Michael Zajac’s Radio Weblog

The most beautiful story...

The most beautiful story I've heard in a very very long time. Some folkshave finally figured out Hamlet.

What About Reverse Links?

This is getting interesting. Dave Winer has released the Weblog Neighbourhood tool for Radio. It checks what else the people who link to you are linking to and generates a report. Very webbish. Mark Pilgrim has his weblog creating a list of linkbacks to his posts. What happens if this info is embedded into the archive pages using REV links? Keeping this up in the long run may be a drag on the server, but I wonder what could be made of the results. Is this part of the two-way web?

Mark Pilgrim is spreading the news about a new way to link from a weblog to the its rss news source. It's all the rage; Dave has already added the feature to Manila and Radio--just view source on my home page and look for the tag. Why didn't we all think of that? Would be nice if this would spur weblog software developers to examine some other uses of (Mark's way ahead of them). W3C's list of link types includes Start, Next, Prev, Contents, Index, Glossary, Copyright, Chapter, Section, Subsection, Appendix, Help and Bookmark. The hreflang and charset attributes would also be useful for multilingual systems.

By the way, in BBEdit it's difficult to save a CSS file in iso-8859-1 encoding, which includes four little characters in Windows Latin encoding. This is notable, because BBEdit does just about everything else well. The winning CSS code for quotes is

q { quotes: '\201C' '\201D' '\2018' '\2019' }

I took a hint from Mark Pilgrim's article about the Q tag, and tried it a site I'm designing. Man, what an ordeal! I changed my html and css code about a thousand times while testing it in three browsers. I even cut and pasted the code directly from Mark's page, and his pages worked and mine didn't! I finally figured some things out:

OmniWeb 4.1b6 supports the Q tag but not CSS 2, so it displays typewriter quotes and italicizes the enclosed text. No surprise so far.
MSIE/Mac 5.14 works right no matter how you encode the 'quotes' attribute. The quote characters can be surrounded by single straight quotes, double straight quotes, or none. They can be typed directly in using correct ISO-8859-1 code, using Windows Latin code, Latin- or decimal-entity encoded, or escaped-unicode encoded ('\201C' '\201D'). You just can't fool it! But it doesn't work at all unless your html body tag says lang="en". You can't put in "en-ca", and you can't leave the lang attribute out. It may not seem like a big deal, but think about how I figured this out. Yoinks! You can't fool it because it doesn't listen. It ignores your CSS quotes attributes. It seems to do the right thing in a block of text that has the lang="en" or lang="fr" attribute (haven't tested any others).
Mozilla 1.0rc1/Mac only seems to recognize the quotes attribute if the quotes are escaped unicode values or Windows Latin encoded. That's right! ISO doesn't work. Latin entities don't work.

Man! By the way, you'll notice I'm not using the Q tag nor curly quotes on this site. This is just a place to leave behind keep random notes on the internet; I haven't taken the time to tart up the code, and [whining alert] Radio Userland Mac version's support for iso-8859-1 is broken, and getting I'm really tired of typing ’. I'm really invested into Frontier and Radio because I love these programs, but it's the little things that make a guy start looking at Movable Type.

New eMac and PowerBook

Apple has announced the eMac, a 17" CRT iMac for education, and a revised PowerBook. The eMac looks like a perfect machine for a museum or gallery setting. Not as dramatic as the new G4 iMac, it’s still slick-looking and should stand up to more abuse.

That old Black Magic

Computers and software are complicated for the average user. Sometimes they make no sense even to the people who create them. Voodoo to you too. [NY Times requires free registration. Link via Scripting News]

A to Z for a Successful Web Site

Good advice for webmasters at a webmasterworld.com forum. You’d be surprised how many people still tell me to avoid outgoing links on their site, because that’s giving away traffic. [via Mark Pilgrim]