14 entries tagged alleged

Validation

With some effort and only a few surprises I was able to get my web pages validated as conformant HTML 4.0. I wrote a short article about the process of getting validated in my somewhat defunct web project area.

New format!

I’ve been envying my friends with all their Livejournal sites (such as cleanskies and tinyjo) and other web logs (such as Dave Winer’s). Given that I already have to struggle to keep my work log up to date, I don’t think I’m up to keeping a journal of my own, but I did want to ape the layout for my own pages.

In particular, I have gone from a vaguely chronological list of stuff to a strictly chronological order of short paragraphs, with pointers to longer articles or photo albums. This style allows for me to add short notes on whatever takes my fancy without special effort as well. I also have permanent links for each entry (the # links next to the date). Given the snail-like pace of progress in my area of my site, my archives are annual rather than monthly...

This is all cobbled together in a semi-automated fashion (using TclHTML)—not quite as mechanized as a proper weblog, but simpler to implement. Entries are kept in spearate disc files on my home PC, and assembled in to the HTML pages automatically. Now the display of entries is sorted out I plan to partially automate the creation of new entries.

Emacs macro for making Entries

I now have a command I can invoke in GNU Emacs to create a new entry in this work log. All it does is visit the entry file (each entry in this weblog has its own source file) and create a skeletal entry for me to type in to. Since I don’t mind typing in HTML myself—and always have an instance of Emacs running—this is enough for me to make entries easily. I have a similar set-up at work for my on-line work-log—nowadays it is the only application I still use Emacs for at work...

Jeremy’s Weekly Strip completes its first year

Jeremy’s completed the first year of her Weekly Strip: the first strip was Monday 2 April 2001, the 52nd will be Tuesday 2 April 2002 (which she assembled before disppearing to Amsterdam for Easter).

To mark the occasion I am belatedly overhauling the Tcl scripts used to generate the HTML pages that form the index for the strips. Careful readers will have noticed that the old index page had the year 2001 in its URL, despite including all the 2002 strips as well. Basically my indexing script was all organized around generating a single index page. I have now refactored the whole shebang so that not only are there now per-year index pages, all the ones for years beyond 2001 have their own directories (e.g., the index for 2002 is /jrd/2002/ instead of being /jrd/tws-2002.html). There was a little jiggery-pokery required to ensure that existing pages do not move to different URLs (to avoid breaking any links or bookmarks other people might have). Thus last week’s strip remains at URL /jrd/20020326.html, and this week’s /jrd/2002/20020402.html.

www.alleged.org.uk

I have now put up the first page on my brand-spanking-new web-site, whose URL you should find familiar: http://www.alleged.org.uk/. So far its only content is a new and improved front page, all of whose links link to this one. Eventually all the old content will be copied across, but I want to give myself a chance to tidy things up along the way.

Photo Albums converted...

I have now converted the photo albums (Aviemore, Roch Castle, and Bologna) on my old site (http://www.alleged.demon.co.uk/) to go on the new site (http://www.alleged.org.uk/). In the process I have ripped out the old HTMLgen code that generated them and replaced it with the more streamlined TclHTML equivalent (using the code I concocted when building the photo albums on the CAPTION site). As a result, the last vestiges of the old Alleged look and feel (with the tabbed-notebook style) is gone! I guess it must be time for a redesign, then... :-)

Jeremy’s TWS returns

Jeremy’s The Weekly Strip went on something of a hiatus after her trip to Amsterdam over Easter. To celebrate its return I have belatedly moved the TWS files across from the old Alleged Literature web site to alleged.org.uk. In the process I rearranged the directory structure (or URL design, to use TBL’s phrase) to be more consistent—something that required fiddly changes to some 300 or so links in more than 50 files. Luckily all the files are generated automatically so all I actually had to do was tweak three Tcl procedures and TclHTML handled the rest. Smug.

And now with added Google

I added a Google sitesearch box to the front of this site. It has been interesting watching www.alleged.org.uk infiltrate the Google database—for a period of a few days, one Google search would find this site, and the next would claim it didn’t exist. My guess is that different subsets of Google’s gigantic server farm have different databases, or something like that.

Search boxes belong near the top right corner of web pages—that’s where people look for them. To accomodate this I rejigged the layout of the front page. I would like to be able to boast it was all a simple case of tweaking the CSS code, but in practice I found it expedient to add two div elements, surrounding the contents of the main and side-bar sections of the page—before that each section had its own div and that was all. Not sure if the result is better or worse as far as structure goes!

RSS 0.91 experiments

I have created an experimental RSS feed (‘channel’) for this site. In principle this can be used by people with RSS aggregators to mix my latest headlines in with other channels.

The documentation for RSS I am using is Dave Winer’s, because he is one of the few people to actually document it. Erm, except that I have taken the liberty of adding an XML namespace attribute (using the namespace mentioned in an article about RSS 1.0).

I am using the description field to hold (part of) the first paragraph, by way of a teaser; readers are expected to follow the link to read the thing in full. I was a little surprised to discover that RSS 0.91 has no provision for supplying a date for news items. For weblog-style channels, this seems like a major omission!

I also really dislike the RSS-0.91 de-facto convention of using escaped HTML text as the value of titles and descriptions. For one thing, why not just embed HTML as-is instead of under an extra layer of encoding? (That’s the whole point of XML namespaces, for example...) Worse, many people just grab the first 100, say, characters, regardless of whether decoding the result will be valid HTML or not! This means that you cannot safely use XSLT to transform RSS 0.91 to HTML, unless I am missing something... Anyway, in my feed I am making a point of stripping out all mark-up before adding to the RSS file. People who want to see it formatted will have to follow the link!

Namespaces annoyances in RSS

In an earlier note I listed four namespaces used in RSS and RSS for the same element names. One of these has now been unmade: the RSS specification never explicitly mentioned the namespace, but the sample file included an xmlns attribute. While I was away in Canada, this was removed to ensure backward compatibility with RSS 0.91. This makes sense (there exist examples of applications that genuinely are broken by this), but is kind of icky.

There is still the old RSS 0.9 format—which did use its own namespace—but given that even RSS 1.0 did not preserve that, I think we can assume it is dead too. I assume that the programs that were broken by the fleeting addition of the RSS-2.0 namespace are also incapable of parsing RSS-1.0 data?

I just tried printing a copy of the RSS 2.0 spec., but because he chose to use a fixed-width table for the text, it is clipped all down the right-hand side of the page, making it useless. Goddammit!

Update (2002-10-14): I have removed the namespace declaration from my experimental RSS feed.