RSS: The Joy of TextInput
I've written 21 computer books in the past decade, documenting thousands of subjects in tree-killing detail. One of my pet peeves as a technical writer is covering something that readers are unlikely to need and should never, ever use, like the discussion board component in FrontPage 2000. I devoted an entire chapter to it in Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft FrontPage 2000 in 24 Hours, a mistake I rectified in subsequent editions.(Buy a copy of the book on Amazon.Com for 92 cents!)
FrontPage 2000 supported discussion boards with FrontPage Server Extensions and a bland web site template that used frames, as you can see on this Pot Bellied Pigs forum. I can't find a single publisher running a discussion board successfully with this software.
I was reminded of this when I wrote the draft RSS specification and had to cover the textInput element.
Nobody uses textInput, even though it has been a part of RSS since the first version was published by Dan Libby in 1999. Aggregators don't support it and RSS publishers don't include one in their feeds.
Because I had to document it anyway, I decided that at least one person should support it.
I included textInput in all of my RSS feeds for the past two months, using the element to ask the question, "Your aggregator supports the textInput element. What software are you using?" I also wrote a PHP script to collect input from anyone who answered this question.
I had to take textInput out of my feeds because its title was being interpreted as the feed's title, causing My Yahoo and other RSS software to change the name of my weblog from Workbench to TextInput Inquiry.
Before I removed it, two RSS aggregators were found that take textInput: James Robertson's BottomFeeder and the Liferea aggregator for Linux.
In BottomFeeder, any feed that has a textInput element includes a right-click menu command: . Choosing the command opens a dialog box that demonstrates Robertson is either extremely detail-oriented or couldn't resist implementing the most useless feature in RSS.
Who Keeps the Metric System Down?
In a Washington Post remembrance of the late Reagan Press Secretary Lyn Nofziger, longtime friend and political rival Frank Mankiewicz claims that they worked secretly to kill the metric system in the United States:... during that first year of Reagan's presidency, I sent Lyn another copy of a column I had written a few years before, attacking and satirizing the attempt by some organized do-gooders to inflict the metric system on Americans, a view of mine Lyn had enthusiastically endorsed. So, in 1981, when I reminded him that a commission actually existed to further the adoption of the metric system and the damage we both felt this could wreak on our country, Lyn went to work with material provided by each of us. He was able, he told me, to prevail on the president to dissolve the commission and make sure that, at least in the Reagan presidency, there would be no further effort to sell metric.
It was a signal victory, but one which we recognized would have to be shared only between the two of us, lest public opinion once again began to head toward metrification.
That's a sorry milestone to be celebrating today, since the closure of the U.S. Metric Board helped keep the U.S. with Liberia and Myanmar as the only countries that won't go metric, but you should never judge a man until you've walked 1.609344 kilometers in his shoes.
Moving from Manila to Movable Type
Craig Jensen's long-running BookNotes weblog has fallen on hard times since the move from Weblogs.Com to Buzzword.Com in 2004. His site lost its Google pagerank and he's had trouble rebuilding his audience.As the first step in retiring free Manila hosting on Buzzword.Com, I'm helping him transfer the weblog to Movable Type, because I have a five-user commercial license that's going to waste on Workbench and I'd like to encourage a fellow liberal and bibliophile to keep blogging.
Jason Levine's Frontier script converted all 3,064 BookNotes entries into Movable Type's custom import format and extracted several hundred images from the weblog's Frontier database into individual files.
When I tried to import the entries, Movable Type happily reported that "All data imported successfully!" but it wasn't true. No entries were imported, a common problem I've experienced before that comes up on the software's support forums.
The problem turned out to be a cross-platform issue with text files. Windows and Linux use different end-of-line character sequences, so the export file I created on Frontier (running on Windows) could not be imported into Movable Type (running on Linux).
On Linux, I used the text editor vi to convert the import file from Windows to Linux format with this command:
The entries imported successfully after the change.
Six Apart has the best weblog import functionality I've used, but the software shouldn't report success when an import has failed to add a single entry. If possible, the software should check for Windows end-of-line characters in an import file and either flag the error or offer to fix it.
BookNotes requires more work to finish the move, as you can see from the test site. The next step: Figuring out how to edit the weblog entries so that graphics are properly displayed.
Humility Equals History Plus Time
An e-mail received by the Drudge Retort:How long did it take for your Jewish handlers to force you to remove the Charlie Sheen/9-11 story the other day?
A comment on Workbench:
Two people witness an event (Jews and Palestinians) and you decide that Jews are simply not credible. You don't want credible, you want to continue to be a racist, Jew hating, angry young man.
When I was young, I can recall studying some of the more horrific moments in history and thinking myself fortunate to live in more rational and enlightened times.
Give Justice Scalia a Hand
When Justice Antonin Scalia received little consideration for promotion to Chief Justice, I wondered how well he'd take life as a second banana to John Roberts. Recent events suggest he isn't handling it well.
After making public remarks about Gitmo detentions that could force his recusal from an upcoming case, Scalia left a Catholic mass Sunday and made an obscene Sicilian gesture to a reporter.
As he was leaving the mass, Scalia was tossed a softball question by a Boston Herald reporter about whether he takes flak for public displays of his Roman Catholic beliefs.
"You know what I say to those people?" Scalia, 70, replied, making an obscene gesture, flicking his hand under his chin ...
The press is being coy about the gesture, which was photographed by a church journalist whose newspaper won't publish the picture, but it appears that Scalia made the move depicted here, which means the same thing as me ne frego! (I don't give a damn).
The service he attended has been described in press reports as a "special Mass for lawyers and politicians." I didn't know the Catholic Church was singling out these groups for extra attention, but it makes a lot of sense.
East Africa Suffers Worst Famine in Decades
I've written before about the journalist Anna Badkhen, who filed incredible reports from Iraq for the San Francisco Chronicle on the day-to-day lives of soldiers and Iraqis.She's now in Kenya, covering a drought across East Africa that has left millions of people dependent on food aid that's running out:
Now Isaaq's family -- her husband, Nur Muhammad, and their children, ranging in ages from 1 to 10 -- have no livestock to sell, and nothing of their own to eat or drink. They left the bush and moved to Jerirot, an impoverished settlement of about 6,000 former nomads who have also lost their cattle to drought. They are among the estimated 17 million people across Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Djibouti and Sudan who are surviving almost entirely on meager food rations distributed by international aid agencies.
The United Nations World Food Programme needs more donations to feed these people, estimating that another $226 million is required to help 6.25 million people in Kenya, Somalia and Djibouti.
Cost to feed one malnourished woman or child in East Africa for one day: 55 cents.
May Your RSS Always Be Well-Formed
I'm working on an RSS Profile, a set of recommendations for RSS publishers that make it easier to create feeds that work in aggregators and other software. I published the third draft this morning.Unlike a specification, the profile contains subjective advice on how to avoid common pitfalls in RSS, like the unresolved question of whether an item may contain multiple enclosures.
The goal of the project is to create a profile that's recommended by the RSS Advisory Board. If that fails, I'll promote it personally on Workbench.
Anyone who wants to build on the profile can do so, because it is offered under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license, even in the current draft form.
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