Archive for January, 2003

I remember watching, in horror, a commerical for Pizza Hut’s Stuffed Crust pizza. Here is a food (pizza) that consists mainly of cheese. Cheese is the main ingredient here and there’s usually plenty of it. A brilliant salesman decides that pizza needs even more cheese, but is baffled by where it could be added. Bingo! inside the crust! This alone is frightening. Enter Stuffed Crust Gold. It has cheese where you’d expect it, cheese inside the crust as described earlier and (now this is insanity) more cheese on top of the crust! Unbelievable. The fact that people will buy it is even more of a mystery. Hungry?

Excellent. I know have titles working in SimplePost. No more boring date headers. More separation between multiple posts in the same day… not to mention much better when you’re reading the XML feed.

The Noodle Incident:

“‘The Web is not Print’. This isn’t news to anyone. But the web isn’t screen either. Or more accurately it is print, and screen, and voice, and many other things.”

I just stumbled upon this brilliant article, a rant about why we should design pages with all types of devices in mind — not just popular web browsers. CSS and basic, clean, valid XHTML (or HTML) allows us to do this.

Tim Bray asks What’s Next for RSS? It’s a good little article. It’s funny to me when people refer to RSS as an XML language. It’s really just XML — with a pre-defined set of rules so that whatever reads it on the other end, be it a browser, application or whatever, knows what to expect.

The Meaning of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday, by Coretta Scott King.

Who knew that printing a fake fly inside a urinal would lead to cleaner bathrooms?

Played around with OmniGraffle recently while mapping out site architecture at work. What a nice piece of software, making it so simple to create flowcharts and diagrammed layouts, drag and drop shapes, add text, etc. Also impressive is the interface design.

More on email link encoding: A reader has sent in a link to Railhead Design’s SpamStopper — an OS X application that encodes email links in a variety of HTML and Javascript methods. Haven’t tried it yet, but looks to be useful.

My mom-in-law sent over a link to some really interesting time-lapse photos of the recovery of the USS Cole. What’s amazing is the way it’s recovered — a transport ship is purposely flooded so that it can get underneath the disabled ship. Unflood and it lifts everything up.

Worried about spam bots grabbing your email address from your site? Use the email address encoder from Dan Benjamin at Hivelogic. It uses javascript to numerically encode a mailto: link for you so that spam bots can’t read it. The browser displays the link normally. All is right with the world again.

Turn into a cabbage:

“How many times have you stared mournfully into the coleslaw and thought to yourself ‘Gee, I wish I was a cabbage.’ Well, now you can be! Activate the CABBAGE CONVERTER and you will instantly transform into a cabbage!”

Yet another gold nugget find via RWS, which was via Da1go.

Speaking of XHTML 2.0, this guy is using it now. It’s no surprise that I get nothing, or un-marked up text. It makes a strong point though — that 2.0 is but only a working draft right now. It’s not finished, and it’ll be years before anyone can actually use it (see Zeldman). That’s decades in web time. We need to use what works now – and what makes sense as a bridge to the future. That’s why I still like the idea of XHTML 1.0.

There’s much talk about the new XHTML 2.0 specification draft. It’s a little frightening just how much the W3C is proposing to throw out the window. All heading tags? The img tag? The href? Wow. As a result, Mark Pilgrim curses web standards, Tantek asks “Why XHTML?”, Zeldman offers smart perspective and
Eric Meyer continues to just use HTML 4.01.

I received a talking Yoda for Christmas. You squeeze his hand (or “his hand you will squeeze”) and ask him a yes or no question. He’ll answer you. He helps make decisions — not important decisions, mind you. Those are left to better methods.

iCommune:

“iCommune is a plug-in which extends Apple’s iTunes software to share music over the network. Your friends’ music libraries appear in the iTunes source list. You can browse their collections, and choose to download or stream their music. It also allows you to make your own music library available to others.”

I’ve just read Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into Accessibility — 30 days to a more accessible web site. What a tremendous resource that anyone who builds web sites should read. Mark tells you why you should add accessibility features to your sites, who they benefit and how to implement them. It’s so clear and easy to read — none of this stuff is that complicated, you just need to the knowledge of why it’s important.

I was thinking how great it would be if the iPod was Bluetooth enabled, and there was a separate device you would plug into your stereo’s receiver to transmit the mp3s. The iPod would be like a remote control. But the iTrip is even better — an FM transmitter that plugs into your iPod, needs no batteries and transmits your music to any stereo via an FM signal. The range is apparently only 10-30 feet, but that’ll do the trick. Also great for the car.