XHTML validation and more CSS notes

I’ve been fixing up some teething problems with my new CSS design and I’m quite pleased to report that my homepage is now 100% valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional! I checked this at the W3C Validator. A couple of days ago I had about 360 errors on my test page, but I whittled it down in … Read more

CSS conversion of my Radio weblog

I’ve done a re-design of my Radio weblog, using CSS. Look ma, no tables! Yes, it’s now a tableless design. I’m doing my bit for the web standards cause, although I haven’t yet achieved 100% XHTML validation. For my re-design I used a CSS Zen Garden design by Michael Landis, who kindly gave me permission … Read more

Pirates of the Blogosphere – the curse of the protocols

September 21, 2003 Andrew Chen wrote a response to my previous post about Syncato. He thinks I want to create something called a “distributed conversation protocol” and then take over the world. Actually creating a protocol would be the difficult part, given what is happening with Atom 🙂 So no, I’m not advocating a new … Read more

Syncato and Microcontent Wiki

Jon Udell is getting very excited about a new weblog product called Syncato, which is described here: “Syncato is a weblog system designed to extract the maximum potential from the content of your posts. All posts in Syncato are stored as XML within a native XML database and are searchable using XPath queries. This includes … Read more

11 Weblog Pieces

Forgive me, it’s the end of the day and I don’t want to write my usual lengthy blog post. So I thought I’d do the blogging equivalent of “piano pieces”, which in this case is a collection of various links and quotes that have caught my eye recently: Prelude No. 15 in D flat Op. … Read more

Ted Nelson’s two-way links

Matt Webb blogged the Hypertext03 conference and the resulting notes are a good scan. Thank goodness for people like Matt who blog conferences, because those of us who live on the other side of the world don’t get to go to these flash harry conferences *sulk*. Matt’s notes on Ted Nelson’s speech were especially interesting. … Read more

Rock n roll

On a less serious note than my previous post, it also occured to me that bloggers are like rock n roll bands. The best bands explore a different theme each album, just like the best bloggers (imho) write on an ever-changing series of themes. My favourite band The Velvet Underground released 4 studio albums that … Read more

Weblogs are the new Universal Art

Blogging is a 21st century art form and right now it is the most vibrant creative outlet in society. Ideas flow like water in the blogosphere and Weblogs.com ticks over with updated posts every few seconds. Anyone can publish a weblog and that’s partly what makes it so vibrant. But also, there is a pioneering … Read more

New School Blogroll example

As per my previous post, I’ve updated my blogroll to include topics and conversations. I just manually updated my blogroll OPML file, but I envisage a web frontend for this in future – kinda like Phil Pearson’s web form for his Feed Combiner. A bit more about the two new sections in my blogroll. The … Read more

Extending blogrolls

Don also mentioned auto-population of blogrolls, which is something that Phil Pearson has been experimenting with and I’ve been commenting on. My view is that the “blogroll” can be extended to incorporate not only links to weblogs (people), but links to topics and conversations (weblog comments). Later on you could add other chunks of microcontent … Read more

Tracking conversations with Wikis

Don Park has come up with some promising ideas on how to link weblogs with wikis. One of his ideas is for weblog comments to be cross-posted to Wiki pages, via some scripting that “can create or find” a matching Wiki page for each comment. For this to work, comments on a weblog post will need to be assigned a theme or topic identifier – … Read more

May the FOAF be with you

I’ve been wondering whether to get myself a FOAF file. FOAF stands for “friend of a friend” and it is a method of publishing personal information about yourself in a machine-readable format. Or as the FOAF Wiki puts it: “If you’re familiar with ‘blogging and providing RSS syndication of the content of your ‘blog, then … Read more

Organic stories

Dave Winer links to an essay he wrote 4 years ago about decentralized syndication: “In our [UserLand’s] system, each story has a *single* location, the site where it originated. We think this is the way the web was meant to work. Stories can live and grow while new information is obtained. Comments from readers can … Read more

Microcontent Wiki

Weblogs and Wikis are authoring tools that enable everyday people to write to the Web. However one part of the Writeable Web is often overlooked: weblog comments. Often some of the best nuggets of content can be found buried in a comment attached to a weblog post. I’ve even coined a phrase for this: Microcontent Wiki, which … Read more

Google PageRank navel-gazing

A few days ago John Robb complained about his Google PageRank being zero after he moved to his new domain. I was in the same situation, but this morning I noticed my weblog has a new Google PageRank of 5/10. I see John Robb’s PageRank is back too (6/10). Another new blogger who had 0/10 … Read more