When I reworked my site last week I was unhappy with the persistent search features of Feedster and I could not get the results I was after using Technorati. Feedster did not have a full index of my site. Technorati accepts URL or keyword, but not both. So I created my own solution.
Using Movable Type’s search template I crafted a RSS 2.0 file as my search result. It validates, but is served as text/html.
If you would like to subscribe to any search result on my weblog you may edit this link, replacing *term* with the search term of your choice. If you would like to implement this idea on your own Movable Type site, here is my template source.
I am sure the PHP support in Movable Type 3.1 will make these features easier to implement. I will leave my Feedster mention in my standard search results and keep this RSS keyword search result as a tool for the power user.
Roxio is getting out of the consumer software business. Today
Roxio announced the sale of its consumer software business (Easy Media Creator, PhotoSuite, VideoWave, Easy DVD Copy, and Toast) to
Sonic Solutions for $70 million cash and $10 million stock. Roxio will change its corporate name to Napster.
Farhad Manjoo wrote an
article about the history Six Apart for Salon.
I never realized that the events of September 11, 2001 made Mena think that blogging was a
bit trivial. I feel the opposite is true. When a major event happens people are looking for an outlet.
Craig’s List was full of postings from people coping with what just happened. My relatives in Ireland wanted to know how we were reacting and what changed. Everyone was watching and listening for the latest news.
If the entire point of creating a blog is to talk about yourself, or to get people talking about you or the things you care about, then it matters what judgments people have formed about the particular blog tool you use. Traditionally, for instance, LiveJournal has been a place of closely connected teenagers; you could try, if you wanted, to publish your well-researched foreign policy musings on an LJ blog, but chances are not many people are going to take you seriously.
Ben Hammersley published the first draft of a chapter from his upcoming book, “Hacking Movable Type,” dealing with the
Atom Publishing Protocol and Movable Type.
I never noticed my Atom authentication token in Movable Type until I read Ben’s chapter. It provides an interesting overview of the Atom Publishing Protocol implemented in Perl.
For $50,000
Genetic Savings and Clone will clone your household cat. For a one-time fee of $900 plus $150 annually you can store tissue from your cat or dog for future cloning just in case nine lives are not enough. The company plans to start cloning dogs next year.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports on the Sausalito company.
Reminds me of
The 6th Day starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. As governor he should pay a visit to Genetic Savings and Clone, preferably by helicopter.
Geographer Ulf Erlingsson believes
Ireland is the island of Atlantis referenced by Plato in 360 BC. Ireland is the only major island of the world with a plain in the middle. He believes Dogger Bank, an isolated shoal in the North Sea, provides the story of the sinking of Atlantis.
Six Apart just
announced their Movable Type 3.1 Sneak Peek mixer next Thursday, August 12, at 5:30 p.m. It’s in San Francisco, so I will definitely be there.
Ann Harrison of
Wired News writes about
Tor, an onion-routing system developed and funded by the U.S. Naval Research Lab. Tor allows data routing through nodes that are only aware of their previous node and next node.
Tor is distributed as free software under the
3-clause BSD license.
I never really liked the design of my weblog. When I moved from Blogger to Movable Type I was more worried about getting every entry converted to the new system and lost sight of structure and design issues. I finally decided to do something.
I have changed my XHTML to include more lists, spans, and divs to create more specific blocks of code. Each entry is part of an ordered list and has its own unique list item id. I might have gone too far when I made some lists with one item, but those lists have room for expansion so it seemed to make the most sense.
The next step is to make the page render in a pretty format on browsers that follow standards. Then I will make some hacks to allow other major browsers to display the page correctly.
Finally there will be much better search functionality.
Small steps in the right direction. Please pardon my dust.
Andy Bowers noticed a sign near his house prohibiting vehicles over 6000 pounds and upon further investigation discovered
most large SUVs are technically banned in entire cities.
Just as most of us instinctively check our speed when we drive by a police car, these luxury truckers should think twice about cruising illegally down Wilshire past a Santa Monica cop. If a few Tahoe owners got slapped with tickets for driving while overweight, the rest of them might actually start learning where their vehicles are legal.