Month: June 2003

One down

Well, there will be one fewer Mac browser to worry about supporting in the future. Following on the heels of suggestions that there will be no future stand alone releases of Internet Explorer, Roz Ho of Microsoft’s MacBU said (and CNET confirms) that the Mac version of Internet Explorer is now browser history.

While I think that watching MacIE, Safari, OmniWeb, and whatever the heck will happen to the Gecko-based browsers compete would have been fun, I gotta say that as a web page designer I’m not unhappy to have one fewer platform to test on.

Scoble: “cheaper than marriage counseling”

Scoble writes about a fight with his wife over his weblogging. Gotta say I wondered how he was able to write that much and be married. He’s right that writing about it is good therapy, but (once you’ve got the words down) it might be better to talk about it.

And yeah, balancing family and “creative time” can be tricky. Sometimes it’s easier to be “creative” (or just busy) than be there for people and deal with real things. Where’s the line? It’s a slippery slope. All I know is that I blog a lot when I’m depressed, or when I’m alone and happy; when I’m with my wife and happy, I don’t blog as much because I’d rather be there with her.

So yeah, good luck, Scoble, and try talking about it.

Long day

Got pulled into a review with my senior director this morning (planned) and my general manager this afternoon (unplanned), which played hell with my workload (as well as my blogging). For now, know that (a) I’ve been listening to the new Radiohead album and alternately awed and unimpressed, almost track by track (it’s uncanny how good the good stuff is; I think the bad stuff will grow on me) and (b) I plan to relax tonight and not think about work or RSS tracking. Maybe AmazonHandler, though. Maybe.

Measuring blogs, part 3: Tracking RSS the old fashioned way?

A reader emailed after my post last week about measuring RSS to ask “Why not slip a 1 pixel ‘webbug’ into the RSS feed?” Good question.

Advantages of web bug graphics:

  • Unobtrusive in the RSS reader’s pane.
  • A direct hit to your server, allows you to play games like feed views and unique users. Note I didn’t say page views or content views; more on that in a second.

That’s about it, really.

Disadvantages? Plentiful:

  • No referrer, no specific content tracking. RSS readers generally send “no referrer” per the HTTP standard rather than try to make up a referring URL (though some, like Radio Userland, refer back to a host page for their services). So you can’t track which content piece the reader was coming from.
  • Doesn’t always get forwarded. RSS items generally contain minimal markup, so an extra image tag inserted is sure to be noticed and removed by most bloggers. Why is this important? We care about the total reach that our content gets, on other peoples’ sites as well as our own. At minimum you won’t be able to count any references that your content gets on tech-savvy bloggers’ sites.

Plus, of course, any tracking system that relies on client side code can be exposed—and risks your readers’ alienation. And, as we’ve discussed before, alienating your blogging readers can be a sure way to invite shunning—and shrink your reach, but good. Kind of the opposite of what you’re trying to do in the first place.

And, by the way, this goes double for any more complicated embedded Javascripts or other solutions.

But what about embedding meaningful images, each with a unique name (perhaps associated with your article’s GUID), in each article? Kinda suggests that the photobloggers are the people most likely to get real tracking of how their content is read.

Of course, they’re also the most likely to get it stolen, renamed, and rehosted on someone else’s site.

This is starting to feel like the three laws of thermodynamics, which I propose we recast as the three laws of measuring RSS:

  1. You can’t win.
  2. You can’t break even.
  3. But you don’t want to get out of the game. Not if weblogs are worth one one-hundredth of the hype that they’ve received. (And I think they’re underhyped. Weblogs at Harvard? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.)

Second blogaversary

Today is my second blogaversary. Two years ago I started this blog in earnest and quickly got embroiled in XMLRPC, scripting, and other stuff. Since my first blogaversary, graduating from business school, moving 3000 miles, and buying a house, the blog has been a lot less technical and hopefully a little more human (apologies to those for whom either prospect is daunting).

Some things remain the same: the first post was about listening to Radiohead’s Amnesiac, and music has continued as a theme. The second post was about beer, and I’ve since broken out food and beverage as a separate department (and one that I haven’t written for in a while). The third: about the Mac and streaming audio.

AmazonHandler acting up

I’ve had no less than four people contact me within the last few weeks to tell me that AmazonHandler, my AppleScript glue to allow calling the Amazon Web Services API, isn’t working for them. The most common error is “Can’t make ‘http://soap.amazon.com/onca/soap’ into a record” but others have been reported as well, including problems with finding and loading the support scripts to do SOAP.

I think the first problem is caused by some code I put into SOAPXMLRPCHandler to work around a bug Apple introduced in the underlying SOAP layer sometime in the late 10.1.x/10.2 timeframe. The support script problem is tricky. The point of scripts is that they’re supposed to be quick and easy, so making the user install support scripts seems dumb. But it’s quicker and easier for me to release scripts that use common technologies (including the Manila API and SOAP generally) if I keep the scripts separate.

I promise I’m looking at it, if only because having this script would allow me to automate some of the workflow around “Current Listening” and “Current Reading.” But be patient—I have a day job, after all.

Technorati doubleheader

First: The creator of Technorati, Dave Sifry, commented on my note about bloggers and journalism last week. He notes:

…if people stop linking to you, your Technorati ranking will drop – and if a blog is removed from a blogroll, the ranking will drop faster. I’ve also been talking with folks like Kevin Marks about his Vote Links initiative, which would place an extra attribute in a link tag to show whether you are approving of the link, neutral, or negative, which can then be used to make further judgements about things like notoriety.

Which puts a little more muscle behind “shunning.” And makes the subtle social dynamics of the blog world replicate middle school just a little more. I’m almost kidding—I think “vote links” is a fricking brilliant idea and long overdue. Just… wow.

Anyway, onto the second point: Doc points to the newest feature at Technorati: blog keyword search. Beating Google to the punch, over 360,000 blogs indexed and ready—plus an API.

The search is pretty cool, though I wonder if indexing by the Technorati ranking of the parent site alone is the right thing to do. After all, someone may only have three inbound links but be the total authority on some obscure search term.

Phone success

Yes, there was happiness at the end of the road. After obtaining a Bluetooth adapter for my home machine, I experimented with trying to sync my contacts (using iSync and trying to send one at a time from the Address Book) with no luck. I then turned to the web. MacFixitForums were unhelpful, but the MacInTouch reader reports on iSync pointed out something I had missed, namely that the phone tries to use port 3004 for the mRouter discovery protocol, and that opening ports 3000 through 3004 enables the communication.

I made the change, turned the firewall off and on, and then had to reboot—I suspect because I had to force quit iSync when it failed the first time. After the reboot I was able to synchronize my address book to my phone, all 1471 contacts processed seamlessly.

Remaining issues:

  • What’s up with mailing photos from the phone? Worked yesterday, doesn’t work today.
  • Bluetooth File Exchange doesn’t work. At all. Can’t move a file, can’t create a new folder.
  • Why won’t iSync transfer iCal items to the phone? There’s a calendar on there after all.

Phone update

So a little quick update on my phone drama: I splurged a little over the weekend and got a Nokia 3650. This is the phone that’s been in a few carriers’ commercials—the one with the built in camera on the back. So I wanted to figure out how to get some of the more advanced features enabled, and I tried to sync the phone up to my PC via infrared.

Nothing. I never got the phone to connect—every time I tried, the software on the PC reported a failure in the sync layer. And now I can’t send emails from the phone, which worked fine before.

I think there’s a law of increasing complexity in cell phone technology, and I think I just crossed over the line between usable and crazy with this new phone. Of course, I can always try putting a Bluetooth adapter on my computer and seeing whether that works any better’adding another layer of complexity.

Realistically it will be a while before I can blog or send photos from this thing…

Why we bust our humps

day lily from our garden

A friend called while I was in the back garden swearing at a thorny, recalcitrant wild strawberry vine that was growing over some of our “real” plants. He asked what I was up to. I responded, “We’re out in the garden finding all sorts of mystery weeds to uproot.”

There was a pause, and he responded dubiously, “Well, I guess that sounds like a good thing to do on a Saturday.”

I thought about it after I got off the phone with him. It’s not so much the uprooting weeds, it’s the results afterwards.

Which is rather the point of a lot of things, I think.

A year ago today…

…was a very cold (55°) and very wet graduation ceremony at MIT.

Sorry I didn’t blog yesterday. It’s definitely the time of year when it’s easy for outdoor projects to consume every iota of my time and attention. Even if it does hit 95° (which is, I think, a record for the Seattle area in June). More rocks to dig in today, and a garden (someone else’s) to visit.

A belated happy anniversary to my parents. Esta arranged for the anniversary to be called out on the loudspeaker at the baseball game they went to on Thursday night.