Richard MacManus

Ever listen to The Velvet Underground’s 9 minute live version of ‘What goes on’, from their 1969 Live album Volume 1? The first couple of minutes feature Lou Reed singing verse and chorus. The rest of the song is an extended instrumental and this is where it gets interesting. Each of the 4 instruments has a … Read more

I read with interest Jon Udell’s OSCOM keynote slides. The main subject is how to write the web “in a rich way” – and by “rich” he means semantic. Udell talks about there being a lack of easy-to-use XML writing tools for the Web. Weblog tools are user-friendly and they are the killer app for … Read more

I’ve installed the W3C web browser/editor, Amaya, onto my PC. I’ve only just begun to test it. But with all this talk about Microsoft abandoning its IE browser, it may pay to actively look at alternative browsers. This article at freshmeat.net has a good write-up on lightweight browsers, including Amaya. Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)

My first post to k-collector! Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)

A hot topic in the blogging world recently has been: is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser dead? Ironically, most of the good stuff to read has been via “Comments” forms – ie readers writing back to a weblog post. Robert Scoble from Microsoft said “The right question is: ‘is the Web dead in Longhorn?’ ” and he got over 30 … Read more

After a few late nights, I’ve successfully implemented Easy News Topics (ENT) tags to my Radio Userland RSS feed. It wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. It involved rooting around in the Radio.root file of my weblog and upskilling myself in UserTalk, Radio Userland’s scripting language. But mostly I stood on the … Read more

D. Keith Robinson has written an interesting article about the future of Intranets. He writes: “…a company’s Intranet would be better served as more of an enterprise-wide, network-enabled application than anything resembling a Web site or Web application.” It seems likely that content management systems will over time integrate with office systems. Products like Microsoft’s upcoming … Read more

I posted a question onto the Radio Userland discussion list. I asked why updates to my OPML blogroll don’t automatically update my weblog menu. Nobody had an answer. A Google search came up empty too. But from my own checks it does seem that when you update your blogroll.opml file in your Gems folder, the ompl file itself upstreams … Read more

I’ve been re-reading Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee. As inventer of the World Wide Web in 1990 and current director of the W3C, Berners-Lee is a visionary and innovator. His current obsession, the Semantic Web, is not yet widely understood or appreciated. Just like the Web 10 years ago.  Indeed one of Berners-Lee’s earliest Web innovations has still not … Read more

Tonight I added an OPML blogroll to my menu – easy thanks to Jake Savin’s instructions. Then I set about trying to implement a “Last 10 Entries” script into my weblog menu. Because I tend to write long-ish articles, I’d like to have a dynamic menu that lists my 10 most recent articles. I looked … Read more

Wouldn’t you know it, I came across a Userland macro today that lists recent titled blog posts. Where was this macro when I needed it yesterday? 🙂 Anyway, I’m playing around with this macro now. Still getting used to Radio Userland’s dev environment… …Got this working OK and I now have my 10 most recent entries displayed … Read more

There appears to be a problem upstreaming changes to my opml blogroll. The XML file updates, but the blogroll on my menu doesn’t. I got around this by manually deleting the blogroll from my homepage template, publishing, then adding the blogroll back in – i.e. in a roundabout way I re-published the blogroll in my … Read more

In his article “Google Aggregation Strategy”, Elwyn Jenkins from Microdot News reviews three Google “information aggregations” and asks which one will be moved from beta to live first – Blogger, Froogle or Google News. Microdot News argues that aggregation is at the heart of Google’s business and that Google will build on the success of their search engine by offering similar aggregation services … Read more

Dave Winer: “Much weblog writing is functional, not artistic. Jon Udell…writes about SpiderPhone because he wants to tell you about a piece of technology that interests him. The writing helps him sort it out, even if no one were to read it.” One of my goals in my weblog is to write original articles, rather … Read more

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, or Rich Site Summary, depending on who you listen to. Either way RSS has become the poster child for the Publish-Subscribe protocol. RSS allows weblog and website owners to syndicate their content to anyone who wishes to subscribe to it. Usually people subscribe to “RSS feeds” via an aggregator. … Read more