Xagronaut

NPR Content Via RSS Enclosures and Audible.

NPR and Audible Team Up To Provide Customized Audio To You Through Their New Weblog-enabled Affliate Service

[The Shifted Librarian]

My Thoughts:

The two items above ring true with hopes of mine in recent times.  But I must say, in the past two weeks, I started listening by chance, and I haven’t been able to change the station.

Yes, NPR has earned a preset on my radio, albeit the last FM preset I had open.  I find the news content, music coverage, and cultural insight incredibly stimulating.  I can definitely see the value in having that content available at will.  Cool!

The above two items also fit nicely into a growing trend in my own life and in the culture of aggregating a myriad of heterogenous content into one place for synthesis and presentation in the format.  It follows my definition of nerdvana: “If nirvana is the state of achieving ultimate knowledge (or something like that), then nerdvana is the state of organizing all of that knowledge in a seemless, integrated way on all of your electronic devices.”

I have just upgraded to , and installed Brad Choate’s . This is a test

of the Textile formatting.

• I love bulleted lists. I hate entering HTML by hand.
• WYSIWYG would be even better, but Textile is better than raw HTML.
• I wonder if tools like could support it.

[]

Textile sounds more and more compelling.  Maybe later…Must work now.

Yes. Mostly.  Here’s the scoop from the Movable Type FAQ.

MT version 2.0 and higher is free for personal or non-profit use. We’re following a donate-ware model in which we ask that you send us a paypal payment for the amount which you feel the product is worth to you. In return, for every $20 that you donate, you will receive a Recently Updated Key. For donations of $45 or more, you are entitled to additional support. See here for more details.

Here are two good finds about Movable Type:

Radio vs. Movable Type
http://blogs.salon.com/0001111/2002/08/14.html#a194

Making the Move to Movable Type
http://www.meryl.net/articles/archives/000947.php

OK, I’m in heaven! I just discovered that has the ability to serve up feeds on any project in their system. Project-level RSS feeds seem to center around news releases for the project, and you can choose among a few formats (like with or without full news release text). In fact, they have a on all the RSS feeds available and explanations/FAQs.

I was also impressed with the way their documents were laid out, being able to jump into any section of the document, like the or a specific topic like “” I think this is a great idea, and I will try to include this feature in any content management system .

The Curse of Outlook.

In reference to Ximian Evolution, The FuzzyBlog! wonders, “Why is it that things that try and look and act like Outlook end up being the same type of slothful, buggy pigs like Outlook itself?”

He wonders if Chandler will also have the same fate, even “Is this just the natural end point for products that try and emulate Microsoft Apps?”

I wonder, is it worth the risk and time to create an application that behaves much differently?  There are an awful lot of users out there that would find and Outlook-ish style application approachable.

I think that in the end, competition in the software space both hurts and helps innovation.  It helps because competitors must both keep pace with each other *AND* find a new feature that beats the other guy.  But, it can also hurt because no feature can be counted on to be totally compatible or integratable (easily) with other systems.  Proprietary systems often lack just enough ease of integration to either require their consulting services or ensure entrenchment once the infiltration has been made into the IT infrastructure.

Still, it seems that complete refactorings come along every several years that summarize, in one place, all or a representation of all, of the advancements that had been made in the preceeding technological generation.

It’s the pain of the early adopters all over again.  The late adopters may not gain competitive advantage, but they are more likely to have offerings available that are easier to integrate, either by design of the software system or by the sheer availability of service organizations (VARs, consultants) competing in that space.

I’m aggravated! Microsoft’s updated support page/Knowledge Base article
format will not save in Web Archive format. This is a recent change, and
I have responded at lease once using their feedback form. I have heard
nothing.

I suspect it is related to the cross-domain stylesheet reference, but I
can’t be sure without researching it (Update: I don’t think that’s the
problem now–all stylesheets have relative paths). But I’m miffed! I
save MSDN/KB articles as archives all the time. MSDN still works, but now
the new layout at support.microsoft.com prevents saving in any format
except “HTML only”, or (*gasp*) plain text. Believe me the “HTML only”
format looks pretty crappy upon reloading.

Dismay

Maybe the world at large has not discovered the joys of the MHT format.
Or maybe they have no concern when they are thwarted. Maybe the
workaround is sufficient for them. My most recent Google search seems to
consistently point to the same (mostly worthless) Microsoft KB article
(#235589).

Are my interests that obscure? Somehow, I doubt it.

Hope?

A few point to an that affects sites in the Restricted Sites group. I
doubt that Microsoft.com is in the Restricted sites group by default. I
did however, find some possibly-related security settings in the IE
options that affect frame navigation, scripting, etc. Interesting…

Background

I use the Web Archive format (*.MHT) extensively with Internet Explorer to
save a snapshot of a web page with all parts in a single file. All of the
images, stylesheets, and scripts are embedded as message parts in a
multipart MIME message. The format is actually not proprietary–it
complies with . The page is reconstructed by Internet Explorer as it
existed when it was saved.

In many cases, this is better than link rot. I don’t have to print out
the web page unnecessarily, and I can guarantee that the contents of the
page will not change the next time I “visit.” Granted, the file size is a
bit chunky, and you don’t benefit from things like image caching since
every web archive file has every element embedded. But hey, gigs are
cheap, right?

An older alternative format with Internet Explorer was the “Web Page
Complete” format. It saves a .htm page file and creates a child folder
with the same name as the page file. All supporting objects (images,
etc.) are saved as distinct files in the child folder. Some people like
that for scavenging web page parts. I personally hate it because it
becomes a file management nightmare. Every time I want to move the web
page, I have to also deal with an accompanying folder. Most of the time,
Windows Explorer groups folders separately from files, so the two items
are seldom close together in a file list. Forget it!

So I use MHT files a lot. Occasionally, however, Internet Explorer gives
an error message and refuses to save a web page as a Web Archive. This
can happen for a number reasons, very few of which I understand. But in
general, there seems to be a problem on some pages with Flash items. That
happens to be a lot of pages–ouch! Microsoft acknowledges the error and
lists a long line of browser products that exhibit the error–pretty much
all of the versions of Internet Explorer since the Web Archive format was
introduced. A recent search of Google groups also suggested that there
were some security considerations involving spreadsheets from a domain
other than where the page was located.

Microsoft addresses a couple of reasons (sorry, you
can’t save that article as a Web Archive!). Excel 2000 HTML spreadsheets
with multiple worksheets (which Excel creates by default–Sheet1, Sheet2,
& Sheet3) don’t save.

The article above provides this help: “To work around this problem, save
the Web page in Internet Explorer using a different Save as format.” Um,
what if my problem is that I CAN’T SAVE IN THE WEB ARCHIVE FORMAT??

Possible issues to consider

1.) The site with the desired page might know how to block this type of
operation. Don’t know how yet, but I haven’t ruled it out. MSN.com
is one site Microsoft mentions specifically, and I haven’t found any good
reason why. Heck, the fact that they document MSN.com in particular in a
support article seems to be evidence that they intend that phenomenon to
persist. Sure, I imagine that the MSN.com folks and the support article
folks probably can’t get together and address this specific problem, so
it’s easier to write about it than to make a change.

2.) The page might not be reproduceable without DHTML or the
appropriate cookie or some other element that only exists in the rendered
version you are viewing. It appears that IE trys to reacquire the page
in a separate “duplicate” request, rather than just saving the page you
are viewing. Wouldn’t that be convenient? Well, maybe not–the MSHTML
component in Windows does some HTML correction to reconcile poorly formed
HTML. It standardizes case and inserts closing tags. In other words, you
wouldn’t be saving the true source of the page; you would be saving IE’s
processed view of the source. Depending on your needs, this may not be
desirable. If you’re interested in what the processed version of the page
looks like, save a page as “Web Page, complete”, and look at the
difference in capitalization between the saved .htm file and the source
displayed by clicking View Source in IE.

Alternatives

A.) Create the file yourself: painful, but I’m beginning to think about
it. The format is documented well enough, that one should be able to
assemble an IE-compatible MHT file without IE’s help in saving it. It
requires arcane MIME knowledge though–message headers, sifting through
dense RFCs–not for the faint-of-heart or crunched-for-time.
B.) Find products that will save MHT files and don’t rely on the Internet
Explorer API to do it. Don’t know of any yet.
C.) Test the Chilkat MHT library and hope it doesn’t require the IE API
either. The Chilkat library is a bit pricey for the individual, but you
can buy a license for their entire suite that covers redistribution. The
price isn’t too bad (you’ll have to check their site) if you’re writing
and selling software that can defray the cost.

Related links

Gordon Weakliem had some problems that included the culprit message, but I
doubt that
will help me.

Data islands are seldom tropical.