weblogs

I am not often blown away anymore by web design. I have been surfing the web since 1993 – been with it since there wasn’t a browser with image support, and “seen it all”. So, I guess what I am saying is, I am not easily impressed. But Lauri Mueller’s Minnesota Gardener weblog, based on the same weblog system I am using – MovableType (yes, amazingly – its true – it dosen’t have to look as bad as this) just blew me away. And she’s a Flash designer too, too […]

The RSS Auto-discovery link tag has been changed. This change comes in response to (valid) criticism that the old way was too general, and could cause confusion if, in the future, there were other XML-based formats that pages wanted to link to. Using a more specific MIME type (the exact type was suggested by Dan Brickley) solves this potential problem, and the more specific title goes along with it. Here is the link tag as it now stands: <link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS” href=”url/to/rss/file” />

UserLand has announced support for RSS Auto-Discovery for Radio. This is great, but what is not so great is that they have implemented an extremely simple parser for the RSS link tag. Here’s an example of a link element that Radio’s aggregator understands: <link rel=”alternate” type=”text/xml” title=”XML” href=”http://www.scripting.com/rss.xml”> In order for it to work it must be formatted in exactly this way. It’s totally brutal. If the attributes aren’t all present, it fails. If they aren’t in the correct order, it fails. If the whitespace isn’t exactly as above, it

This is worth spreading the word about: Autodiscovered RSS feeds By adding one line of HTML code in your weblog, you will enable users of Amphetadesk and Radio to subscribe to your RSS feed with the help of a bookmarklet. HTML Code: <link rel=”alternate” type=”text/xml” title=”XML” href=”http://diveintomark.org/xml/rss.xml” /> Bookmarklet for Radio Bookmarklet for Amphetadesk The bookmarklets should work in IE 5.+, Netscape 6+, and Mozilla. The HTML tag is a standard HTML tag, and will allow various applications/servers/spiders to find your XML feed. It can only be good to add

Jon Udell writes about Personal RSS Aggregators for Byte.com Has RSS run out of steam? Quite the opposite. There’s more action than ever, but it’s shifted into a decentralized mode. That’s just what the RSS network needed to do in order to truly operate at Internet scale. A good article about RSS and how the publish/subscribe model is slowly changing how the web works, and how information flows. Jon also goes into detail about some of the RSS aggregator tools available today.

Paul Andrews article in The Seattle Times titled Web logging can serve many roles raises the question about the integrity of the Macromedian bloggers, while trying to take the issue a step further, he focuses on the lack of labeling of the Macromedia weblogs. Macromedia’s bloggers want to have it both ways. They don’t want to be seen as shills. At the same time, they are loath to bite the hand that feeds them. As one Macromedia manager told me, he would never criticize the company or tout a competitor’s

Ideas for the evolution of RSS – The X-Document Interesting article about the proposed extentions of the RSS format for the next version. Things are moving again in the RSS development field. In the past two weeks we’ve had both Dave Winer’s “Ideas for the Evolution of RSS plus Jon Udell’s continuing work, and Steve Yost, David Weinberger et al, plus Mike Krus all talking of introducing new elements and features to the specification. These discussions have, in turn, sparked new ideas and further calls for new elements.

Snewp indexes about 6000 news sources every day, gathering news headlines from around the world. (To quote Snewp). They are really updated, and have a lot of news available, the coolest part is that you can get results from news searches as RSS, making it possible to hook it directly into Radio, AmphetaDesk or any other RSS reader you might be using. The only complaint I have is that they are a little too easy on which news sources they are using, IMHO. Just check out a search for Flash

This was fun, it took me a couple of minutes to add a PDA version of jdb cyberspace, and then make an AvantGo channel of it. Good advice and Moveable Type template provided by Meryl.net I will probably tinker with the layout of the channel, and change it around a little, but the channels url will be the same, if you want to use it with AvantGo. The direct url is: http://weblog.bergersen.net/pda.html

I hope Chris will be celebrating with some sparklies today, even if its only some sparkly water. Flazoom is Chris MacGregors baby in many ways. And over two years it has accumulated a lot of knowledge about Flash and Usability. Chris was in many ways ahead of his time when he launched Flazoom as a weblog 2 years ago. He and the other co-editors of Flazoom has really been busy the last two years. 1400 reviews and news items translates to approximately 4 postings every single day, and most of