Gnodal Journal

On 7JAN03, in my little item on Apple chooses ”Safari”, I wrote. “A choice of browsers … hunh … Given that I’ve never and will never use IE, that’s truly novel concept for me! So, it comes to this, then: shall I use Mozilla 1.2.1? or Phoenix 0.5? …. ummmm, I think the latest Phoenix nightly is the order of the day.”
For the record, I’ve been using Mozilla 1.3a since then … sweet.

I’ve recovered archives, which is a Good Thing.
From this evening’s experience I know that, if I go back to edit the template, it will 1) destroy the contents of the right sidebar (either the text, or the archive script, or bits and pieces of both) and/or 2) destroy the counter script I’ve put in. Life’s like that, I know … but I’m not convinced it has to be.

Blogs refine enterprise focus by InfoWorld‘s Cathleen Moore begins, “Building on the success of Weblogs for personal Web publishing, enterprises are starting to tap into blogs to streamline specific business processes such as intelligence gathering or to augment traditional content-and knowledge-management technologies.

XpertWeb’s Manifesto for a New Economy conceptualizes things wonderfully: “The Internet is a conversation. Work and its Reward is primarily a conversation about quality: money is just the punch line. The quality of the work-reward conversation, not money, is the best benchmark for a ‘New’ Economy.”

And in the cluetrain manifesto we’re treated to this: “A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter faster than most companies.”

An introductory sidebar reads

“This Site Declared A Read-Only Landmark –   When we created Cluetrain.com in April, 1999, it kicked up some dust. A few thousand people signed their endorsement of the ideas. Lots of email, lots of press coverage. This is the site as it existed then. The conversations continue elsewhere. Please read and enjoy. But don’t tap on the glass as it just annoys the animals.”

This is followed by a shortlist of bloggers [the animals?]: “To catch up with the site’s creators: Chris Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger.”

The UK Register reports that Norwegian courts have rendered judgement: DVD decoder Johansen did no wrong. Kewl. More on this “real soon now”. [thanks to h2odragon and kuro5hin for this. h_b]

On the Sematic Web front [no secondary links right now … it’s 02:20 and I’m pooped. h_b]: In Attention MovableType users! the creator of Idle Words writes:

“I am working on a semantic search engine plugin for Movable Type. The technique I have been working with, called latent semantic analysis, uses linear algebra to examine patterns of word use across many blog entries and make intelligent guesses about the topics those entries cover.”

(As well as having an interesting project and some tasty items, the guy is reading Joseph Heller’s Something Happened right now!)

On a different thread entirely, Conservative Columnists Bruce Bartlett on blogging. (Earlier this evening I came across an item on libertarian hawks … dynamical systems indeed!)

Here’s the item that moved me to blog at this ungawdly hour after so long online: if we drive someone offline by linkiing to them, shouldn’t we arrange that they get served with higher bandwidth capabality? Set up a tip jar somewhere …

Web sites can in effect get disappeared by their popularity; getting linked by the likes of Slashdot and Kuro5hin, can bring down the server that isn’t ready for massive hits. (I’ve often told friends that if they think failure is hard to cope with, then they really aren’t prepared to handle success!) Exceeding bandwidth can result in suspension of service. It can easily drive up costs. [thanks to zonker for the kuro5hin item “Ethics of Linkage”. h_b]

An online book: KDE 2.0 Development – Andamooka Reader Table of Contents

!Headline! Exposure to Mozilla world shocks Mac thinker into sensibility!

Yes, of course that’s silly. But how else to explain this bit of sophomoric cant? (Alright … over-paid hot-house dot-com sophists on phurlough. Yes, there is that.)

dive into mark “How to hide CSS from Safari” reads, in part:
Recently, I floated the idea that perhaps Safari should be intentionally buggy in parsing CSS, in order to leave a backdoor for web designers. [??!] Of those who thought it was a bad idea, arguments fell broadly into two categories:
1) “We had enough buggy CSS rendering in Netscape 4; modern browsers should render perfectly.” This is true, but it is not an argument against my proposal. My proposal was about bugs in CSS parsing, not CSS rendering. Obviously Safari should properly render all the CSS it finds; the only question is whether it should intentionally not find some of it. [Obviously. But what an inarticulate way of explicating what has been so thorougly discussed in the explanation of Moz’s “quirks” mode.]
2) “Web designers should just code to standards and not make concessions for buggy browsers.” Um, OK, you’re certainly free to do that on your own site. Meanwhile, over here in the real world, half a million people have downloaded Safari in the last 48 hours, I’m getting 1000 Safari visitors a day, and my site looks like this. [ohhh for *&^@$# … see above]

It’s gratifying to see that people are coming to grips with what is under their feet. I hope we don’t have to reward them too highly for their having coined the working concept of “ground”.

In the first entry of my LiveJournal, I commented rather rudely on the default link colours. Well, actually, what I wrote was “*heaves sigh / groan* Gawd this page is ugly. pink as the default colour for clicked links? How does that harmonize? *sigh*”
Someone named evan responded, commenting rather cryptically: “#8 (and later, #8 still).” (I’ve unpacked the links below.)
Here’s my reply:

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Ya, thanks evan … I think Nielsen’s comments are very sane. Also, I think they are quite usually observed. But in any case, this can’t hurt … Read and heed:

Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox for May 1996: Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design
8. Non-Standard Link Colors – Links to pages that have not been seen by the user are blue; links to previously seen pages are purple or red. Don’t mess with these colors since the ability to understand what links have been followed is one of the few navigational aides that is standard in most web browsers. Consistency is key to teaching users what the link colors mean.

Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, May 2, 1999: “Top Ten Mistakes” Revisited Three Years Later
8. Non-Standard Link Colors – Continues to be a problem since users rely on the link colors to understand what parts of the site they have visited. I often see users bounce repeatedly among a small set of pages, not knowing that they are going back to the same page again and again. (Also, because non-standard link colors are unpleasantly frequent, users are now getting confused by any underlining of text that is not a link. Score: Severe

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Cudna said it better myself. Actually, in retrospect, the pink was one of the things that moved me to swing this page in direction of a personal diary. Which, BTW, I happen to think is just fine.

Bookmarklets
With “The power of JavaScript in the hands of the user!“, Jesse’s Bookmarklets Page kicks off a lovely introduction:

Bookmarklets are extra browser features that you can store as bookmarks on your personal toolbar. For example, if you have search links on your personal toolbar, you can go to Slashdot and then click the toolbar button to search the links on Slashdot. Bookmarklets are actually short JavaScript programs that, when stored as bookmarks, act on whatever page you’re viewing before you trigger them.

A good example of b’lets’ power *yaaa, that’s right, b’lets. I just now used this neologism; did I coin it?* is “test styles” on Jess’s Web Development Bookmarklets page. This makes reference to “Blast Sites with User CSS Sheets“, a “meryl.net article”“, which begins:

All you need is a modern browser [standards compliant, ehh whot? h_b] and a text editor to make use of a powerful tool that will make you wonder why you never thought of [this] before.
Creating your own user style sheets gives you the ability to: find legacy markup; understand how a Web site is laid out; ensure the site is accessible for people with disabilities; conduct fast usability testing

Bookmarklets – free tools for power surfing is another page that looks pretty kewl … “Bookmarklets allow you to: modify the way you see someone else’s webpage; extract data from a webpage; search more quickly, and in ways not possible with a search engine; navigate in new ways …and more. Over 150 bookmarklets are available.” Yup … kewl.
And just this morning a friend pointed me toward Bookmarklets: Search Engine Bookmarklets – www.docjavascript.com, a nice double-handful of b’lets dedicated to that task. *Did I just coin a new term? 20:43AST 10JAN03 hfx_ben* nota: I’m not sure why docjavascript.com appears in this last item’s title.

On this day googling “bookmarklet” returned 34,700 results. Consider yourself duly informed. 😉