kontrawize

Twittering Away

I signed up for Twitter quite a while ago, but never used it. I couldn't quite see the point; if I'm at my PC, I would rather use my weblog if I have something to say. So while I had some followers on Twitter, I never posted any "tweets".

However, I recently came across "twibble", a Twitter client for mobile phones. On my phone, Twitter makes sense to me. The maximum length of a single "tweet" is about the same as an SMS text message, so it's the kind of short thing that phones are good for. So, I've started posting snippets of thoughts to Twitter. If you are interested, feel free to follow my ramblings via Twitter.

Opera bug in handling of Atom feeds

I use the Opera browser (currently version 9.62) not only as my browser, but also as my e-mail and feed reader. I had noticed that, sometimes, the link at the bottom of a feed (blog) post doesn't take me to the correct page. In particular, this was happening with the Atom feed for Tim Bray's 'ongoing' blog. Tim was one of the authors of the Atom specification for blog feeds; I know Tim, and I know his blog feed follows the Atom specification rigorously.

I wrote to Tim and asked him about it, and it appears that this a known bug in Opera's handling of Atom feeds, that it doesn't not correctly process relative URLs in Atom feeds. Apparently Opera has been doing this wrongly for some years now. For example, for Tim's most recent post, Opera shows the link the Web page as being

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/CL-Rain

but the actual page URL is

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/11/28/CL-Rain

What went wrong? Well, in the Atom feed for 'ongoing',

• the value of "/feed/id" is "http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/"
• the value of the first "/feed/entry/link/@href" is "CL-Rain"

and Opera appears to be concatenating these to produce the URL

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/CL-Rain

However, that first "/feed/entry" has its "xml:base" set to "When/200x/2008/11/28/". What Opera should do is add this in the middle, to produce the correct URL

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/11/28/CL-Rain

Anyway, I have now posted a bug for Opera (DSK-240409), so we can only wait and see now when it gets fixed. Fingers crossed that it's sooner, rather than later.

Bye-bye Dilbert, hello Reuters

I've changed my mind about having Dilbert on the Web pages for this blog. Instead, I've replaced it with Reuters Market Data News. I still have fond memories of having worked for Reuters, and the financial markets are my business and my interest, so they reflect my interests more than Dilbert does.

Dilbert on kontrawize

As a reader of the Dilbert blog, I have added the new Dilbert widget to the sidebar of my weblog pages. So, if you visit my weblog site, you can catch up with Dilbert there. There are many other places you can catch up with Dilbert, of course. The choice is yours.

A Little Bit of Fry

Thanks to Tim Bray for pointing out that Stephen Fry now has a weblog! As blogs go, it is nothing if not sesquipedalean. It's a must-read for lovers of British satiritical writing.

Administrivia: Technorati Blog Claim

While I've been registered at Technorati for some 3 years or so, it seems I never got around to registering my weblog with them. This post contains a link to a Technorati Profile. Technorati requires this link to verify my ownership of this weblog.

Recommended Reading - James Clark's Blog

Those of you who read blogs from the XML community will already have read that James Clark now has a blog. I wanted to recommend for subscribers of this blog who don't read those other blogs.

James Clark is a fascinating guy. He was one of the few people (some say the only) who was able to implement SGML, and he played a significant role in the early days of XML. He was also one of the creators of the RELAX NG schema language for XML, which is a good replacement for DTDs for "document-like" XML. [As usual, I disagree with RELAX NG supporters who feel that RELAX NG is better than W3C XML Schema for "data-like" XML, but I don't want to let that play down the value of RELAX NG for many XML users.]

James has had such an important role in creating and implementing SGML and XML technologies that he has a great view of what those technologies do well, and what they could do better (i.e. what compromises they made along the way that don't work so well in practice). So, I'm looking forwards to seeing what he writes, and I recommend you have a look for yourself as well.

kontrawize feeds

David O'Shea has an issue where each kontrawize post shows up twice in Thunderbird, once with a kontrawize.blogs.com URL and once with a feeds.feedburner.com URL. I don't use Thunderbird (I use Opera), so I can't say anything about Thunderbird itself. However, when I started this blog it was set up with direct kontrawize.blogs.com feed URLs. Later, when I found out about FeedBurner, I set up alternative feeds URLs there, and tried to make those the default feed URLs, although I don't know for sure which feed URLs are offered to people by their feed readers when they subscribe to kontrawize.

I recommend that you use one of the FeedBurner URLs for kontrawize:

• Atom (preferred): http://feeds.feedburner.com/kontrawize-atom
• RSS1.0: http://feeds.feedburner.com/kontrawize-rss-1-0
• RSS 2.0: http://feeds.feedburner.com/kontrawize-rss-2-0

It sounds to me like David's Thunderbird has become subscribed to two separate kontrawize feeds. That kind of thing would be obvious if you did it in Opera, but I have no idea whether it could happen silently in Thunderbird. It sounds to me like what has happened, though.

Weblog Statistics

I've just come back from a couple of weeks vacation, and while I was away, my "average page views per day" figure crept up over the magic value of 100. That was something of a target for me when I started this weblog about a year ago, so thanks to everyone!

Actually, 100 value is the average since the weblog began. The actual daily average is currently around 250. To put that in perspective, Tim Bray receives around 8000 page views per week (from search referrals), which is 4-5 times what this weblog receives (Tim also gets a further 8000 image views per week; he posts a lot of photos that people find via Google Images). I'm ignoring Tim's one million feed retrievals per week because I don't have a good value for that for this weblog (but I believe it's at least a dozen per week). Tim's weblog is good example of a successful, technology-oriented, single-author weblog, so it's a useful benchmark.

I'm still enjoying my blogging, and that's perhaps the most important thing.

Blogging with SUSE 10.1

SUSE Linux 10.1 comes with a convenient desktop blogging applet, so I'm going to give it a bit of a try and see how it goes. I haven't always found the Typepad HTML editing interface to be ideal. The main problem is that, when I'm using the touchpad on my laptop, it can be easy to click a link you didn't mean to click, and when you hit the 'back' button in the browser, you often find that the page has reset and your erudite prose has disappeared into the æther. This seems like a better way to go, although it doesn't let me set the category - hopefully I can edit that by hand afterwards. We'll see.