Thursday, June 30, 2005

Google Releases Maps API for External Use. bahree writes "Google now has officially released their API's for Google Maps; till now there were a few hacks in place such as my where I work, but now its all supported. You would need to get a key, which is associated with a specific url, you can get that here and also read up on all the fun details here." [Slashdot:] 3:26:45 PM    comment []

Monday, April 25, 2005

Microsoft: Where's the feed? Microsoft has certainly joined the blogosphere in a big way, whether it's the famous Scobleizer or a host of developers (onsite and offsite). Much of the MSDN content is available via RSS. Ironically, however, a visit to the MSDN Blogs page, which lists the most recent blog posts from the MSDN Microsoft clan, fails to turn up the famous XML () or RSS () images. In fact, I have yet to find a master list of RSS feeds on Microsoft's website, although this FAQ about blogging and RSS/Atom points to some helpful feeds and resources. A Google search turns up a page of Microsoft PressPass RSS feeds and a Security Updates page with this feed. I did find a couple of RSS feeds on the Architecture page and a link to a list of architecture-related blogs, but again without a group RSS feed for the list of blogs altogether. You have to visit each blog to find the RSS link. Simon Guest's black-on-blue RSS link is hard to see, demonstrating the disadvantage of diversity in weblog layout. My best guess is that the URLs just map to the blog software of choice for each author (ain't the web grand?). I did unearth a very cool gem while digging through the MSDN blogs, though. Jack Greenfield's blog pointed to a blog by Grady Booch! Talk about cool! I'd only heard legends about the guy, you know, Booch Notation, the "Three Amigos," UML, Rational, etc. He has a blog--how cool is that? And he also has a picture, which I think I will add to my mugroll. Then there's also Martin Fowler's "bliki", or in his words: A cross between a blog and wiki of my partly-formed ideas on software development I need to come back to absorb the essence of his bliki approach to publishing. Fortunately, his hybrid approach still offers an RSS feed. And, of course, Martin has a picture too. Bottom line: Microsoft should make it easy to find RSS feeds on their site, including a link on their site map. Update: I found (after much searching) a page which lets you search the Microsoft site blogs. It serves up RSS feeds and OPML for categories of blogs. 11:43:17 AM    comment []

Thursday, November 04, 2004

Automatic Ad-Rotation in JavaScript. In an earlier article, the author wrote about how use JavaScript to display random advertisements when the page loads. To complement that article, he now focuses on rotating the ads in random order, over a period of time without reloading the page. By Jonathan Fenocchi. 1104 [WebReference News] 2:13:52 PM    comment []

Tuesday, March 30, 2004

DevX: HTML Tidy and .NET Fix Up Your HTML with HTML Tidy and .NET. When standards change, your development efforts must often change with them. But change doesn't always have to be painful. If you're trying to upgrade your HTML pages to the latest standards, fix unclosed tags, find and fix deprecated features, and format all your Web pages consistently, HTML Tidy is just what the doctor ordered. By alexhildyard@hotmail.com (Alex Hildyard). [DevX: .NET Feed] 10:44:00 AM    comment [] DevX: C# without .NET? Free Your C# Apps from .NET Platforms. Visual Mainwin offers unprecedented platform flexibility, allowing you to develop applications in C# and deploy and run them on J2EE. Learn how to take advantage of this freedom by building a C# Web service that you can run on platforms besides .NET and IIS. By lmoroney@philotic.com (Laurence Moroney). [DevX: Latest Web Development Content] 10:35:38 AM    comment []

Tuesday, March 23, 2004

RSSify - an example of the cost of novelty "Web Services" RSSify was pretty cool. It could turn a non-RSSing blog into RSS for consumption by aggregators. But here's the catch--it caught on so much that it was hogging precious bandwidth (see below). Successful grass roots services (not necessarily limited to XML-RPC/SOAP) face the same problem--becoming the victim of their own success. 23-Mar-04 3:00:30 pm Please stop using RSSify. Unfortunately I can no longer bear the bandwidth cost of running this service so I'm turning it off. There's a mirror at http://www.wcc.vccs.edu/services/rssify/rssify.php. There may be others. RSSify is a rather horrible hack that shouldn't be needed any more. Please ask the owner of the site you're reading (http://handheldlib.blogspot.com/) to change to a system that generates RSS natively such as Blogger Pro or Movable Type. Alternatively consider hosting RSSify yourself rather than using my bandwidth. [RSSify for http://handheldlib.blogspot.com/] Oh, and by the way, note the mention of the Blogger Pro subscription. It's not that expensive for the year. That's why it surprises me so much that Dave Barry's weblog doesn't use the pro version. Come on Dave, if you don't want to fork over the cash, have somebody pay for it. Your readers will thank you. 10:58:12 AM    comment []

Wednesday, November 19, 2003

Windows XP SP2 released Windows XP Service Pack 2 is out and available for use. ...By the way, I notice there's an RSS feed on [Microsoft's] security page. That's a good one to subscribe to. This link brought to you by [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger] 6:33:40 PM    comment [] Moving this weblog Howdy folks! Boy that sounds corny. If you're reading this post on radio.weblogs.com/0113822, I am moving this weblog to my own server with a more 'appropriate' domain name-- http://www.xagronaut.com. And I've shortened the name from The xagronaut Chronicle to Xagronaut. I apologize for any possible mistakes I might make during this process. I have seen at least one article with tips on the process, but I'm afraid I haven't followed all of the advice. I appreciate everyone who reads this weblog, and I hope you will migrate all of your links to my new address. Thanks. Still to do: Redirect RSS feeds Investigate a conditional redirect from my pages at the Radio UserLand community servers to my new location--should I use some kind of conditional UserTalk script in my template, or maybe some JavaScript based on the window.document.location.domain? 6:25:41 AM    comment []

Wednesday, November 12, 2003

Time for more trackbacks, Theoblogical should *fade to white*, dotText weblogging, oh, and Hi Sam Sam Ruby's site seems to be picking up on my posts now that I have enabled the trackback feature in Radio. My reference to the Fade To White trick later in the post will surely ping again. The trackback feature seems to work well enough. I can't say as much for the mail-from-aggregator feature which has stopped working. I get an email every hour that does not have any links--no body, just a message about "This message contains the latest headlines, courtesy of Radio Userland" (actually not a quote). Well, I tried to tweak it just a tad by adding a couple of extra content substitution tags (or so I thought) I was hoping to have the permalink and site link appear in the email (it doesn't by default). I've been writing a bookmarklet to parse out hyperlinks, text selections, and stylesheet references from a web page. While it has multiple uses, my primary goal is to create a custom "blog this" tool. I know they exist, but I'm reinventing the wheel. And whoever said that reinventing the wheel was bad, should consider the intellectual property wheel before applying that sentiment universally. Yeah, sometimes I reinvent the wheel, but *it's my wheel*. And I'm starting to get to the point, familiarity-wise, where I might actually be able to pull off the bibliography bookmarklet I wrote about before. And it was working great until I tried to get Radio to give me just one or two more links in the emails I was getting. You're supposed to credit the source blog right? But the source blog is not consistently in the default mail-from-aggregator template. Is that too much to ask? It's not as though the format of the email wasn't intended to be customized. There's even a dedicated interface for just that. After I tried the web interface unsuccessfully (because of faulty assumptions that this feature would work like the text file interface where #anything can be referred to later). So I dug into the database, as I'm becoming accustomed to doing lately. I really don't think I changed the code. I might have goofed and accidentally saved something, but I'm almost positive I didn't. I was a little disappointed in digging through the code to find out that the substitutions are hard-coded string replacements. I can't just pick some common substitutions like <%permalink%> on the item or <%link%> or <%url%> on the feed. Guess they just never thought of that. There was some cool code that I did find, though. I was hoping it would save my butt, but no luck. Well, anyway, the cool part was that there was an "init" procedure that would create the default configuration entries if they were not already defined. Which means that if I wanted to restore the intial default settings, I had only to delete the existing values in Radio's outliner database explorer interface. They even reappeared mysteriously just seconds after I whacked them. For a second, I thought Radio was flaking, or Windows had a repaint problem, or I was trying to delete too many items (yeah, 3) at once. Nope. Radio magically detects or polls and discovers that the entries are gone and need to be recreated. Just like it does with the cached upstream server stuff. You delete the entries and it instantly detects that they've disappeared and reads them from the disk if they still exist. Now I'll have to do some research to find out if this is happening to anybody else. [Update: I found another tool called news2mail for Radio Userland that appears to already have the links I need.] So, I wonder if Dale at Theoblogical will see this post before I leave a comment on his blog. Either way, it sounds like he has a problem similar to the one Sam Ruby solved with the "fade to white" social engineering technique--changing the color of the contents displayed in his deprecated RSS feed. I was puzzled at first when I saw it, but it was definitely effective. Since he has switched, he is advertising his new feed. I'm a little confused, and a little surprised, too, with the next change going on there. I haven't read enough to get [oh wait, now I did] all the background. Now, maybe this is a second blog, and I can understand that. The cool thing is that he's using dotText, a .NET-based weblog tool. I had a tough time getting back to his Radio links because he's done a pretty effective job of redirecting his Radio weblog version to the Movable Type blog, which ironically still has a link to his Radio version which redirects back to Movable Type. Oh, well. I think it's par for the course when trying to manage all this stuff despite tools that are only partially customizable, reasonable, agreeable, etc. Man, this blogging thing is really starting to catch on--so much so that I can barely keep up with the host of blogging tools and news aggregators. Yowza! Well, I had better get my publishing act together before it's a given that everyone can publish without thinking or without writing code, and I'll be considered behind the curve. As usual. Of course, I'm all about customization and integration. That's half the reason that I'm frustrated with Radio, and half the reason I'm impressed by it. It's kind of a love-hate thing. [Note: I would give you a couple more links for the love-hate phrase in the last sentence, but I've already spent 2 and a half hours tweaking this post. Good night.] 11:19:02 PM    comment []

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