In Brief 
Howell Raines: The Times's image as a bastion of quality had become even more important as tabloid television, Britain's declining newspaper values, and the unsourced ranting of Internet bloggers polluted the journalistic mainstream of the United States.
[The Atlantic].
4/19/04 - 6:20 pm GMT - [guid]
Dave Winer: There are a lot of folk legends about the evolution of RSS - Here's the scoop, the sequence of events in the life of RSS, as told by the designer of most of the formats.
4/7/04 - 1:36 pm GMT - [guid]
Mikel Maron: Web Services, RIA, Semantic Web, the Blogosphere, are coming together to enable an Internet OS, built on amateur application programming in recombinant growth.
We'll all be programming an OS that is everywhere.
4/6/04 - 11:29 am GMT - [guid]
Jon Udell: In theory a CSS attribute could say: "Don't index this element" - Parsing it would likely be more work than search engines are currently willing or able to do.
But it's a competitive market again, and there's going to be a struggle to differentiate premium search from commodity search.
3/26/04 - 10:22 am GMT - [guid]
Rogers Cadenhead: Creating text date links in Radio.
3/20/04 - 4:42 pm GMT - [guid]
activeRenderer News
Download activeRenderer 2.5
[image] After the customary delays (even worse than my worst estimates this time :-), the new version 2.5 of activeRenderer is now available for download.
Here is a quick summary of activeRenderer 2.5's new and upgraded features.
Plain text rendering: activeRenderer now renders regular text documents in addition to OPML outlines and RSS news feeds.
It even renders dot-head format files, for nostalgia's sake.
For this feature to work, Microsoft Word has to be installed on the system running the Radio/activeRenderer application.
Automatic importing feature: any text or Word document dropped, saved or modified in aR's new www/imports folders is automatically rendered as an OPML document in the matching www/outlines folder.
This triggers its upstreaming as DHTML on the public site.
Audio transclusion: the transclusion mechanism in activeRenderer now recognizes several audio file formats when processing OPML link attributes: ".mp3", "m4a" (Apple), ".wav" (Microsoft) and ".mid" (MIDI).
These audio links are rendered in the outline's DHTML version with a new 'speaker' wedge.
[image].
Clicking the speaker wedge creates a small player object under the linking node, sized according to the linking node's width.
The audio content starts playing.
You can control the sound output through the player object.
[image].
This should be helpful to poscasters who are publishing show notes in OPML format using Radio with activeRenderer, or are using the activeRenderer web service.
Importing feeds from mySubscriptions.opml: activeRenderer's outline browser now has a new import button at the bottom of its news feed list [screenshot].
Clicking import, you can locate a subScriptions.opml file on your local system or on the Web [screenshot], and ask activeRenderer to automatically add all the feeds of that file into Radio's aggregator: mass subscription!
Registration is back: It's optional, works fast [screenshot], the server side processing is simple and hosted in NYC. Registration is a first step in getting to know activeRenderer users, something that is very important in any community driven project.
So please take a few seconds to register once aR 2.5 is installed.
Complete release notes are available on the ar-announce Yahoo group.
Indeed, ar-announce and ar-support have been the places where most of the action took place these past months.
In an effort to take better advantage of RSS publishing, I will publish more detailed information about each aR 2.5 new feature on this channel in the coming days.
3/24/05 - 5:36 pm GMT - [guid]
activeRenderer 2.4 Steps Forward
[image] Version 2.3.1, announced last June, is now officially reported Missing In Action, fallen to determined bug attacks - and pressing other engagements - during the testing phase.
RIP.
At long last, activeRenderer 2.4 is now ready for download.
It has all the features of 2.3.1, and a whole bunch of others.
Here's a short list:
The registration process at first time installation is now history: I couldn't afford the time to replace the aging (defunct?) registration service graciously offered by eVectors in Northen Italy.
New users: we'd still love hearing from you, drop us a note anyway.
[image] activeRenderer is now available in German, thanks to Werner Bohlmann and a little help from Albert Baeumel, as well as in Italian, thanks to Fabio Artuso.
To switch languages, use the popup at the bottom of activeRenderer's preferences page.
The outline rendering of RSS feeds and of Radio's aggregator is vastly improved: no more risks of crashing Radio when feeds contain malformed HTML.
Tags.
I also added a clever (I hope) sentences processor to separate posts content into outline nodes in a clean way (this was a major endeavour, took way too long :-).
The outline browser got a little face surgery.
After selecting an entry, you can either delete it (unsubscribe for an RSS feed) or rename it.
Clicking twice on an entry puts you directly in text editing mode.
When browsing a news feed which is not in your subscription list already, you can subscribe to it directly.
Finally you can enlarge or reduce the font used to display outlines.
At Thomas Burg's request, you can open transcluded Flash or QT Movie objects full size in a different window when clicking on the new 'spyglass'
button that appears at the right of the transcluded node.
At Gwénaël's suggestion, I added a new startup preference so that aR may republish in the background at a programmable interval all pages created using a template that includes the rssBox macro.
[image].
If I can convince Gwénaël to lead the development of the next 2.5 version of activeRenderer, it will include wizards to easily format and style rssBox and activeRoll macros in weblog publishing templates.
10/13/04 - 1:49 pm GMT - [guid]
Read About Pete Dako's First Time Experience
We always love it when users actually report on their experience with activeRenderer.
First time experiences are most valuable to us, beyond what works and and what doesn't (everything usually does), it lets us know what is simple enough, and what is overly complicated.
This is the only way we can truly create a better user experience.
Publishing and maintaining a user outline, as Pete did, is a great idea.
We also welcome all contributions to the ar-support forum.
To answer Pete's issues:
Even though aR's installation code should kick in properly even when you drop the activeRenderer.root file in Radio's Tools folder while Radio is running, it is actually very difficult to test properly, and thus much safer to quit Radio first, as described in the downloading instructions, then place the downloaded root file in the Tools folder, then restart Radio.
Thanks to Pete's report, I'll modify aR's startup sequence, so that Radio cleans itself up better after a failed activeRenderer installation attempt: just quit Radio, remove activeRenderer.root from the Tools folder and restart Radio.
You may download activeRenderer.root with any browser.
Whatever your favorite browser might be, the downloading over http might develop problems, resulting in a corrupted activeRenderer.root file once in a while.
If your first installation of activeRenderer fails before the registration page is displayed, it's safer to download a fresh copy before trying again.
We endeavour to make the DHTML in activeRenderer browser agnostic, not a small proposition even these days :-) Our reference platform is the Gecko rendering engine, used by Mozilla and FireFox, which is the most standards compatible browser by far.
Then we try to make sure that our code works with Windows MSIE, which is less standards compliant, but is used by 85% of the visitors to this site.
Then we check Apple's Safari, which is still the less standards compatible browser of the three, despite Apple's marketing claims. activeRenderer's transclusion feature does not work currently with Safari.
We almost never test other browsers, such as Opera, Konqueror or OmniWeb, but welcome all reports.
I personnaly apologize for all the registration problems.
The registration service, graciously hosted in Northern Italy by eVectors, is long due for an overhaul, and often unavailable.
Registration is important to us because we can keep track of our current user base.
We will come up with a new and simpler registration process in activeRenderer 2.4, due later this summer.
The main function of activeRenderer is to render outlines saved as OPML format Files into DHTML pages and upload them to your public site.
Your outlines must be saved as OPML format files first for the rendering to process smoothly.
If you are working from an outline object in Radio's internal database, the safest way of ensuring a proper conversion to OPML, then DHTML is to create a new outline file in Radio (using the File/New menu), then copy the content nodes of the previous outline object into the new file, then save the new file.
This will automatically create a new OPML file in your file system.
If this file is created under the outlines folder or one of its subfolders, it will be automatically upstreamed as DHTML.
Check Radio's Event Log to make sure.
The next 2.3.1 version of activeRenderer is due this week, I'm a touch late on our schedule, thanks to lots of contributions in the alpha and beta testing phases.
read more about 7 topics
6/21/04 - 10:20 am GMT - [guid]
activeRenderer version 2.3 released
[image] [image] Change in plans! We've decided to release activeRenderer vs 2.3 now instead of mid June.
The 2.3 version adds multilingual support, thanks to Gwénaël's patient work.
There is now a language selection popup at the bottom of activeRenderer's preferences page.
The only language we offer in addition to English so far is French.
Others will follow: from Scotland, AJG Beaumel has volunteered a German translation.
We are currently looking for translators in Italian, Spanish, Dutch and Danish.
Those are the latin alphabet based languages I could extract from activeRenderer's registration database.
We will keep making small modifications in the 2.3 track.
We aim to enable the publication of outlined sites in several different languages, as opposed to today's single language choice for all documents.
Gwénaël is still working on his activeRenderer macros wizards, which will be at the core of version 2.4, still scheduled for mid June.
read more about 3 topics
5/12/04 - 1:05 pm GMT - [guid]
rssBox and activeRoll wizards
The next version of activeRenderer will include wizards to help bloggers add side rolls to their templates using activeRenderer's activeRoll and rssBox macros.
Gwénaël, who first came up with this brilliant idea, is hard at work getting those wizards ready.
If your French isn't too rusty, you may try out his public prototypes of the rssBox and activeRoll wizards.
We'll be working together next week in Paris, our target is to release a 2.3 version of activeRenderer by mid June.
More on the coming 2.3 version later...
read more about 2 topics
4/27/04 - 5:27 pm GMT - [guid]
Elections Demo Page Updated
Taking advantage of Feedster's feedpapers, I've updated activeRenderer's rssBox demo page to display a side by side view of both Kerry and Bush consoladited news feeds.
The outlined view makes it easy to compare news headlines, and the preview mode lets you scan through interesting looking posts by simply hovering your mouse's cursor over the 'wedge' handle at the left of each title.
Clicking the wedge actually opens, or expands, the news item.
The template for the demo page is available for download, as an example of rssBox macro use.
Another way of leveraging RSS feeds is including an RSS box in a blogroll, as I do on s l a m's home page.
read more about 4 topics
4/22/04 - 3:17 pm GMT - [guid]
