggregator feed. et cetera, et cetera.

i started thinking about the fact that mozilla already has a bookmark properties dialogue box which lets you set notification preferences, descriptions and keywords for urls. it would seem fairly easy to use a combination of keywords and descriptive text for each url to enable and external application to periodically poll weblogs.com or blo.gs, filter the results based on bookmark keywords and then plop the results in a sidebar.

well, it didn't take very much googling to figure out that mike apparently has set the foundation for this with the syndication sidebar for mozblog:

"/** * the sydnication tool works by downloading the list of updated sites.
* passing it through the filter with bookmarks
* the filter then generate an rdf source
* the html is then generated from the rdf
*/"

unforunately, i've installed the syndication sidebar and it doesn't seem to be updating.

testing, testing, testing. i haven't tested mozblog in awhile, so i'm taking it for a spin. looks like it's coming along nicely, but for some reason, it's not grabbing my recent posts. in any case, i'm getting pretty hopped-up on the syndication sidebar code . more on this after i see if it's posting correctly.