Nutty RSS/Tivo hack

"if you've already hacked up your Tivo to the point where you can telnet to it, it's not a whole lot of extra work to display RSS feed data right there on the screen."

I don't suppose it's better than reading it in a proper aggregator... But I like the convergence. I wonder if TiVo works in the UK?

Another busy old day. Going back to do another iteration of the Manila themes in CSS. Having troubles with my mouse overs. But after a good night's sleep, and some re-reading of printouts of some basic CSS from that I did way back in 1998, I'm looking forward to solving a few positioning riddles.
I see Tantek's doing some fun stuff with CSS too:

[The Scobleizer -- Geek Aggregator]: He's doing a different design every day, based on Technorati's top 100 blogs. All in CSS. All without changing any of the content of his blog.

Cool. And finally a reason to visit a blog in a browser rather than in an RSS news aggregator (News aggregators don't usually display design of blogs).

Doesn't look as though he's picked a good example today. Odd.

Current Weather. 2C Mostly Cloudy [Cosford Royal Air Force Base, United Kingdom Weather]

I get the above updates every hour. Wouldn't it be cool, if I plugged it intot the Government's Intranet. So that as the weather changed, so did the theme. From suuny to partially cloudy. Rain to light rain...

Feature creep! I shut up, quickly!

John Robb: What is the scope of the offshoring problem?

What is $100 b of offshored services worth in terms of jobs? First, an offshored service costs ~50% of the service produced in the US (on average). Since this is basically a pure salary play (infrastructure is minimal), these estimates mean that 2 m ($100k) information workers will be offshored by 2008. Also, given these jobs usually produce upwards of ~4 additional jobs per position (community impact), this is a net loss of 10 m jobs by 2008.

I guess, offshoring is a bigger opportunity than I thought. Problems are, after all , opportunities.

Too busy working over the last few days. NEED SLEEP. Been pouring man hours into CSS for Manila. Not that Manila was the problem, but style sheets, and what I could do within my knowledge, which obviously I wanted to stretch (unfeasibly long).

Family's taking off to visit Nannie, so I'll have the house to myself. Intend to break the back of this project—switchable CSS for Manila themes. It'll be nice when it's finished.

ComputerWorld: Blogs bubble into business

ImageReady to make CSS themes

15 Trends Taking Shape In Logo Design

Plenty of ideas to steal from :-) Giving clients the spin from these descriptions isn't recommended.

Small firms to cash in on software bargain bonanza

But they need to negotiate them to the floor. For example, small firms should be aware of the fact that vendors often try to base maintenance contract prices on the 'list price' of software licenses (usually 20 per cent to 22 per cent) when dealing with SME buyers.

It is important for SMB buyers to leverage the interest in their market and negotiate maintenance agreements based on 'as sold' prices, or contract deliverables in return for their business.

Orphaned or balck archive pages? Use this.
A few days ago I posted some advice re deleting posts, saying that one may end up with blank pages in your archives. Not that anything would point to them if you used my repair script.

I've found an old script that deletes those pesky files off your hard disk.

More than likely there'll be nothing there, but you may want to run it in check mode, to see if there are. If there are and there are lots uncomment the delete line and it'll really delete them.

Here's a screen shot to help you understand the script. You can just look in particular archives.

As my posts to the Radio discussion board is syndicated into my Radio aggregator it's much easier to snip it out of my aggregator than to copy, open new editing window, paste... (I think :-)

Mobile Phones Enter 2-Mpixel Era

Auto-focus (AF) mechanisms and electronic flashes are likely to become more common in mobile phone cameras once the 2-megapixel mark is reached.

I guess this will make me move from my current still digiCam ==> puter ==> thumbnailed to blog. Would prefer direct to blog, but will also require editing on the phone (crop, colour correcting). Though imageMagick does this... {Via Roland Tanglao]

The AtomEnabled Directory

"More AtomEnabled tools and services are being added every day. Check back soon for even more sites and software using Atom."

I don't hear of anything happening in the Radio or Manila world. I just had a quick look at Mark Pilgrim's feed made by MovableType. Doesn't look that tricky to do, knowing the system.verbs.builtins.radio.weblog.writeRssFile script (though I'm probably missing something, as I've ignored the developement process). If I had some time I'd make that system.verbs.builtins.radio.weblog.writeAtomFile and make one for my Manila hosting server too.

It would be good for business to be listed as the only Manila hosting service and quite probably the only service that both writes and reads Atom.

Manila themes and CSS

I'm creating some new themes for the Government's intranet. 20 of them. Valentines. St David's day. Christmas. Eid Al-Addha. You know, all the most important holidays.

I'm starting from scratch. Trying to have very little HTML and do most of it with XHTML and style sheets.

Once I have a layout that I'm happy with, I can very quickly alter the stylesheet, or the arrangement of the columns and produce 20 different designs with basically the same structure. Kinda like the CSS Zen Garden, only without the switcher. The intranet has 30 odd micros sites (Manila sites) and the IT geezer wants to 'one click' swap themes for the entire installation. People will still be able to use the Editors' only: Prefs: Appearance, to change background and link colours — I'm still using the body macro.

Each site will be fully loaded, with all the usual macros plus:

• searchThisSite
• alteredUserland.siteMenu: a Windows Explorer view of the hierarchy
  
• lastUpdate
• alteredUserland.newsDeptLinks: links with XML buttons to news departments
  
• recentNewsItems
• displayLastUpdatedHomePagesCSS
• printFriendlyLink
• mailStory
  
• xmlCoffeeMug
• rssLink
• viewRssBoxCSS
• alteredUserland.mailToLink: a mail to: member's name with envelope icon

I may add some CSS tool tips as well. Maybe a monthly archive macro too, and I have been thinking about doing a print CSS but if it takes as long to do a screen CSS then I think I'll stick with the print friendly template.

Currently, I'm ripping out the discussion group theme. Still has to be an HTML table but much simpler, whilst giving more power to the CSS.

I'll remove the non UserLand macros and add in modules instead of the includeMessage and release them to the community when they're finished.

The World and the US internet balance of power

For the first time in Internet history there are more DNS rootservers outside the United States than within, following this week's launch in Frankfurt of an anycast "instance" of RIPE NCC-managed K root server.

The US still has the master A root server in Dullas, under the control of the US Dept. of Commerce.

10 reasons why RSS is not ready for prime time

I think all of his arguments have been rebutted now.

Easy subscription is one I'd like to add to. I can subscribe to feed by hitting the coffee cup icon on a lot of sites, or, more usually pulling down a bookmark which looks in their headers for a feed. Sure lots haven't got this yet, but it's there and has been for two years.

I think there's still a ways to go, but for sure it's ready for prime time. This is why many large orgs like the BBC are publishing through it.

Found Typography

From Metafilter I also found, some that are more appealing to me as a designer. Fuller of meaning and poignantcy. Here's a cheesy cheese example:

Found Typography (right) and if you liked that, please also try Hundreds of Thousands.

Pure css tooltips

Do you know what is a tooltip? This is a tooltip an aiding text that appears just when you roll on with the mouse. The basic idea comes from Eric Meyer's pure css popupsa very clever way to get dynamic effects on an html page without using javascript.

Nice... I use javascript for the tool tips on the navigation, this is much cleaner, and I'd much, much prefer to use CSS to do this. And I don't have to have 'stuff' in my hrefs. I could write an addition to my standard hrefs, just to add the class declaration, won't matter if there's no span element inside... And I could style the tool tips differently for different parts of the site... Yip, I'll change over as soon as I get some time.

As an aside, I wonder if it'll come through my RSS feed into my aggregator.

[Update:] No, the CSS curly braces have been neutered in the RSS feed somewhere. I'll have to dig in and see if I can control this with a callback. It may be that Radio thinks they're macros and is neutering them. [update 2:] Actually, it's not the production of the RSS feed that's the problem, it's the aggregator, when it sucks up the feed. Again there are callbacks for this, but I wonder how many other aggregators actually allow complete stylesheets?

Fat, bloated files! Squish them with this

Snippets from RSS WinterFest IRC day one

RSS removes SPAM completely and make it truly "My Internet"
RSS Aggregators and formats are good enough to start replacing email newsletters
RSS information routers are disruptive because of their ability to create your 'own newspaper', will lead to explosion
RSS is a great way to collaborate and manage attention
2rss.com is a directory of RSS feeds.
RSS flowing in and and out enables a superior colloborative process
RSS may be the perfect vehicle for delivering news to small devices
Showing people business applications of News Aggregator is key. Show them how to subscribe to a Google or Feedster search.

Roland Tanglao was on IRC for the first day and blogged quite a few snippets. I just had to rob, what I considered the best bits, and stick them here.

Webcam Windows Media GPRS SmartPhone=?

What if we combine Webcam, Windows Media Technology, GPRS and a SmartPhone together? Here is the result:

I broadcasted the scene of my cubicle and use a smart phone to view it, in video, at real time. I can pull my mobile phone and see what is going on, no matter where I am, on bus, in Metro, at airport, in Beijing or in Hainan...

Interesting stuff. But using IIS is a bit overboard, surely? Aren't there web cam apps that would do this? Or, at least create MPEGs that could be streamed with QuickTime Streaming Server? What about QuickTime Broadcaster? I'll dig into this a little more in a few days. I have a client that will definitely be interested in it.

Current Weather. 9C Rain
Ah! Good. I need to post some invoices. I can wear my new hat. This makes me even happier — it's a big invoice I'm posting :-) And the Government, who're gonna get it, always pay quickly.

Camera Phones Help Buyers Beware

"With a camera phone that is also a bar-code scanner, you can go into a store like Barnes & Noble, take a photo of the ISBN number on a book and instantly receive a coupon offering the book for 30 percent less at Amazon.com."

Although it'll be difficult, for sure, camera phones will be banned from use in most shops. The above example is just perfect: the bricks and mortar carry the expense of stocking the 'look-at-product' while the online company makes the profit by selling it.

Look in the shops, check out competitive prices on the 'net. Barcode phones increase the efficiency, dramatically.

I know I did this when I need to buy my digi cam. However, Tescos actually carried it as cheaply as anywhere on the net, especially when delivery came into the equation. I ended going back to Tescos :-)

Microsoft threaten and bully student

For his phonetic sound-a-like domain name of MikeRoweSoft.com.

"It may confuse customers."

Basic Manila training in an hour

Maybe I'm getting quicker. Last week it was an hour and ¾. Today, it was down to an hour.

To be fair, the two classes I had today were far brighter, and much quicker off the mark. One woman was always two steps ahead of me. I was particularly impressed by one instance if this, as she had to log into her site under a made up email adress then add herself using the Editor's only: Admin, then log out, and log back in as her real self.

While others were figuring what fields to fill in, and what level of editorial roles to select, she had done the lot. Smart.

So I'd have finished an hour early. But, I wanted to teach them the world according to my version of Manila's RSS aggregator and this, news items, and express blogging via bookmarklets and/or the aggregator took up the other hour.

3 Columns From 1

"This demo illustrates how to achieve a layout with 3 columns of equal height using only one column. The trick is to use a central column (this one) and add borders to it. Then position your other 2 columns so they overlay the borders."

Clever! I've been puzzeling problem for a while now.

I was attracted to this site with the weird and wonderful pencils in CSS. The geezer, has taken an image, rendered the whole thing in stylesheets with absolute positioned pixels, thus he can change colours by switching stylesheets.

Looking around for his links and others:
Some nice drop down menus in CSS, but unsuitable for IE.

Then there's the graphs in CSS - which work in IE. Different site, mind. I certainly love those borders.

Another site: a scroll bar CSS generator for IE5.5

And mouse over menus? Tons at Wireframe (works in IE)

More tricks: It's quite often, when navigating through a long document, confusing or disorienting for users to click a link which immediately jumps them to somewhere else in that document. Are they on the same page, on a different page, should they scroll more from here, what's going on?

Smooth link scrolling alleviates this a little, by scrolling the page to the new link rather than jumping there directly.

Getting off the point, some javascripts: automatic search word highlighting after web searches. Like my Google bar... I've seen this on a few sites. Quite useful (if I didn't have my Google bar in Firebird). And from the same trickster (Stuart Langridge) sortable tables, just like Excel.

Madness with borders that look like triangles, which can them be further messed with.

And it looks as though this chap solved my stylesheet swapping problem. Using a drop down list. Thus, he could have as many sheets as he wants.

That's enough. Time for bed Sooty.

Why 'Bottom Up' is on its way up

This new style of business, birthed by the Internet, is ignored at any company's peril.

I love these sayings. "Do it or die!"

Customers today have more options and less loyalty. They will migrate to businesses that see them as participants in a process rather than as just consumers.

Somebody once said, they, "don't want to be a customer anymore!" But this was nearly four years ago.
Can people finally be catching on to this simple clue train stuff? If they are, both companies and consumers, I wonder if (our) world will be filled with the products we want at the prices we want them. Followed by a feeling that we have helped, that we have been a part of the process, then we'll have swallowed the hyperaffilate bait, hook line and sinker. Is this to be the post modernist consumer society? Bottom up?

No. This is simply market forces. Companies who solicit feedback on the internet are merely marketing, but in real time, rather than pouring over dry stats and hoping their focus groups are speaking for the masses.

Still, it's a great way of holding consumer attention. But wouldn't you get pissed off if the big company didn't add your 'die for' feature? Well, that's politics for you, and this is where companies are heading.

Big List of Blog Search Engines

"Following are all the blog search engines, directories, and web-based RSS aggregators I could find, along with brief instructions on getting your site listed."

I counted 31 such services. As I've got several hundred blogs on my manila servers, I'm going to have to do this programmatically. And, very, very carefully :-)

Suing grannies for MP3 swapping - will it start in the UK?

"So the trick will be to make enough noise to dampen-off file-swapping while avoiding suing anything that's going to look like a victim of heartless pigopolist greedheads."
If anybody has been to a car boot sale, and seen the huge, huge crowds around the bootleggers' stalls, or heard of a friend of a friend who makes thousands of pounds a week copying DVDs, CDs computer games...
And this has had me scared, worrying that me replacing some hard to find hip hop tracks from knackered tapes given to me years ago, is going to get me sued. I guess I shouldn't be so paranoid.

David Pollard's vision of a global corporation in 2015

Reminds me of articles I read when the internet first came out. Only, they were of the type "if you're not on the internet by 1999 your company will die." 1994 was when I first heard of the word disintermediation. It was all going to change at 'internet speed.' Looking back, I believed all the hype, and indeed, some companies died and new ones came into being. It seemed that the whole corporate world was to be changed upside down. It hasn't. Things are much the same.

Reading this article, I thought, "this sounds right" but I know things won't change that much. Maybe if the time scales are more like 30-40 years rather than eleven. I'll probably be dead by then.

"Future state vision at the front lines of a typical corporation, and look over the shoulder of a typical knowledge worker in 2015."

Nevertheless, this excellent and stimulating article will be worth reading again. I'd better print it out >:->

The company this employee works for no longer has a knowledge centre, in-house researchers or a corporate library. In fact, it has outsourced and shrunk its IT and other infrastructure to zero. It has no in-house overhead, no 'back office'. Everyone on the payroll either sells product or delivers services to customers.

Blog, Blog, Blog: The US Navy Tests Web Logging For Team Communications

This pilot blog is being developed by Traction Software as an "enterprise blog" according to the company. It will serve as a medium for distribution of general information to staffers from the seven team members. It also will enable users to post proprietary data, for example, test results and reports, that are accessible only to designated readers or groups of readers. The homepage will resemble a newspaper consisting of stories posted by users.

Blogs are beginning to seep into everywhere.

largest hard drive capacity available

"Unprecendented 1 terabyte capacity"

How big is your disk? Or, are you pleased to see me?
Don't know the price, but I guess I'm not many months off having a hard look.

My So-Called Blog (or reputation amongst teenagers)

M. is an unusually Zen teenage boy -- dreamy and ruminative about his personal relationships. But his obsessive online habits are hardly exceptional; he is one of a generation of compulsive self-chroniclers, a fleet of juvenile Marcel Prousts gone wild. When he meets new friends in real life, M. offers them access to his online world. ''That's how you introduce yourself,'' he said. ''It's like, here's my cellphone number, my e-mail, my screen name, oh, and -- here's my blog. Personally, I'd go to that person's blog before I'd call them or e-mail them or contact them on  AOL because I would know them better that way.''

And this is how reputation will be (is) amongst businesses and individuals in businesses. The grown up world isn't so far away.

Governments waste money

Interesting training day yesterday at the Government Offices for the West Midlands. (I was giving Manila training.)

I learned two important things:

1. Someone's daughter wanted to be a horse at the age of three. Thus, I shouldn't worry that my 3 year old Bradley wants to be a girl because he's "not brave of having his toenails cut."
2. On the topic of spending tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of pounds plus increased labour on web projects when Manila could do it out of the box.
• That money needed to be spent quickly less it disappeared, if it wasn't spent it may not come back and this was "the way Government works."
• And, people would make purchasing decisions between, very low cost and very large cost without the slightest technical knowledge nor seeking advice, because "it gets their dick hard to spend loads."
This was regarding two projects. If this is multiplied throughout the whole of Government I fear the loss would amount to the cost of several new hospitals.

Found: All the Young Dudes

"No longer married to TV, the elusive young male demographics"

I'm too old! But anyway, I do more internet than TV too.

Most important ideas for 2033 - security blogs

Personal security passes, a digital warrant contained in the writings and other stored ephemera in one's blog.

Dave Pollard's cooking up some more excellent thoughts. His first of a series of important ideas for 2003 concentrates on blogs. This item, I'd like to revisit.

"Blogs could be the platform for a proxy for each of us as individuals, our electronic filing cabinet and electronic identity - A blog consists of information about you, and knowledge you've accumulated. What if you expanded it to be a repository for all the information about you and all the knowledge you've accumulated, your 'locked' filing cabinet. You control it, you decide what does and doesn't go into it, and who can have a temporary key to what parts of it. Then at work, it could be your proxy, the repository of knowledge that shows your value to your employer and the value you've added to the company. And it could be your resume. At home it could be your medical patient record. Your bookshelf catalogue and refrigerator/pantry inventory and recipe book. Your bio for the dating service. Imagine the applications that could be built on this knowledge. Your intellectual property, under your control. Amazing. Scary."

One of the applications would be the policeman stopping you to see if you're a terrorist or not. Easily he'd be able to access you blog with bills or other background knowledge you have about yourself on his mobile device. Looking at your posts he'd see if you're an extremist. If you didn't write, he could question you on your utility bills, your movements, interests.

I do see the day when it is a legal requirement to have a blog. For this very purpose. All your school, employment and bank records, bills, passports and other legal documents will be sent there by government agencies, utility companies and so on. Your library books, music choices, phone calls, browsing statistics, every conceivable record would be there, including GPS information from mobile devices. Transport records, car ownerships, bus or train trips. FOAF is only the start.
Big brother? Sure.

As a way of finding criminals, of checking out truths, researching backgrounds, probabilities, understanding motivations. It couldn't be beat. Where as finger printing, or retinal checks could if there's no previous history of wrong doing.
Thought police? Sure.

In a civilisation where 99.999% of people are good, honest. Where 0.001% are bad, dishonest and out of them the tiniest minority are evil. Where that evil, in years to come could wipe out thousands, millions even billions of people, I don't mind. I welcome big brother, as I do with the zero tolerance of New York's drive to eliminate crime. As I do with the CCTV cameras now everywhere.

Thirty or forty years, after the second, or third WMD attack on the West the public will say yes to anything.
Security will be our new morality.

CSS3 Emulation in IE with javascript

"What a hack. Woooo! :D"

Looking at the javascript, it looks very neat indeed. This would be quite a thrill, I think, for I.E. users to see in their browser. $50 licence though! And I love his site, 22 year old Kiwi, wants to change the way the web works. Excellent. Can't argue with that.

Manila Features

I think he'll be adding a lot more to this list. There's the private site, control over membership — lots just in there. Bulletins, pictures, shortcuts, power blogging, trackbacks, comments, plug-ins, dynamic updates, check outs...

So much, and then there's different ways of configuring a site to make highly customised front ends, not to mention linking sites up to make very different types of sites.

Google's House of Cards

"Advertisers report return on investment (ROI) and customer service have deteriorated."

I thought this would have top end sometime. Although some were thrown off for lifting their own click throughs or even asking their readers to click through, I thought (and in my own experience) that when I was surfing at other sites, I wasn't hunting for products. Where as when at Google and presented with ads that were helpful to my search, I was in buying mode.

Although AdSense brings them more traffic, many find it also lowers their ROI. The drop in ROI, sometimes exceeding 50 percent...

Ouch!

Wired News: Mac Maniacs Wait to Be Wowed

As usual, Apple have kept the lid firmly shut. Only rumours abound. Personally, I'd like to see a massive increase in power in the G5. Massive, massive, massive.

Though I fear it may be too late for me, I'm much happier on my fast PC these days.

Several things that RSS does better than HTML

Scoble explains :
"1) RSS is faster to display...
2) With RSS I only need to read one out of 10 sites...
3) RSS is faster to read...
4) RSS is more efficient to read...
5) RSS lets you escape the browser..."
(see site for more details and good discussion.)
I was once a multi tab browser type guy. With one link I could hit 20 blogs. I thought I was a power reader. But I was always taking time to re-read stuff, figuring out what was new. Now, in my Radio aggregator, I only get new stuff and I read far, far quicker.
I hate excerpts too. I want the full article, with pictures.