Today’s million-dollar idea is this: the Foo Bar™. Comes in caffeinated chocolate, caffeinated peanut, and–for pulling an all-nighter in a lab that can’t get pizza delivered–extra-caffeinated energy varieties. These things would sell like hotcakes at ThinkGeek.
(Hotcakes, eh? Hmmm….)
I contacted GMPG with my robot profile. However, in the e-mail I sent I munged the URL. (I’ve been trying out WordPress and have a slightly different naming scheme than what’s here. I cut-and-pasted the URL from WordPress, realized the domain was wrong, and fixed it without thinking about the rest of the path.) Matt kindly let me know I’d fubared the link and updated the GMPG folks with the correct one, but I decided I should fix the link anyway through an Apache rewrite:
RewriteRule ^(200.*) /blog/archives/$1 [R=301,L]So, patch applied and all’s well. I like the shorter URLs, but I’m not going to convert MT just yet.
I will not–can not–promote the Firefox and Thunderbird projects by including their banners on this weblog until this removal is overturned. The hasty, draconian decision has been overruled by Brendan Eich and Ben Goodger. I’ve read the arguments against retaining the feature, and they’re far outweighed by the arguments for it–most overwhelmingly this one from the feature developer that was ignored by drivers:
I am planning to fix all those bugs… for the 1.0 localization freeze (FF 0.10?).
If buggy, untested new features can be added at the last minute to a supposedly stablizing product, why can’t less-buggy, well-tested, useful features be retained? Asa: it’s too late in the game to get decent feedback
is not a reason, it’s an excuse.
And a final bit of irony: in Mozilla Seamonkey 1.8’s latest alpha, Users can now disable CSS via Use Style > None or a global preference
… the very thing that’s been removed from Firefox.
Daniel Glazman sums it up nicely: If [a list of 7 minor bugs] is accurate, the whole story of the removal of the Style Switcher is a real shame.
I’m thinking that HTML should have an element that basically says
content within this section may contain links from external sources; just because they are here does not mean we are endorsing them.
I’m not convinced an HTML extension is necessary or desirable. Instead, I think this might be better handled through a back door approach.
…imagine allowing a div that lets you block out links or sections of a page not to index/follow.
It’s a simple idea, really: use an XHTML MetaData Profile and specially-named classes to indicate whether the content of an element should be considered in some way undesirable to a robot. This has several advantages over creating a new element, particularly that it preserves backward and forward compatibility with HTML and XHTML: it’s just a use of an ability that’s there already. It also has an advantage over specially-formatted comments in that it doesn’t require tag-soup handling of XML documents.
Like XFN, the use of special classnames would be indicated by an HTML metadata profile. It might be desirable to have the classnames namespaced–really just another use of the profile attribute–or otherwise made unique so they could be identified without the profile, but for now I’ll stick with the simple case.
On to some examples. The first shows the use of the profile http://example.org/ignore, which indicates that the content marked with an ignore-content class is not to be used in indexing the page.
<head profile="http://example.org/ignore">
...
<div class="ignore-content">There once was a man from Nantucket...</div>
<p>This is not about <span class="ignore-content">porn</span>.</p>Next, let’s mark some links as not to be followed; example.{tld} links shouldn’t be followed anyway, but this will reinforce that. The text is fair game, though.
<head profile="http://example.org/ignore">
...
<p class="ignore-links">This is <a href="http://example.com/bogus">a bogus link</a>
and so is <a href="http://example.net/bogus">this</a>.</p>Finally, we’ll cause an entire page to be ignored, similar to the <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow,noarchive”> convention.
<head profile="http://example.org/ignore">
...
<body class="ignore-content ignore-links">
<p>The <a href="http://example.com/">hot girls</a> cooled off with a glass of ice water.</p>So, there it is. Is this worth following up? Would GMPG be interested? (I think it follows their principles.)
These are a few of the references and sources for this proposal that haven’t been linked above. In no particular order, and subject to expansion:
This item is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
I got rid of the Internet Connect icon!
While trying to set up my Mac’s VPN connection to work, I configured several L2TP and PPTP connections in OS X’s Internet Connect control panel. I later discovered that they don’t work with the Cisco VPN software we use at work (nasty words to Cisco) and so I removed them, but the toolbar icon didn’t disappear.
I knew the icon wasn’t there originally, so I was fairly sure it could be gotten rid of. Because it didn’t happen by itself, I decided to experiment.
Menus? Nope.
Preferences? No.
Dragging the icon? No… but hold on, the Option key seems to be a favourite of the single-mouse-button crowd.
How about Option-dragging the icon? Hey, it moved!
How about Option-dragging it to the trash? Bingo, no more icon!
So, thumbs down to Apple for not making the icon disappear in the first place, but thumbs up for making it at least somewhat intuitive to get rid of. (Although describing it as intuitive may be a stretch… others have had the same problem and I haven’t been able to find anyone else’s answer.)
Lenni Jabour was recently interviewed on CIUT 89.5 FM, a community radio station in Toronto. As certain of you will understand, I was incredibly disappointed to find when the program aired that I was unable to listen via streaming audio (due to network issues). I got in touch with one of the station programmers, hoping it might be rebroadcast, but the station doesn’t do that, or keep archives of their shows. So it was with reluctance that I admitted to myself that I’d never hear it.
A few days later I made the drive to Toronto to see Lenni’s final show at nia. (The venue is hosting its last performance on Saturday, by the way.) As per usual, I took a seat at one of the front tables. Shortly thereafter, a couple sat down on the other side of the table and an attractive young woman took one of the padded benches at the end. The three of us got talking about music in general and Lenni in particular, and I discovered that the couple were visiting from Michigan and that Lenni’s show had been recommended to them. When I mentioned that Lenni had been on the radio the previous weekend and that despite being a huge fan I’d missed it, the young woman piped up and said that she had done the interview and still had a copy. We exchanged cards and I saw that, sure enough, she was Jeanette (that Jeanette) Cabral, host and producer of About The Music.
Flash forward a couple of weeks. I’m sitting at my desk today when Cathy, a co-worker, comes into the office with a padded manila envelope, return-addressed to Jeanette at CIUT and… containing a CD copy of the interview! Showing enormous self-restraint, I opened it, checked that the CD was intact (it was), and set it aside until I left the office.
I’m pleased to report that Lenni is just as charming on the radio as she is in person, as is Jeanette. There are some intriguing tidbits, including the fact that Lenni appears on an album by a singer whose music is diametrically opposite her own in just about every respect. Lenni and Jeanette talk in some depth about projects I’d previously only heard the names of, discuss The Third Floor and Un Trio D’Hommes Très Gentils, share thoughts on the etiquette of concert-going, and wonder at the loyalty of Lenni’s fans. It’s a wide-ranging, well-done interview, and I’d like to publicly thank Jeanette for her kindness in passing it along. Thank you!
Don’t tell NBC, let’s just keep it between us, but: These women aren’t wearing any clothes!
Cluefulness is next to godliness.
Photo Matt is seeing something that I’ve noticed for a while as well: Googlebot is making up URLs to retrieve. I’m surprised no one at the big G has heard of RSS autodiscovery; they’ve obviously already got lots of content they could use as a basis. Then again, Googlebot doesn’t recognize application/xhtml+xml pages, either:
64.68.82.28 - - [16/Aug/2004:18:36:53 -0700] "GET /blog/archives/2004/08/16/fun-with-xfn HTTP/1.0" 406 398 "-" "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
Following up on some of the comments on Matt’s linkback that indicate otherwise, I’ve discovered that Googlebot sometimes retrieves application/xhtml+xml pages:
64.68.82.18 - - [18/Aug/2004:04:41:20 -0700] "GET /blog/archives/2004/08/16/fun-with-xfn HTTP/1.0" 200 6609 "-" "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
Nothing has changed on the page or in the way I’m serving it. Anyone have an explanation for this?
There are by some estimates more than a million weblogs. But most of them get no visibility in search engines. Only a few A-List blogs get into the top search engine results for a given topic, while the majority of blogs just don’t get noticed. The reason is that the smaller blogs don’t have enough links pointing to them. But this posting could solve that. Let’s help the smaller blogs get more visibility!
This posting is GoMeme 4.0. It is part of an experiment to see if we can create a blog posting that helps 1000s of blogs get higher rankings in Google. So far we have tried 3 earlier variations. Our first test, GoMeme 1.0, spread to nearly 740 blogs in 2.5 days. This new version 4.0 is shorter, simpler, and fits more easily into your blog.
Why are we doing this? We want to help thousands of blogs get more visibility in Google and other search engines. How does it work? Just follow the instructions below to re-post this meme in your blog and add your URL to the end of the Path List below. As the meme spreads onwards from your blog, so will your URL. Later, when your blog is indexed by search engines, they will see the links pointing to your blog from all the downstream blogs that got this via you, which will cause them to rank your blog higher in search results. Everyone in the Path List below benefits in a similar way as this meme spreads. Try it!
Just copy this entire post and paste it into your blog. Then add your URL to the end of the path list below, and pass it on! (Make sure you add your URLs as live links or HTML code to the Path List below.)
(NOTE: Be sure you paste live links for the Path List or use HTML code.)