Sportus interruptus

Sportus interruptus: Three miles from the finish, the leader in the men's marathon was knocked to the ground by a spectator and was subsequently passed by two runners. The attacker has attempted similar stunts at other events to promote his apocalyptic religious books.

Sports · 2004/08/29 · Comment · Link

Encoding XML in Movable Type Templates

Last week, I helped Jessamyn West fix a problem with the XML encoding of the RSS 2.0 feed on the Movable Type weblog she ran during the Democratic National Convention.

West's feed couldn't be read successfully by the Convention Bloggers aggregator because of the following line:

[more]

This line produced output of this form:

some entry text]]> [more]

The block that begins with and ends with ]]> is character data in XML. The encode_xml attribute causes this encoding to take place, which ensures that text has been formatted properly for transmission as XML data.

The problem was caused by text appearing outside of the CDATA block. Though it's valid XML, by my understanding, some XML parsers cannot handle element content that appears outside of a CDATA block or content that includes more than one CDATA block.

If you understand how to create a CDATA block, you can solve this problem in a Movable Type template by dropping the encode_xml attribute and creating the CDATA block by yourself, as in this example:

[more] ]]>

For West's weblog, I used this technique to add another feature she wanted -- the full text of extended weblog entries in the feed:

]]>

Movable Type · 2004/08/03 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

Bush's Taxing Day in Ohio

Energized by the Democratic National Convention, I'm going to spend more time following the frenetic presidential campaigns during the last days of the race (93 and counting).

During a stop in Canton, Ohio, on Saturday, one of the swing states hit hardest by the sour economy, President Bush tried to cast doubt on Kerry's plan to roll back the tax cuts for Americans earning over $200,000 to invest in health care, education, and job creation:

"He said he's only going to raise taxes on the so-called rich. But you know how the rich is -- they got accountants. That means you pay."

I know the moral of that story is the Republicans' favorite scare tactic -- them Dems gonna raise your taxes -- but let's stop for a moment and consider how he tells it: The president, 3.5 years into his term, declares that rich people are effectively untaxable because they can afford accountants who find loopholes.

How can that argument possibly reflect well on Bush? He's calling rich people tax cheats, telling the rest of us that he's resigned to a system where they evade taxes, and admitting by implication that he did nothing with the Republican Congress to change it.

Politics · 2004/08/01 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Routing Around the Conventional Media

After reading CNET commentary editor Charles Cooper shred the convention bloggers as hayseeds and "cybertourists," I've written a response to revoke his credentials.

In a telling quote from his commentary, Cooper defines the success of webloggers by whether the professional media admires their work, writing that "I'm sure many from the world of mainstream media left town thinking they had little to worry about if this is the best the blogging world can produce."

Though I'd love to find out that Brian Williams, Shepard Smith and other media luminaries took a little time out from their pancake makeup sessions to catch up with Dave and Duncan, why should bloggers care about impressing the outage they're trying to route around?

2004/07/30 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

The Too-Much-Information Age?

A longtime Jacksonville weblogger normally devoted to wonky subjects like his blogging software made a frank public admission on his weblog recently: "I had an affair with another woman. My wife was a severe depressive and I was uncaring and unfeeling towards her when she needed me the most."

Metafilter · 2004/07/29 · Comment · Link

Convention Bloggers Pick Up Speed

After a slow start, the webloggers at the Democratic National Convention have managed to produce more good material this week than I have time to read.

Some scattered finds:

John Kerry solicited Ron Reagan's speech about embryonic stem-cell research, telling him that he would reverse Bush policy and allow federal funding.

A bad idea: Scanning in your convention credential.

A nice photo of youngest delegate Sarah Bender, taken by one of the college journalists from the wireless group moblog Newsplex.

At BOPNews, Stirling Newberry has been offering some of the best-produced and most interesting audioblog commentaries. That's not much of a compliment, given the rough quality of most weblog audio, but his response to Barack Obama's speech sounds like something you'd hear on NPR.

After sitting down with Sean Hannity at the Fleet Center, Matt Stoller asks a good question: Why would the Democrats invite the Republican machine into the building?

Without credit, Matt Drudge ran Tom Tomorrow's photo of Bill O'Reilly and Michael Moore that was flopped and edited to hide its origins.

Suggestions for the next group to implement a special-event aggregator like ConventionBloggers.Com: There ought to be a search engine, schedule of upcoming events, and past schedule with permalinks to speech transcripts and multimedia.

Webloggers and people reading them with services like Technorati need unique URLs to material they're commenting on (such as a link to this Obama speech video and transcript).

Media liaisons working for the convention ought to be churning out an index of links to everything they'd like these overwhelmed webloggers to see during the event.

2004/07/29 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Day One in Boston: Too Conventional

My reaction to day one of the convention bloggers experiment has been similar to that of Michael Markman and B.K. DeLong: too much awe, too little blog.

I've been watching the convention with heightened interest because of the weblogger invite, but many of them appear overwhelmed by the experience and their moment of media celebrity. I hope they're not going to be stuck in a cranny of the Fleet Center with poor Net access, because they won't have a chance to do what webloggers do best: Poke around the fringes of an event finding things the mainstream media overlooks.

Contrary to what some journalists have argued, webloggers are valuable in situations like this because of their personal perspective, not in spite of it. I want the idiosyncratic views of software pioneers, librarians, and other real people as a contrast to the polished, safe and jaded coverage of professional reporters.

Here's an example of the kind of post I'm hoping to read: Electablog author Dave Pell's take on the declining importance of urban issues in politics, inspired by his encounter with Jerry Brown.

2004/07/27 · Comment · Link

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