News.com Leads Blog Communication

Uncategorized,

This is the coolest thing I’ve seen all year. Check out the HTML of this article I linked a few days ago. Notice anything at the top?

<link rel="pingback" href="http://tb.news.com/p2t.cgi/2100-1032-5368454" />

Houston, we have Pingback support! Let’s dig deeper:

<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
xmlns:trackback="http://madskills.com/public/xml/rss/module/trackback/">
<rdf:Description
rdf:about="http://news.com.com/2100-1032-5368454.html"
dc:title="Microsoft flip-flop may signal blog clog"
dc:identifier="http://news.com.com/2100-1032-5368454.html" />
trackback:ping="http://tb.news.com/tb.cgi/2100-1032-5368454"
</rdf:RDF>

Ugly as sin, but that’s trackback. It gets better…

A little URI hacking takes us to this page which lists all trackbacks and pingbacks the article recieved. How cool is that?

It’s my understanding that even though they’ve had the trackback autodiscovery code for a while they’ve been recieving mostly pingbacks, which makes sense given that it’s more fully and elegantly automatic. It would be cool if they could add support for the nascent rel="trackback" discovery method and save themselves the trouble of the RDF hack. Hopefully spammers won’t exploit their trackback server too soon and they can support legacy systems that don’t implement Pingback yet.

The implications of this are fairly large. News.com is obviously bootstrapping code that will involve their readers with the blog conversation surrounding their articles. How long for other sites to catch up? Will they plug into Technorati or Pubsub next? As far as I know this is the first major media organization to implement Trackback and Pingback. The team at News.com should be commended for their effort and leadership in this area.

Blogger Endorses Firefox

Asides

Just got this in my forgot-my-username-and-password email from Blogger, “You could also try logging in/recovering your password from a different web browser – we recommend Mozilla Firefox: http://mozilla.org/products/firefox/ Sincerely, The Blogger Team.” Very nice, but if they had recommended “gbrowser” then I would’ve had a real scoop. Also, they have a really great website. I don’t know how much is Adaptive Path magic and how much is in-house, but the result is a pleasure to use.

Jane Kim for School Board

Asides

One of the people I had the pleasure of meeting while in San Francisco was Jane Kim, who’s running for school board there. If you’re voting in that area in this upcoming election I would highly recommend checking out where she stands on the issues and keep Jane Kim in mind when you visit the polls. If you get a chance to meet her before the election you’ll also get to see what a neat person she is, if not you’ll just have to take my word for it.

I once met a Zen-trained painter in Japan, in his 90s, who told me that suffering is a privilege, it moves us toward thinking about essential things and shakes us out of shortsighted complacency; when he was a boy, he said, it was believed you should pay for suffering, it proves such a hidden blessing.

Yet none of that begins to apply to a child gassed to death (or born with AIDS or hit by a “limited strike”). Philosophy cannot cure a toothache, and the person who starts going on about its long-term benefits may induce a headache, too.

Pico Iyer in the New York Times on The Value of Suffering. Hat tip: Evelyn Rusli.

Image Title Plugin

Asides

Coldforged has an entry title image replacement plugin that lets you have titles like mine (done previously) that also has word-wrapping. I think I saw an approach somewhere (was it b2evo?) that actually broke each word into a separate image. For me the length limitation isn’t a limitation as much as a sanity check, if I’m writing titles so long it breaks my site I should probably shorten up a bit. I’ve also found caching isn’t worth it, every title here has been completely dynamic for about a year now.