Blogging

15th December 2006

New weblog, new location

I've just launched my new weblog over at simonwillison.net. I will no longer be updating simon.incutio.com, and will be putting redirects in place for old content over the next few days. You can read ...

2nd December 2004

Blogmarks on del.icio.us

I'm horribly ill again: having defeated the mumps I now seem to have come down with some kind of 'flu thing. Lovely. In between whinging about my state of health and watching episodes of Frasier I've ...

29th October 2004

Keeping up appearances

Wow, I think this is the longest gap in my blogging since I started! I wish I could say I've been enjoying the sunshine or taking up a new hobby, but the truth is that the weather's been horrible and ...

26th August 2004

1000th Blogmark

I just posted my 1000th blogmark. I can't emphasize enough how much of an impact this 15 minute hack has had on both my browsing and my blogging habits. While I still tend to leave browser windows ope...

23rd August 2004

A snarky note from the administrator

No, you can't have a Gmail invite. No, I won't hack your email account for you. And if you can't find your hotmail inbox, you shouldn't be using a computer. Semantic HTML is a two-edged sword....

11th May 2004

Google approved PageRank stripping

Blogger are now using the redirect-without-PageRank technique to protect their hosted blogs against comment spam (also used by Moveable Type). At the risk of sounding incredibly pleased with myself (w...

5th April 2004

Personalisation? We've already got it

Vin Crosbie, a highly respected commentator on the online news industry, recently published his long awaited essay What Newspapers and Their Web Sites Must Do to Survive. It's long but captivating and...

Microsoft "get" blogging

Who would have thought a year ago that Microsoft would be the company that took corporate blogging to the next level? Say what you like about the company itself, you can't fault the quality and quanti...

27th March 2004

Omit needless words, codified

I continue to try to improve my writing. "Omit needless words" is all well and good, but identifying needless words can be a difficult task for the untrained eye. Paul Ford's Passivator bookmarklet hi...

21st March 2004

Avoiding protracted debates

I love Charles Miller's Fishbowl. His latest entry introduces his rules for argument. Read them, follow them and save a truck-load of time avoiding protracted debates in the future. Heck, if everyone ...

6th March 2004

Ghost town, sponsored by Google

Via Boing Boing, this fascinating and utterly chilling photographic journey through the abandoned ruins of the Chernobyl dead zone. As an aside, the free hosting provide used by the site appears to...

5th March 2004

Attribution

Via Kevin Fox, Wired are running an article that claims that authors of popular blog sites regularly borrow topics from lesser-known bloggers -- and they often do so without attribution. The first ...

6th February 2004

The dangers of PageRank

A well documented side effect of the weblog format is that it brings Google PageRank in almost absurd quantities. I'm now the 5th result for simon on Google, and I've been the top result for simon wil...

28th January 2004

Solving comment spam

There are two main schools of thought concerning comment spam: the optimists and the defeatists. Optimists believe that comment spam can be beaten with technology; defeatists (maybe I should call them...

21st January 2004

Moveable Type now kills PageRank on comment links

This is pretty cool: Moveable Type 2.661 is out and includes a whole bunch of comment spam fighting features, including one inspired by my own anti-spam measure of disabling PageRank on links from com...

31st December 2003

Professional social software

Via D. Keith Robinson, LinkedIn is a social software system that works kind of like Friendster but is targetted at professionals. You sign up, create a profile that includes your industry and geograph...

29th December 2003

A belated Merry Christmas

I'm back to work after enjoying that most precious of things: a holiday without computers. Comment spam has been deleted, email spam has been saved in a special folder (for rapid training of bayesian ...

11th December 2003

More blogmark tweaks

I'm up to 110 blogmarks now, and from my point of view they're the single most useful feature I've added to this site in a long time. I've modified my day archive pages to show the blogmarks added on ...

26th November 2003

Feed you

Wow, that's what I call feedback! It's a shame pretty much everyone hates the new design but I like it so it stays. I've taken a few tips though and tweaked the link colours a bit, as well as making a...

25th November 2003

Collaborative Redesign

Out with the orange, in with the green. As with my last redesign, only the CSS changed. A fun deviation with this one was that it was a collaboration between myself and Natalie over nearly 5,000 miles...

24th November 2003

Blogmarks

This entry was going to be another list of links, together with a note about how much I really needed to set up a separate link blog. Then I realised that it would make more sense just to set one up s...

12th November 2003

Roundup of roundups

There's blogging a list of links, and then there's blogging a list of lists of links: Elizabeth Lane Lawley has collated a list of responses to Clay Shirky's latest. Kayode Okeyode has a round...

11th November 2003

Innovation chez Orchard

Dunstan Orchard's great looking blog has had a whole bunch of upgrades, and some of them are pretty interesting. Firstly, he's taken my blockquote citations script and modified it to handle citations ...

22nd October 2003

Google's Internal Blogs

Evan Williams on Google's intranet weblogs: How many people blog at Google? Not sure what the count is, but I know there's a couple hundred or more. It's really interesting to see the network ...

18th October 2003

Kansas Blog

I've set up a new blog, A Year in Kansas, to chronicle my adventures during my 11 months in the States. I'm going to keep my two blogs pretty much separate; my Kansas blog is going to be squarely targ...

30th September 2003

Battling comment spam

It's a sad state of affairs when you come back to your blog after a week elsewhere and have to add another 56 domains to your blacklist. I'm actually getting more comment spam than legitimate comments...

15th September 2003

Don't delete.me

Paul Sowden is the blogger who inspired me to start my own blog over a year ago. He's restarted his blog at a new domain: delete.me.uk. Let's hope the new site doesn't live up to its name. Oh, and be ...

2nd September 2003

Blacklisting Comment Spam

I'm fed up with comment spam. From now on, any comment I judge to be spam will be deleted, and the domains linked to from that comment will be blacklisted. Any future comments that contain links to th...

28th August 2003

Banning Google Comments

Russell Beattie has an ingenious solution to the problem caused by weblog un-savvy Google users turning up on old entries and posting comments on them, without properly understanding the nature of the...

27th August 2003

I'm in Kansas

If you've been wondering why the site has been so quiet for the past few days, here's the reason: I've moved to the States! To cut a long story short, I'm here in sunny Lawrence for a couple of weeks ...

13th August 2003

On blogging technique and better tabbed browsing

I'm addicted to tabs. Several times a day, I scan down my blogroll looking for blogs that have updated since I last checked, then middle click each one to open it up in a new tab in the background. I ...

3rd August 2003

Minor comment system improvements

I should have made these a long time ago: thanks Nat for reminding me ;) Comments no longer require an email address, and provide a proper error page with the comment intact if you forget to enter you...

24th July 2003

Comment Authentication Prototype

I've built a prototype of the comment signature system discussed earlier. The prototype consists of an authentication server which anyone can register with and support on this blog for verifying signa...

22nd July 2003

You can't keep a good man down

John Robb: NEVER (under any circumstances) publish a weblog to a domain that you don't control. Nice to see he's back....

Signing comments on blogs

Adrian Holovaty has implemented reserved comment names in his blog, a feature that prevents anyone apart from him from using the names "Adrian", "Adrian H." or "Adrian Holovaty" when posting a comment...

Scott Andrew on Typepad

Delimiter is Scott Andrew's new TypePad blog. Unlike his primary blog which mostly talks about his adventures as a musician, Delimiter promises to cover fun and interesting Web stuff. Should be good. ...

10th July 2003

Clearout

Tristan Louis' RSS to Necho convertor puts paid to the idea that the success of one format will be detrimental to the usefulness of the other. O'Reilly's RegExp Power series (part one and part tw...

9th July 2003

Independent Days on Daring Fireball

Daring Fireball: Independent Days. A sprawling essay that covers web design principles, corporate vs. independent sites, Mac punditry and the justification for adding Google Ads to a weblog. Well wort...

Throwing your money around

Adam Curry is a dangerous man: He's throwing $10,000 at a problem he clearly doesn't understand. Quote from June 29th: I wonder if netscape came up with the Really Simple Syndication when they hi...

Filtering AOL

Burningbird starts a discussion on how much harm the addition of AOL users will cause to the blogging eco-system. She compares this development to the chaos caused when AOL users were first introduced...

7th July 2003

John Robb leaves UserLand

From Scripting.com: Some news: John Robb is leaving UserLand. This is part of a bigger transition, one that we're not ready to talk about yet. It should be, net-net, good news for Manila and Radi...

1st July 2003

Join the Buzz

Artima.com keeps getting better and better. In addition to the world's most interesting collection of technical bloggers, Bill Venners has just added Artima Technology Buzz, a collection of community ...

25th June 2003

Tom Gilder's blog

Tom Gilder has finally started his blog properly, powered by Moveable Type. Nice design too (be sure to view source to figure out how he achieved the drop shadows). He's already covered the RNIB site ...

24th June 2003

Friends' Blogs

My friend Tristan has got his blosxom powered blog up and running again. He's also set up an experimental public aggregator of feeds from a small group of friends from Uni, using blosxom's companion a...

16th June 2003

Another MP Blogger

Fantastic! Tom Watson has now been joined by Richard Allan (Liberal Democrat MP for Sheffield Hallam) in the ranks of MPs with their own weblog. It looks like it's going to be really good; Richard is ...

14th June 2003

Small design tweak, big difference

I've changed from using the day as the principle heading on the front page to using the title of each post instead. This is quite a minor alteration, but I expect it to have a relatively large impact ...

12th June 2003

One year of blogging

Today marks the first anniversary of the start of my blog (and, by a slightly contrived coincidence, my thousandth blog entry). It's been a fun year. Here are my highlights - if you can't stand length...

10th June 2003

Home improvements

Exams are all over and I've had a few days of doing nothing to recuperate. I've also made a couple of small improvements to my blog. Firstly I've finally updated the comment system (after numerous voc...

25th April 2003

Experimental feature: Related entries

I'm experimenting with using MySQL full text indexing to generate a list of "related entries" for each entry (click on an item's permalink to see it in action). It works by concatenating the item's ti...

23rd April 2003

Titles all the way

I've added titles to every single one of my archived blog entries; nearly a thousand of them. It took just over an hour, thanks mainly to my decision a long time ago to use camelCase for my permalinks...

Big news from Six Apart.

Ben Hammersley reports on SixApart's (creators of Moveable Type) new venture, TypePad: SixApart, the company behind the Movable Type weblogging system, is to lanch a new "hosted" service called Typ...

22nd April 2003

Entry Titles

As promised many times, I've finally implemented titles on my blog entries. I'm in the transitional stage at the moment - new posts will have them, old posts won't. At some point in the near future I'...

21st April 2003

Comment Notification

Keith is calling for bloggers to implement a "notify me of any replies" feature for their comments systems: There are a few ways to do this. You could get an e-mail for every reply that's made, b...

15th April 2003

Interview with the Blogging MP

Via Tom Watson himself, a short interview with Tom, the UK's first blogging MP: It is a huge political risk (Watson's spoof page for teenagers caught the eyes of the national newspapers last week...

14th April 2003

Last 40 Comments Page

Last 40 comments, more for my use than anything else (I keep missing comments posted on older entries)....

13th April 2003

Artima Weblogs

Artima.com recently started hosting weblogs, with membership by invitation only. With people like Guido van Rossum and Ward Cunningham already signed up Artima looks set to become a very interesting c...

Home Improvements

Phil Ringnalda posted a rant about sites that don't tell you how their comments system works - like this one. I've been meaning to add instructions for ages but never got round to it; now I have. Hope...

11th April 2003

Lots of RSS Aggregators

Via Ed Tech Dev (and others), an RSS Feed Reader / News Aggregators directory and an RSS Readers wiki page. ...

8th April 2003

Category specific RSS feeds

I frequently check the Python Programmer Weblogs page for an addition to my daily blogging fix. It's a simple but very effective idea: Subscribe an aggregator to a bunch of feeds about a similar topic...

6th April 2003

Archive woes

Mike Golding has some interesting thoughts on Archive Navigation in blogs. He uses mine as an example of what not to do. I agree - the archives on this site leave an awful lot to be desired. I've got ...

4th April 2003

Letting off some steam

I spent most of today knee deep in RSS, writing an aggregator for a project at work. It has been quickly becomng apparent that "Really Simple Syndication" is anything but! There are currently three m...

The blogging MP

Could Tom Watson be the blogging world's best kept secret? He's the Labour MP for west Bromich East, he's been blogging apparently since since July 2001 and posts updates several times a day, includin...

Bjørn Borud blogs

Bjørn Borud (a Senior Software Engineer at AllTheWeb) has recently started blogging. His thoughts on wikis make interesting reading. I also rather liked his description of something he calls th...

25th March 2003

Date-centric vs Entry-centric

When I started this blog, I made the decision to use days rather than entries as the principle navigation unit of the site. Each day's entries are grouped under a single heading for that day, archives...

Freshly Blogrolled

Recent additions to the blogroll: Andrew Hayward - a friend from Uni with some serious javascript skills. As well as document.getElementbyClassName, recent innovations have included a rewrite of d...

16th March 2003

Clearing out my tabs

I've inadvertantly discovered a flaw in the tabbed browsing model - if you're not disciplined about them you can quickly end up lost in a see of tabs. Right now I have 6 Phoenix windows open with a to...

12th March 2003

Blosxom rocks

I've been hearing a few good things about Blosxom recently, so a few days ago I decided to see what all the fuss was about. It's a blogging tool, but it's a very different species from the average sys...

9th March 2003

A plea for pings

Blogs I would read a lot more often if only they pinged weblogs.com when they updated: Decafbad Stop Design Keith Devens Tony Bowden afongen Brent Ashley The Web Standards Project ...

8th March 2003

Roogle

Scott Johnson has put together a blog search engine with a difference: it indexes RSS feeds rather than crawling the blogs themselves. Roogle is still under heavy development (and Scott is blogging it...

6th March 2003

Jeff minter blogs

Wow. Jeff Minter has a blog....

4th March 2003

Mozilla for bloggers

Matthew Haughey (freshly redesigned) has published a Mozilla advocacy article explaining why Mozilla (and variants) are excellent tools for bloggers. Spot on....

3rd March 2003

The importance of titles

Gordon Weakliem reminds us that the most important RSS element is <title>. I'm painfully reminded of this each and every time I add a new entry - I have well over 800 entries now, and I've promi...

28th February 2003

Blogging and journalism

I've been pretty much ignoring the whole "Blogging vs Journalism" thing but recently I've begun to understand what the big fuss is about. One of the most popular arguments put forth by journalists con...

24th February 2003

Pingback redux

I think I've worked out a way of implementing Pingback (or a Pingback-like system) without any need for XML-RPC, <link> elements or custom HTTP headers. There are three principle reasons for ...

16th February 2003

Google aquire Blogger

Lots of analysis around the blogosphere today of Google's surprise aquisition of Blogger. Cory Doctorow's analysis is (in my opinion) especially worth reading. Personally, I just hope Google do someth...

4th February 2003

Vellum on Windows

Via Paul Freeman, detailed instructions for installing Stuart's Vellum Python blogging system on Windows using either IIS or Apache....

21st January 2003

More Vellum

Vellum 1.0a4 is out, and features comment support via a new Comments plugin and an Audience generic object type that abstracts the concept of "responses to your post" and is also used for Pingback sup...

20th January 2003

Scaling the two way web

Another Dave inspired post: It seems I misunderstood Dave's objections to blogging feedback mechanisms yesterday. I thought he was ruling out what I see as an invaluable tool for low traffic bloggers,...

You know me

Dave Winer: The "You Know Me" Button. Dave hates posting comments on blogs and then having to check back constantly to see if anyone has replied (I do too). Sam Ruby's solution is to provide the comme...

19th January 2003

A global conversation

Dave Winer on TrackBacks and push backs (and presumably PingBack as well): I'm old school. I think the cool thing about weblogs is that they are not discussion groups or mail lists. If I want to ...

16th January 2003

Blogging with AppleScript

Les Orchard describes an intriguing blogging tool built with AppleScript that posts links to a weblog when they are dragged on to a special folder on the OS X desktop....

Vellum looks nice

Stuart has released the code for Vellum, his new Python blogging system. I haven't tried it out yet (the installation process is pretty in depth and I don't have a properly configured server to hand) ...

15th January 2003

Feedback loops

Mark Pilgrim has been having an interesting problem with his Further Reading feature: Feedback loops. I always said that my "further reading" was like a prisoner's dilemma: great for me as long a...

First deployment of Vellum

Oooh... Stuart has moved his blog over to Vellum, his brand new sparkly Python powered blogging system. The full post is here, but his archive / permalinks aren't working yet. It's going to be fun wat...

14th January 2003

Comment back

Paul Freeman: Maybe one day, I’ll post a comment somewhere, and when someone responds, a CommentBack will be sent to my CommentBack server, and I can click straight to the response. ...

Apple snubs Mozilla

News.com: Apple snub stings Mozilla. Surprisingly comprehensive coverage of the Mozilla communities reactions to Safari. What impressed me was the number of links to weblogs in the news story. It look...

Blogs as agents

Scott makes an interesting observation: Are blogs nothing more than agents for the internet?. A few years ago "intelligent agents" which knew your tastes and found content you would be interested in w...

11th January 2003

Stuart's pingback roundup

Stuart has a good summary of the recent advances being made in the Pingback/Trackback implementation sphere....

7th January 2003

Pepy's diary

Pepy's Diary is a serialization of the Diary of Samuel Pepys in weblog form, which launched on Christmas day plans to continue for the next ten years (the time period covered by the diary). The weblog...

Wiki hosts and ticket stubs

Matthew Haughey asks why no one has launched a free host for people to set up Wikis, similar to blogspot for blogs or Yahoo Groups for mailing lists / collaborative communities. It's a good question. ...

5th January 2003

Merging comments and pingbacks

Tantek: [...] we now have Trackback and Pingback to help automate generating comment hyperlinks to blog-on-blog commentary. While I certainly applaud these efforts at automating the plumbing, I m...

19th December 2002

Stuart on plays

Stuart has some interesting thoughts regarding Mark Pilgrim's latest entry: an excerpt from The Real Thing, a play by Tom Stoppard....

Coursework complete

Coursework is done and dusted; normal service can now resume :)...

11th December 2002

A new source of rants

Soup is Good is a new blog by a friend of Jeremy Zawodny. It looks like one to watch - two quality rants and counting....

8th December 2002

The perils of semantic markup

Phil Ringnalda: The perils of good semantic markup. A throwaway comment by a blogger about some trashy manufactured band results in his (properly marked up) site ending ranked higher by Google than th...

4th December 2002

Taking a break

Coursework continues, but I'm taking a quick break to blog the fact that Tony Bowden has changed the CSS style for blockquotes on Understanding Nothing. This may not be earth shattering news, but con...

2nd December 2002

No updates for a while

It's coursework crunch time. Deadline is Thursday, we have an application that works but doesn't work (if you get what I mean) and it looks like I will be spending the next few days immersed in Java. ...

29th November 2002

rel="bookmark"

Mental note: add the rel="bookmark" attribute to my permalinks, as recommended by Tantek. I'd never realised the rel attribute could be applied to normal hyperlinks....

28th November 2002

Syndication is not publication

Mark Pilgrim pretty much single handedly killed the discussion thread on syndicating weblog content with XHTML started a few days ago by Anil Dash. Stuart's reply to Mark's post is definitely worth a ...

24th November 2002

Syndicating blogs with XHTML

Anil Dash suggests using structured XHTML as a blog syndication format. Scott Andrew points out that this has semantic problems in that it would mean using the class attribute to add additional meanin...

23rd November 2002

Aquari-gone-ics

Aquarionics is Gone (well, not entirely - the old site can still be found here). Aquarion has committed to building his new blogging system, Epistula 2, and vowed not to add any more entries until the...

22nd November 2002

Mark's tinkerings

Mark's back, and he's been tinkering. In addition to a whole bunch of changes made yesterday in response to Hixie's markup critique, Mark now boasts php.net style shortcut URLs, an RDF powered about p...

20th November 2002

Syndicated further reading recommendations

I frequently find myself reading something on someone elses blog and thinking "that's interesting, and it fits in well with XXX that I read the other day". I often end up blogging a link to both just ...

16th November 2002

Douglas Bowman goes it alone

Douglas Bowman has left Wired, and is striking out on his own with Stop Design, his one man consultancy business. With the Wired redesign Douglas gave a massive and long-awaited boost to the web stand...

13th November 2002

Blogspace census

Phil Wolff: We need a census of blogspace....

K-Logging pilot

Rick Klau: A K-Log Pilot Recap: Given the flexible nature of weblogs (unlike structured applications, weblogs really can be what you want them to be), it wasn't entirely surprising to see users sha...

8th November 2002

Clean URLs

Handy bookmark for bloggers who wish to validate: cleanURL. It gives you the URL of the current page with all &s replaced with &amp;, ready to be posted in to a blog entry. Unescaped ampersand...

Web services in action

All Consuming is another one of those information-about-weblogs sites, but with a heavy emphasis on books: This page is the result of several different processes. Inspired by Book Watch, I create...

7th November 2002

Validating weblog entries

webgraphics have an interesting discussion running about the need for a weblog entry XHTML validator. Dave Lindquist suggests using his JavaScript XML Parser to perform validation on the client side, ...

4th November 2002

Blogroll with a twist

Spotted in my referrals today: ReadingEd.com. A promising new blog, well worth checking out for the innovative "Outside Reading" panel which uses the DOM and some very funky javascript to pull in the ...

28th October 2002

Cache-22

I haven't been checking my referrer logs recently, so it was a nice surprise to see that Richard from Incutio has finished redesigning his blog and is now back to updating it frequently. He also has P...

Comment spammers

I suppose it was only a matter of time. Phil Ringnalda reports on a spam attack on his blog in which a spammer used a script to systematically spam the comments section of every entry, using a piece o...

27th October 2002

Tidakada redesign

tidakada has redesigned, with a funky new 4 column CSS layout and a brand new blog o' links....

21st October 2002

Blogrolled

Via Adrian Holovaty I discover Craig Saila has an excellent weblog, and is now pinging blo.gs whenever he updates. A welcome addition to my blogroll....

13th October 2002

Catch-up time

Catch up time... An Interview With Douglas Bowman of Wired News - Eric Meyer interviews the man who headed up the team responsible for the fantastic new CSS Wired design. A great article both for t...

List o' Links

Paul Freeman has a clever new feature on his blog: List o Links, a list of links that he wants to record without writing up a full blog entry. I'm tempted to borrow the idea (which originated with Ani...

2nd October 2002

Write on

A year ago, Mark Pilgrim's manager told him to stop blogging. He refused, and was fired a week later. Today Mark celebrates. ...

Googledumping

It seems Google have tweaked their algorithm a bit, resulting in several high profile webloggers losing their top ranking positions for a search on their name. Scott Andrew summarises the situation ni...

30th September 2002

Peter Gabriel

Today's weird blogging observation: Bloggers love Peter Gabriel. Jeremy Zawodny is a big fan, Scott Andrew can't wait for his new album, Jeffrey Zeldman praises his sophistication and daypop returns 4...

25th September 2002

More lecture notes

As you can see, I've posted some more lecture notes. The second set uses a HTML entities to display greek letters, as listed on this page of the HTML 4.0 recommendation. I've been thinking about va...

Pingback coverage

The Pingback 1.0 specification is getting some serious attention. Mark Pilgrim and Dave Winer have linked to it. Ben Trott (co-author of Moveable Type and creator of TrackBack, the system that inspire...

24th September 2002

Pingback 1.0

Hixie has published the specification for Pingback 1.0. In general the specification is an excellent document, but I'm not entirely happy with the following statement: HTML and XHTML documents MAY ...

23rd September 2002

Blogging my lecture notes

So what was all that about? University term started today, and with it comes my grand plan to blog my lecture notes. Don't worry, I will be restructuring this site in the near future to keep lecture n...

17th September 2002

Returning

Cameron Barrett is back from Russia and brings photos. Scott Andrew is back from his summer vacation and brings CSS tips. I am back at University and stuck without bandwidth for the next few weeks....

14th September 2002

No updates for a while

I'm moving back up to Bath this afternoon, in to a student house with 4 other people. I don't know if we even have a phone line at the moment so I'll probably be offline for the next few days....

13th September 2002

Another excellent blog

Jeremy Allaire, Chief Technology Officer at Macromedia, now has a blog. Macromedia's attitude towards weblogging has been fantastic - they seem to really understand the medium and the opportunities it...

11th September 2002

Testing Pingback client

This post exists partly to list the blogs I know of that support PingBack, but mostly to help test my new PingBack client implementation. Hixie welcomes feedback on his text/html document. Aquarion l...

10th September 2002

Thrown the switch

I've flicked the switch and redirected my old blog to this new site. Unfortunately the Bath University web server appears not to obey .htaccess directives so I am currently having trouble redirecting ...

9th September 2002

New Hosting

If you were wondering why this blog went quiet all of a sudden, here's the reason. I've moved to a new host, and in the process completely rewritten the engine that powers this weblog from the ground ...

6th September 2002

geoIP

Adrian Holovaty in a blogite thread about features that can be added to blogs: Change the time zone. I've noticed a lot of blogs don't specify which time zone they're in, which pretty much makes the...

2nd September 2002

JellyBath

JellyBath (via Aquarionics). It turns your bath water in to Jelly. From the FAQ: Q. Can I use Jellybath in a Jacuzzi or Hot Tub? A. No, it is not recommended that you use Jellybath in tubs with jet...

More on Pingback

More on PingBack. PingBack can be seen in effect on this blog and in this entry on kryogenix.org. If you wish to ping my blog you can do so using the following XML-RPC details:Server: www.bath.ac.uk ...

Pingback implemented

I've implemented PingBack on my blog. PingBack is a system for tracking who is linking to your blog in a controlled way, based on a post by Stuart a few months ago. The idea is that when you link to a...

1st September 2002

Yay for <links>

Aquarionics has joined the Mozilla <link> element party....

A better trackback

A discussion on Aquarionics nails why TrackBack isn't quite there yet (emphasis mine):Plus, to support Trackback, I must put what amounts to part of an RSS feed in each post so that Movable Type's Boo...

30th August 2002

More stuff

And some more... Open Source Tools and the Process of Programming How Penny Per Page Might Work Describing Document Text for Accessibility A revised method of defining link pseudo classes Optim...

Some stuff

A few other things I read today: Develop rock-solid code in PHP, Part 1 My Web site is standard! And yours? Dr. Strangeglobe: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The W3C. Charlotte Gray: ...

Trackback roundup

Plenty of action on the TrackBack front. Michel V is adding TrackBack support to b2, Moveable Type have released a standalone Perl implementation of TrackBack under the Artistic license, MetaFilter ha...

Back from Reading

Back from Reading. 3,200 emails (I forgot to unsubscribe from some mailing lists). <sigh>...

18th August 2002

Off down to Exeter

I'm off down to Exeter to see my girlfriend this afternoon, then we're heading off to the Reading Festival on Wednesday. Updates will be scarce for the next few days....

17th August 2002

Working on my blog

If I don't post much today it's because I'm hard at work on the new database driven version of this blog. I'm hoping to open souce it so I'm trying to design it to be as easy to customise and modify a...

Tips for working from home

Another cracking article from Scott: 12 Tips for Working from Home But Keeping it Under Control. I worked from home for a while last year and these tips make a lot of sense (I know because I wasn't do...

Why Scott doesn't read your blog

Scott: Why I'm Not Reading Your Blog and Why Others May Not Be Also. Scott likes text he can resize and a decent update frequency. Tony Bowden responds that update frequency is no longer an issue for ...

16th August 2002

Comments improvement

I've improved the comment system at the bequest of Adrian Holovaty. URLs posted in a comment (both those beginning with http:// and those beginning just with www.) will now be converted in to links....

Today's required reading

10 Tips on Writing the Living Web is full of invaluable advice for anyone who wants their weblog to be of interest to other people....

15th August 2002

More mailing list etiquette

Madhu Menon: Avoiding personal conflict on mailing lists....

14th August 2002

Thanks for the link

Stuart has pointed out that this is the second time Jeffrey Zeldman (who is actually Eric Meyer) has spelt my name wrong :)...

Tidakada

Spotted in my referrals: tidak ada, a beautifully designed blog covering web development and other related topics. This is another great example of what you can achieve with some creative CSS....

8th August 2002

Offline until Sunday

I'll probably be offline until Sunday. Have a nice weekend :)...

Mike Pletch to Column Two

I spotted Mike Pletch in my referrals this morning. His blog has a clean, readable design and some great content, particularly if you are interested in information architecture and content management....

5th August 2002

Stuart gets slashdotted

Congratulations Stuart on getting slashdotted. How's the server holding out?...

3rd August 2002

Working on some cool new stuff

Slow blogging day today - I've been hit by a round of Aquarionics Syndrome ;)...

1st August 2002

Styles of blogging

There's a great discussion going on at the heart of things concerning different styles of blogging and the way the format is evolving. The range of formats evident across the blogosphere fascinates me...

29th July 2002

Back to normal at diveintomark

Mark Pilgrim has made his first update since finishing his accessibility series a week ago. He has launched a new site design (as previewed on css-discuss) in an attractive shade of blue, and posted...

26th July 2002

Here comes another meme

Via Kottke: True Porn Clerk Stories, a hilarious, touching and insightful journal of the trials and tribulations of a female Porn video store clerk in Chicago. This is some of the best and most origi...

25th July 2002

Blog Hot or Not

Blog Hot or Not. I'm surprised no one had thought of this before - it's clever idea, well implemented. When adding my own blog I was asked to come up with some keywords to describe it, so here they ar...

23rd July 2002

Swannie's blog

Mark Swanborough (a friend from Uni) now has a blog. He's getting hooked already. Since he asked, my results for the first year came through the other day and I scored a respectable 75% average. Ro...

22nd July 2002

Catch up time

I had a great weekend, and now it's catch-up time. I've managed to find 15 things from the weekend that I want to blog so I'll try and spread them out over the next day or so....

17th July 2002

Addition to the blogroll

Small Values of Cool - links to things that I find interesting by Simon Brunning. I turns out I find them interesting as well. Lots of Python stuff on there at the moment, including a link to the new ...

16th July 2002

Goodbye to BurningBird

Burningbird has hung up her wings. Dorothea thoughtfully blogs her departure, disagreeing with her suggestion that blogged content suffers from a lack of permanence. One of the reasons I blog is that ...

15th July 2002

Blogchat rocks

I spent a while today over at Brent Ashley's blog chatting away on BlogChat. BlogChat is Brent's impressive DHTML chat system (backend in PHP, front end via JSRS) which allows anyone visiting his blog...

Fifty two projects

52 projects (via Peter): Hopefully these projects will give you a starting off point, or maybe some inspiration, perhaps a reminder of the thing that you've been wanting to do.52 projects is just a p...

XML fun

Peter has upgraded his blog to the latest version of Moveable Type. As a result, his blog now pings weblogs.com via XML-RPC whenever he makes an update. blo.gs grabs the weblogs.com changes.xml file o...

14th July 2002

An excellent rant

Lobowalk is a "somewhat daily" blog that has just made the transition to using CSS for layout. The decision to go CSS was accompanied by an excellent rant:Why am I doing this? Because right now the we...

12th July 2002

Blogroll etiquette

Jordon Cooper on Blogroll Etiquette. I haven't made it on to many blog rolls yet but it's always nice to spot a new site in my referrals. The problem with having a blogroll powered by blo.gs is that y...

Blog birthday

This blog is one month old today :) According to my category statistics page I've posted 185 entries covering 23 different topics. Quite frankly, that statistic scares me......

6th July 2002

Interesting suggestion

Micah Sittig made an interesting suggestion in a comment attached to an earlier entry. Micah suggested adding an inert ?lastUpdated=time attribute to links in my blog roll, causing browsers to display...

More blogroll fun

Stuart has added an extra innovation to his blogroll. Clicking on a link there now sets a cookie (via javascript) recording your visit - these are then used to display a 'new' icon if a blog has been ...

Better blogrolling

Stuart at kryogenix.org saw my post about blo.gs and re-implemented his blogroll to update from his blo.gs subscriptions, complete with last updated times. It's such a brilliant idea that I've impleme...

5th July 2002

Kevin Burton

Kevin Burton: I personally believe that being intellectually open, to the point of promiscuity, not only helps further technology and society, but is an ethical issue as well. We have too many barrie...

Blog tracking solution

I've found a solution to my blog tracking problems. blo.gs is an excellent service which tracks when weblogs are updated by waiting for pings - either directly from the blog or indirectly by co-operat...

4th July 2002

Home improvements

A couple of home improvements. I've added a "5 latest comments" box to the front page, and I've implemented a system to ping blo.gs whenever this blog is updated. Next up, Weblogs.com....

2nd July 2002

Guardian blogroll

I'm listed on the Guardian's weblog list :) The link is quite well hidden (in the Tech weblogs section) but it's still pretty cool. The list details some excellent blogs covering a large range of topi...

1st July 2002

Hixie goes open source

Hixie has open sourced his Perl weblog system. It has some nice features but a pretty extensive set of requirements (MySQL, CVS, Expat and a whole bunch of Perl modules). He has also added support for...

Back from Glastonbury

Back from Glastonbury. Blog catchup tonight, Glastonbury writeup tomorrow....

25th June 2002

Paul back soon

Paul Sowden: I've finished my exams and I hope to be back soon....

22nd June 2002

NPR again

More on BoingBoing about NPR's link policy. It seems NPR are reconsidering their policy, but in the mean time they have posted a defence of it which Cory Doctorow criticises at length....

Dave's back

Dave's back. Thank goodness for that :)...

19th June 2002

djc on Kuro5hin

djc (formerly of evolt) has posted his views on the recent Kuro5hin problems. His take on things can be summarised as "don't quit your day job until you're sure your hobby can pay for itself"....

17th June 2002

Mark replies

Mark mailed me in response to my query about limiting his accessibility series to weblogs rather than expanding it to cover general sites: Because every project needs to start and end somewhere. T...

Blog fixed

I've just finished rebuilding the main data file for this blog, after it became corrupted last night due to a "Disk Quota Exceeded" error. It looks like this was my fault - I inadvertantly filled up m...

16th June 2002

University of Blogaria

Apparently the University of Blogaria was founded on the principle that the ideal university would have no students to contaminate the educational process (Jonathan Delacour). The only way in is to ea...

Jonathan on Mark

Jonathan has meta-blogged (I think that's the term) responses to Mark Pilgrim's accessiblity series. He replies to my query about the wisdom of limiting the series to bloggers rather than expanding it...

15th June 2002

Meg replies

Meg has replied to Jonathan's criticism of her piece on the nature of blogging via his site's comments system. She defends her original viewpoint, commenting on blogging that we can't define this thi...

Meetup Launches

With launch notices on both glish and Signal vs. Noise I just had to check out MEETUP. I was not dissapointed. MEETUP is a beautifully simple concept that has been superbly executed. It aims to arrang...

Has Paul finished?

I wonder if Paul Sowden has finished his exams yet....

The nature of blogging

Meg Hourihan's explanation of blogging (which I linked to and praised earlier) is stirring up something of a storm. Meg's suggestion that the key to blogging is the format has been ripped to pieces by...

Meg on blogging

Meg Hourihan: What We're Doing When We Blog. It's a curious fact of blogdom that many bloggers blog blogging - why they do it, what it is and why it's so important. I feel Meg has nailed it with this ...

14th June 2002

Meta weblog API

I'm itching to get an XML-RPC interface to this blog up and running so I can start playing with blogging tools (or roll my own in PythonCard). It looks like Dave Winer's MetaWeblog API is just what I...

Blog added to the OED

Dane Carlson: Blog to be added to the Oxford English Dictionary....

12th June 2002

Todo list

Weblog TODO List I've got the bare bones of a weblog up and running now - essentially the ability to add entries which are categorised and archived in a permanent location. Still to come... An edit ...

Blogging aint easy

Blogging isn't nearly as easy as it looks. After several days hacking around in PHP (I'm far too proud to use an off the shelf solution) I find myself confronted with a blank slate, and writers block ...