FeedBurner: Not Funny

Posted on February 8, 2006 by mfagan

FeedBurner: Not Funny – I’ve said before that FeedBurner is a company doing things right. I’ll say it again.

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coComment – clear conversation in the blogosphere

Posted on February 4, 2006 by mfagan

coComment – clear conversation in the blogosphere – once upon a time I kept a sideblog of all the comments I made on other blogs. I and others postulated on how it could be done in a more automatic way, perhaps similar to trackback or something. My thought at the time was that we could comment with a FOAF file (which would also eliminate typing in name, email and url), which would include a url for the blog system to ping.

Of course, the easier thing to do to get this started is something centralized, which is what coComment is. Of course, unless I’m mistaken (barely read the docs), this means that coComment gets to keep all the data, also making them (to some extent) a single point of failure for the entire system.

Will it take on? Personally I wish it would, followed by a move to a distributed system, but I’m pessimistic that it will. Of course, I could be wrong.

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Google Toolbar Button API Follow-up

Posted on January 30, 2006 by mfagan

In my last post was my initital reaction to this new API from Google. It’s not surprising that I’m worried about Google’s plans here, as their record on XML cooperation hasn’t been all that stellar. I haven’t fully looked into it yet, but I had noticed Google’s absence from a new standardization effort; Retailers, Engines Want Standard for Product Description (via Gary) lists MSN, Yahoo!, and others.

Anyhow, getting down to the real point, I’ve decided to completely skip over “What Google Should Have Done,” and go right ahead to “What Google Should Now Do.” Save myself the wasted keystrokes.

Step 1: Fix Feed Refresh Interval

Remove the refresh-interval attribute from <feed>. Add it to RSS/Atom in a namespace. This shouldn’t really change anything. This has nothing to do with OpenSearch by the way, it’s just my general opinion on XML – extend an existing format rather than creating a new one.

After I started writing this, DeWitt posted his take on it all: Google Toolbar, Custom Buttons, and OpenSearch. It includes a lot of what I was going to say, so I will continue my comments as a reply to his post.

A final note, for anyone that’s counting… this makes at least four different Google products that are RSS/Atom readers (Google Reader, Google Toolbar, Google Personalized Homepage, Google Desktop). I hope they’re all using the API that the Google Reader team has been developing.

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Google Toolbar API – Guide to Making Custom Button

Posted on January 30, 2006 by mfagan

Google Toolbar API – Guide to Making Custom Button – aaaargh. I see Google’s recreated the OpenSearch Description format. Nice job guys. Oh yeah, and it also functions as an RSS feed information thingy…. which as far as I can tell, only provides refresh rate…. if they need that so badly they could make that element an extension to RSS/Atom.

It seems like Google’s attitude nowadays is “developers like APIs, and they like XML, so lets create lots and lots of little tiny APIs and new XML formats.” How about a new search API, like for images. The web search API was last updated years ago… . Oh, in case we’re counting, Google now has created XML formats for sitemaps (but they accept RSS and Atom, so what was the point?), homepage modules (why not use HTML, as I’ve written before?), “buttons” (Google Toolbar), 50 (exaggeration) kinds of microcontent (Google Base), etc.

More later when I get back from school and have time to look into this more fully.

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Canadian Election Analysis: Urban vs Rural

Posted on January 25, 2006 by mfagan

Talking about the urban-vs-rural divide in Canada and the US with my roommate yesterday; today I realized I could actually demonstrate it.

I scraped data from two websites: CBC and Elections Canada, since the latter doesn’t yet have election results. So here’s what I found:

population density vs vote scatterplots

What are you seeing here? Each point is a single riding. The x-axis shows population density. The y-axis shows the votes for that party as a percentage of the votes to the four major national parties (Liberal, Conservative, NDP, Green), and the scale is different for each. The Bloc Quebecois are not considered here, since they only participate in Quebec.

As you can see, this data seems to show that the Liberals weakly correlate with high population density, and the Conservatives correlate strongly with low population density. I tried making similar graphs using the logarithm of population density, but that didn’t reveal anything differently.

There’s quite a lot more that can be done with the data I used, you can find it all in this Excel file.

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Puzzlepieces � tree-climbing vines (April 17, 2005)

Posted on January 25, 2006 by mfagan

Puzzlepieces � tree-climbing vines (April 17, 2005) – yes, I’m linking to a blog post of mine from last year. Most of my posts generate about zero comments, so this one, at 5, is a lot, the last one just added today.

All from people I don’t know, it seems that people are searching for “tree climbing vine” and variations, and I’m ranking quite well for those. So if you have vines like those and want to get rid of them, check that post for comments 😉

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Google Code: Web Authoring Statistics

Posted on January 24, 2006 by mfagan

Google Code: Web Authoring Statistics – excellent stats from Google on HTML usage. There are so many times that I have wanted this. I have, however, made use somewhat more basic stats on RSS from Syndic8.

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Vote Selector Quiz

Posted on January 18, 2006 by mfagan

I never do quizes. And political party ones are innaccurate, of course. nevertheless

  • Jack Layton Leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada (100%)
  • Paul Martin Leader of Liberal Party of Canada, Prime Minister of Canada (88%)
  • Gilles Duceppe Leader of the Bloc Quebecois (77%)
  • Stephen Harper Leader of the Conservative Party of Canada (27%)

and of course, in Canada you vote per-riding, not for the party leader (well, unless they’re in your riding). oh, and since I don’t live in Quebec, I couldn’t vote for the Bloc. Although the riding I’m voting in also has Green and Marxist-Lenninist and an independant. Via mattt

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There is no XML without namespaces

Posted on January 17, 2006 by mfagan

Yes, this makes two blog posts today, and yes, I’m going to talk about XML again.

I’ve suspected this for a while, but hadn’t looked into it. Thanks to Sam Ruby, I see that someone has: Who knows an XML document from a hole in the ground? shows that indeed, a lot of RSS/Atom parsers are not reading XML as XML… or at least, they’re not understanding the namespaces.

This wasn’t a problem when most feeds were bare-bones, and before Atom. Now, only a couple of years after I expected, all sorts of data and metada is starting to be put into feeds, with lots of different namespaces.

This is one of those things were if you’re a feed reader, and you don’t understand namespaces, you are broken, and need to be fixed. There’s no way around it, end of story.

That being said, I’m much more optimistic now than I was about those fixes actually happened. Phil Ringnalda’s Atom title tests really did help and pushed a lot more readers into supporting it properly. Now let’s see some real XML parsing.

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‘my portal’ pages

Posted on January 17, 2006 by mfagan

Via Marc Canter, I learn that AOL is creating YAPP (yet another personal portal), in the DHTML/AJAX style. That’s by no means a bad thing, though.

So now we have all the major players with a personalizable home page: Yahoo!, Google, MSN (Windows Live), and AOL (okay, so theirs is alpha). 3/4 of those are ‘all cool and ajax-y,’ Yahoo! being the odd one out. Yahoo!’s is the oldest, and I’d be quite surprised if they weren’t planning a new version with a richer interface.

In the ajax-y arena, there are several which are just as good or better than the major players: Netvibes, Protopage, eskobo, and several others.

Looking at another facet, 3 of those major players, and none of the others that I’m aware of, allow third-party modules. I haven’t looked at Microsoft’s, but I did look at Google’s last month in Why is the Google Homepage API not HTML?. Surprise, surprise, AOL’s announcement today is that their API is a microformat (HTML).

Aside from the AJAX, does this remind anyone else of 1999? I’d accuse some of copying from others, but… well that’s life.

Update January 20: Yahoo!’s is now all ajaxy, although it doesn’t seem quite as well done as some of the others. No third-party modules yet, though.

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