Month: February 2004

Happenstance

In a confluence of events made possible by a silly policy of the City of Toronto’s tourism department, I will not be in that city on March 7 before going to see Lenni Jabour at Cameron House on the 8th. This is quite fortunate, because this evening during the intermission of a Michael Kaeshammer concert at the Wolf Performance Hall I discovered that Claire Jenkins will be at The Ugly Mug Café on the 7th. Seeing as I’ve been a fan of Claire’s since I saw her open for Lenni a few months ago, and as I can claim at least partial responsibility for her being at the Mug, it’s great that I’ll actually be in London to see her!

You–yes, you, the usual suspects–should come out, and bring your friends!

XFN CSS

I’ve just put together a CSS2/CSS3 stylesheet for XFN. It uses Roger Darlington‘s XFN icon to indicate the presence of XFN information for browsers that support CSS2, which is cool but ultimately not a big deal. The interesting part is the set of rules for CSS3, which append a set of icons (currently single characters) to each XFN-enabled link that highlight the relationships in that reference; in a CSS3-capable browser you will see something like this (fmcnr&M♥). (At least, that’s the theory… I don’t know of any browser that can handle the CSS3 rules yet.)

There are actually CSS2 rules for each individual relationship in the file as well, but they’re overridden by the icon rule because only the last value will be displayed anyway. They’re included for completeness, and because they may be useful as examples.

I’ve looked for, but been unable to find as of yet, a set of XFN relationship icons. I’ve used some Unicode glyphs for the romantic relationships, but if anyone has more or (a set of) images they’d like to share, please let me know and I’ll either reference them or provide them directly from here.

As the Creative Commons license in the file suggests, Share and enjoy!

Angel dead?

…we went to Joss [Whedon] to let him know that this would be the last year of [Angel] on The WB.

This looks bad. This looks really bad.

I wonder how much this has to do with the fact that the series for which Whedon is best known, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, was scooped from the WB by UPN. From what I understand of the entertainment world (which is, admittedly, very little) it’s possible Angel was included near the end of Buffy‘s WB run as a dealmaker; once Buffy left, WB had no reason to keep Angel going, and indeed they’ve been trying to cancel the series for a couple of years, ever since UPN’s coup.

As Donna and I were discussing earlier today, Angel has gone in a direction we’re not particularly fond of this season, moving away from longer-term story arcs and into one-shot episodes and mini-arcs. (Did network executives learn nothing from Babylon 5?) Even so, it’s fared much better in its new incarnation than the zombified corpse that NBC refers to as The West Wing, largely due to the excellent staff of writers.

With UPN close to cancelling Enterprise (thankfully) I hope they’re looking very closely at scooping the other Buffiverse show, if only as thanks to Joss for keeping them alive for a few more years than they’d have had otherwise. Does lightning ever strike twice in TeeVee Land?

Sinker swim

Shortly after hitting a high result of hit #10 for sirens, the Sirens website plummeted: first to hit #155, then to #376, and now out of the first 800 results. I’m at a loss to explain this: all of the pages on the site are still in the index (including some I specifically told Googlebot not to spider, but that’s another story) but Google refuses to show them in its search results. Could it be that the first rule of Google rankings is: you do not talk about Google rankings? A little research says no, but that leaves me with no cause for the broken search and nothing I can do about it.

This isn’t the only search I’ve seen behave similarly, but it’s the one closest to my heart. Fortunately, I’ve come across a tool that uses Google’s own algorithms to show that it’s an error on their side. Search Sinker returns Google searches to all their former Googly goodness. It seems that repeating words in a search string emphasizes them, so Sinker fills up the string with a term you deem most important: instead of sirens, it will look for sirens sirens sirens sirens sirens sirens sirens sirens sirens sirens. Using this technique, sirens3.com appears in a (rightful?) place of hit #12… not bad considering the last thirty pages updated on the site haven’t even been crawled. It doesn’t solve the problem that the general public will never find the Sirens’ site, but at least now I know it’s not because of anything I’ve done.

The so-called brandyupdate has put the Sirens back in a more reasonable place, at (appropriately for the date) #14.