Category: Internet

Weblogs.com watch – high water rising

Continuing the Weblogs.com watch, it looks like everyone’s favorite list of updated weblogs survived the blogstorm following the MacWorld keynote pretty well. In fact, it’s hit three or four consecutive high water marks in the last three days.

This seems like a good time to update the graph I did in October showing the high water marks over time. For a while in November and December it looked like the rate of growth was slowing down, and the slope is slightly less than it looked then. But if the activity over the last couple of days is anything to go by, it looks like we might expect a slope increase in the next few months.

Here is the updated graph:

weblogs.com high water growth is approximately linear at 2.74 weblogs a day

I still can’t separate how much of this is due to new weblogs coming on line vs. old ones blogging more frequently. I suspect that this would require more data than Weblogs.com currently collects.

Safari: my $0.02

Apple made a new browser available in public beta yesterday. This doesn’t happen every day. There was, naturally, a rush to get it, and then a rush to test it. I think every web designer and blogger in the world was thinking what I was: “Great, another browser that I have to worry about. How many things on my pages will break with this one?”

In this case, for me, not much breaks. If you’re reading my page using Safari, the title of each post will appear in the same font and size as the paragraph text below it. It should instead appear in Verdana, Helvetica, or your favorite sans serif, at 14px (slightly larger), as specified by my CSS rule for the H3 tag. Also, periodically a page will load but not show any content or only show a few images on a page; reloading generally fixes the problem. So far I haven’t found anything else broken yet. It does seem a little faster than Chimera, though I haven’t done any stopwatch exercises.

There are a bunch of other folks looking at the browser, though, chief among them Mark Pilgrim (who has both an initial review, in which he strongly states that the lack of tabbed browsing is a showstopper, and Safari Information For Web Designers, in which he summarizes rendering successes and failures of the browser). and Mena Trott (whose article contains links to most of the other big articles on the subject, including the changelog from KHTML to Safari). Finally, here is the blog of Dave Hyatt, one of the team members, in which he addresses some of the initial review comments.

Reputation worth 7.6% of price, UMich sez

Howard Rheingold caught this University of Michigan paper: “The Value of Reputation on eBay: A Controlled Experiment.” The authors find in controlled experiments that a high reputation score on eBay is worth about a 7.6% price premium. This is pretty low when you compare it to the price premium that eBay itself commands over other auction sites, such as Yahoo! (at least in the US), but it’s an interesting finding anyway.

Useful time waster

Dejavu.org is a web application that claims to emulate different browsers from the original line mode browser from 1991, through NCSA Mosaic, beta Netscape, Netscape 1.0, IE 2.0, and HotJava. I’m pleased to report that my page is quite readable and almost looks like it was designed for all those browsers—if you ignore the fact that all my navigation links show up at the bottom of the page.

Blog roundup

Quick and necessarily incomplete keiretsu check-in:

Scripting News Awards: Dave fesses up

Dave is going to do the Scripting News Awards again. In the process, he fesses up about something that’s puzzled me: how I got in the running last year:

“It’s quite interesting to look at the lists a year later. For example, the scripting category has boomed. Last year it was hard to find any weblogs about scripting.”

Which explains both why I was one of the four and why I didn’t get that many votes. It was just a small pool.

Playing with CSS again

It’s always driven me nuts that the month links didn’t line up properly underneath my site calendar. I figured it had something to do with the way I had defined the div around the calendar, but I didn’t have time to look at it until this afternoon.

The problem was that the div was defined to start at 70% of the page width and take the rest of the space on the page, but the content was centered in the div. For some reason, the table had a different center than the line following it, which caused the month links to show up askew.

Easy fix, right? Just recode the width of the calendar div. Except that it turns out not to be simple with CSS. Basically, what I want the calendar to do is this:

  • Hug the right hand side of the page, most of the time
  • If the window is too narrow to put the calendar to the right of the logo and still be visible, either:
    • wrap the calendar to the next line, or
    • scroll the calendar off the page to the right.

I don’t know a way to manage all of those things at once. I currently have changed it so that the calendar hugs the right hand side (for what it’s worth, I changed the width to 190px, the same as the min-width; eliminated the left attribute; and set the right attribute to 0). But if you shrink the browser window too far, the calendar overprints the site logo.

Actually, this isn’t the biggest problem, since the content starts to run into the nav bar before this happens… This is all because there’s no concept of “min-left,” the minimum left distance from the left hand bounding box that an element needs to respect.

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Pilgrim: XHTML no replacement for RSS

Mark Pilgrim surveys a crop of new postings that contrast RSS for syndication vs. semantic coding in the first place and sez they’re all wet. In doing so, he draws a useful line between XHTML theory and blogging practice:

…this latest XHTML-as-syndication movement seems to be based on the principle that “syndication is so incredibly important that you must immediately stop whatever you’re doing with your web pages, upgrade to XHTML, validate your markup, restructure your home page to include all and only the content you’re willing to syndicate, and by the way, would you please unlearn that ugly nasty presentational page layout language you’ve been using for years and learn this wonderful happy structured semantic markup language instead?”

It should be obvious to any rational observer that this will go nowhere fast. A syndication format that requires valid semantic XHTML markup? Spare me. 9 out of 10 bloggers can’t even spell XHTML.

Between user resistance, bandwidth issues, sites that don’t want to syndicate their entire content, Pilgrim goes on to coin an important principle: “Syndication is not publication….It’s something else, a different medium.” Right on. The iCal to RSS experiments alone should tip off most intelligent observers that there’s value in a standalone syndication format, and real power in separating syndication from publication.
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