Remembering Leslie Harpold

As I write this, Leslie Harpold has passed Britney Spears and Christmas to become the third-most searched term on Technorati. That should give you a pretty strong indication of what the 40-year-old web designer and online essayist, who died unexpectedly Dec. 8 with her well-bookmarked advent calendar halted in its count, meant to a lot of people on the web.

Her close friend Lance Arthur offers one remembrance among dozens on the web tonight, linking to her essay Possible Scenarios for Heaven, a 2003 rumination on the perfect afterlife.

As someone who sort-of knew Leslie for years in the way you sort-of know a lot of people online, I didn't know she'd been touched by so many personal tragedies -- such as the death of her fiancé at age 29 and some medical malpractice that left her seriously injured -- or just how far her network of admirers extended. I just knew she was an incisive writer who was cool in a way you don't see often in web writers. Lauren Bacall lighting a cigarette in a black-and-white movie before the surgeon general warned anybody cool.

Harpold followed the sweet sentimentality of Possible Scenarios for Heaven with a raw letter to her late fiancé, written on his birthday:

As far as I know you never lied to me, except for one thing you said the morning after we met. I thought you were a dork, albeit a charming one, when you asked me if I liked you. I said "Of course," more to be polite than anything else. I mean, you seemed nice enough at the time. Then you said "Good, because I like you, and I'm never leaving."

But you did.

An anecdote from Mike Monteiro is a nice point of entry to Harpold for people just getting to know her through these lavish memorials:

I met Leslie Harpold six years ago when a large cardboard box showed up unexpectedly at my door. Inside was a large 32 gallon stainless steel trash can that I'd added to my Amazon wish list a few weeks before on a whim.

The gift note inside said (... and I'm paraphrasing) "I wanted to meet the sort of freak who'd put a 32 gallon stainless steel trash can on his wish list. —- Leslie Harpold"

· 2006/12/13 · 11 COMMENTS · Link

Bloglines Fixes Atom 1.0 Display Bug

Bloglines has fixed the glitch that was causing Workbench's Atom 1.0 feed to display incorrectly, as a feed preview demonstrates.

I reported the bug to them in e-mail last week and was told they forwarded it to the "appropriate technical department." I never figured out any possible cause of the error, but the fix is another sign that Bloglines is a lot more actively maintained today than it was a year ago.

Atom · Rss · 2006/12/13 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Proposing a New Name for RSS 1.0

Whenever you talk about syndication, you have to deal with confusion regarding the multiple meanings of the term RSS.

RSS refers to the format Really Simple Syndication, also known as RSS 2.0.

RSS refers to the format RDF Site Summary, also known as RSS 1.0.

RSS refers collectively to all syndication feeds, whether they're in RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 or Atom format.

I floated a proposal to the RSS-DEV Working Group last night to rename RSS 1.0 as RSS-RDF (RSS for the Resource Description Framework).

I'm asking for trouble by suggesting the idea, but as syndication has grown, RSS 2.0 appears to be eating RSS 1.0's lunch. According to the feed stats published on the syndication directory Syndic8, 76.3 percent of its RSS feeds are RSS 2.0 and 11.3 percent are RSS 1.0.

Here's their past Syndic8 percentages, using pages archived by the Internet Archive:

• February 2006: RSS 2.0 68.3%, RSS 1.0 17.6%
• March 2005: RSS 2.0 62.1%, RSS 1.0 16.5%
• December 2004: RSS 2.0 49.2%, RSS 1.0 20.6%
• April 2004: RSS 2.0 24.6%, RSS 1.0 47.3%

Those dates aren't necessarily correct, since they depend on how often Syndic8 runs statistics reports. But the trend is pretty clear.

We can debate the reasons why, but my guess is that RSS 2.0's higher version number is as much a factor as anything else. I expect that RSS 2.0 will continue to grow relative to RSS 1.0 because of Microsoft's choice to normalize to RSS 2.0 in Windows Vista and MSIE.

Each of the popular syndication formats has a strong selling point:

• Atom is an Internet standard that's more adaptable to uses outside site syndication
• RSS 1.0 builds on RDF
• RSS 2.0 is simple, loose and popular

Giving RSS 1.0 the name RSS-RDF makes its status as an RDF format more prominent and allows some elbow room to open up between two similarly named formats with a common origin.

Rss · Atom · 2006/12/12 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

RSS Graphic Under Creative Commons License

In March, when I wanted to illustrate why web publishers should support the common feed icon, I put together a graphic showing the ways RSS and Atom feeds have been identified on the web.

I just received another media request to use this graphic in a publication, so I'm releasing it under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike license. For publications that can't use a Creative Commons license, send requests in email.

Rss · Creative Commons · Atom · 2006/12/11 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

Sun Sees the Light on Java Applets

I'm working on the next edition of Sams Teach Yourself Java in 21 Days, an 800-page monster that will cover Java 6 so thoroughly that all the other Java authors will stop writing their books and pursue retraining for a non-technical profession. (Computer book authors should talk smack like rappers. One of these days I'm going to start an East Coast/West Coast feud with Seattle's Glenn "PC-Diddy" Fleischman.)

Ten years ago, the original edition of Java in 21 Days made a big deal out of Java applets, web-based programs that were the world's first exposure to the language. The first Java boom was sparked by then-Netscape executive Marc Andreesen's decision to add a Java interpreter to the Navigator browser.

As the years passed, the world realized that an applet is a terrible thing to do to a web browser. Even today, with five iterations of Java to improve performance, you can tell when a page contains an applet: Your hard drive starts spinning furiously as the Java Plug-in loads and there's an interminably long pause before the page displays. Fortunately for authors like me, Java found a better niche in servlets, mobile devices and enterprise applications.

The next edition of my book relegates browser applets to an appendix. By the time Java 7 rolls around, I may dump the subject entirely.

Need more proof that applets are dead? If you go to Sun's Java.Com homepage, you may see a cool demo of a Fast and the Furious: Tokyo cell phone game that's written in Java.

The demo loads quickly and incorporates fast-moving graphics synchronized perfectly with sound. When I saw it, I was so impressed that I dug into the page's source code, wanting to find out how Sun accomplished such great effects using an applet.

The answer: They wrote it in Flash.

Programming · Java · 2006/12/11 · 8 COMMENTS · Link

Oliver Burkeman's Year in Literature

I've never heard of Oliver Burkeman, but after reading his year-end book review for The Guardian, I'm stalking him on Google.

In our conflict-ravaged times, no such list could start with anything other than Bob Woodward's State of War of Denial of Plan of Attack, the third part of his insider analysis of how George Bush invaded Iraq. The first two books, based on weeks of one-to-one interviews with Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, exclusively revealed the inspired and decisive leadership of the president and his defence secretary. In a twist that can only be described as masterful, part three -- based on weeks of one-to-one interviews with Colin Powell -- exclusively reveals that they were actually rubbish.

Here's the lead of an article he wrote about the founder of Pzizz, an odd Web 2.0 company -- is that an oxymoron? -- that creates randomly generated naptime podcasts for adults:

For several weeks, I've been following instructions given to me by a nice man called Michael Breen. He has the calmest, most soothing voice I've ever heard. It's hard to imagine him getting anxious or edgy about anything; even if he found himself in an out-of-control jetliner hurtling towards the ground at 500mph, I don't think he'd panic. I think he'd turn to the passenger next to him and say, "Just relax every muscle in your body and let yourself drift, with comfort, into a state of complete ease."

There's a lot more stuff out there by Burkeman, mostly high-minded professional journalism that makes you a better person for having read it (or so I'm guessing), but his blog's a little thin.

Web 2.0 · Books · 2006/12/11 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Can't Stop the Dance? Edit Your Hosts File

I've resisted the urge to use any ad blocking software, since I'm a web publisher who supports my sites through advertising. I finally broke down today because of the dancing people who want to refinance my mortgage.

These ads for LowerMyBills.Com bore into your brain like the Ceti eel on The Wrath of Khan.

Upon emergence, the eel larva could enter the ear of a larger animal, where it wrapped itself around the cerebral cortex. This caused the host extreme pain and rendered them extremely susceptible to suggestion. As the larva matured, the subject grew increasingly mad and might attempt suicide ...

The author of My Open Wallet shares my fear of the dirty dancing couple on the rooftop:

... there was something about the way the man was undulating his pelvis as he advanced towards the woman that always looked really creepy to me! That kind of move would make we want to throw a drink on a guy at a club, not get a mortgage from him! At least the image is just a sihouette so you can't tell if he's doing that bite-the-lower-lip thing!

You know he's doing that. He's also primping his shirt like Dieter on Sprockets.

Windows users can block a web server's content by adding it to their hosts file, which maps domain names to IP addresses. If you use this to map an ad server's domain to 127.0.0.1, which is an address for your own computer, you'll never see its ads again.

Windows XP keeps the file in the C:WindowsSystem32DriversEtc folder.

The following line will stop the music for the dancing mortgage people and any other advertiser using the same broker:

127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net

The ads are replaced with an error message that looks clunky but poses no threat to your cerebral cortex. More detailed instructions are available from MVPS.org.

Movies · 2006/12/08 · 34 COMMENTS · Link

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