Well, we’re on our way to Charlottesville for the reunion. If anyone wants to hang out, we’re staying at the Inn at Court Square—catty-corner from the Court Square Tavern, of course. Blogging will be light, I think.
Day: June 3, 2004
Avoiding search engine confusion with charset
Following up on an old thread, the reason that MSN Search thought my pages were in Chinese and other languages rather than English was a problem with the charset specified for my pages. My site used to specify its charset as Macintosh: <meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=macintosh”>. Unfortunately, MSN’s search crawler doesn’t understand this charset. So as an experiment I tried changing the charset to UTF-8 on my front page, while leaving the deep pages untouched. Now an MSN search on my name no longer brings up garbage characters.
That’s the good news. The bad is that re-rendering my whole site to fix the charset on all the deep pages will be a royal pain.
Coolpix and iPhoto
Quick follow-up to yesterday’s post about my first experiences with my Nikon CoolPix 2200. Some of the image questions I had—the small resolution (800×600 vs. 1280×1024) in particular, and some of the extra image artifacts on street signs—were caused when I upstreamed my photos to the web from iPhoto. The native resolution of the images was much higher. However, I still saw light balance problems on some photos (to fix, I’ll need to pay more attention to light levels and exposure settings when I shoot) and moiré effects on the shot of the clock tower. Apparently there’s not much I can do about that given the camera’s resolution; I’ll just need to be aware of it.
I forgot to mention one bennie of this camera: it’s really small, light, and portable. Almost as light as my cell phone, a little bulkier in a pants pocket but really not too bad.
RSS in the New York Times
New York Times Circuits: Fine-Tuning Your Filter for Online Information. The article positions RSS as a time-saver for getting targeted news and information, touches on the technology at a high level, recommends a few tools (Dogpile Search Tool, NewsDesk, and NewsGator). No mention of Dave Winer, Atom, or any of the other techie stuff around RSS. But they do recommend Adam Curry’s blog!