Day: January 4, 2004

RSS luv

Two quickies and then I must sleep:

  1. RSS feed (scraped) for news updates from the Mars Rover landing. Subscribed, as Dave would say.
  2. I’m looking at the new feed: URL proposal. While I understand the technical arguments that a lot of folks are making—that this should be a MIME type, not a URL type, since the feeds are still fetched by HTTP, I can’t argue with the end result. One click subscriptions are the one feature I really missed after I migrated from reading RSS in Radio to other aggregators, and now it looks like there’s an emerging cross client consensus on how to make the feature work everywhere—for instance, in NetNewsWire. Right on.

Trackback and validation, and CMSes, and …

Scoble says that the Radio trackback feature (which is implemented identically to the Manila implementation on this site) makes his site fail validation. Frustrating when a useful feature like that has to be turned off, but I understand the pain; I’ve been working on validation myself.

At this point there are still a bunch of errors reported by the W3C’s validator, none of which I can do anything about. They all have to do with ampersands in URLs in my articles. Ampersands are commonly used in URLs when there are multiple arguments. Manila thinks that those ampersands should be represented by actual & characters (and enforces this in its managed content), while the W3C validator insists that, at least for HTML 4.01 Transitional, the ampersands must be represented as &, even in URLs. So there’s nothing I can do; the site is as valid as it’s going to get.

(Incidentally, if anyone has Manila spitting out valid XHTML, I’d love to know. It would be nice to get off HTML 4.01.)

For more info about CMSes and HTML validation, there’s a great interview with What Do I Know’s Todd Dominey over at WebStandards.org.

First ski of 2004

Lisa and I went back to Snoqualmie today for another half day ski. The difference is that we had our own boots and brought our rented skis with us, both courtesy REI. We are definitely getting into skiing as a serious lifestyle, and we figured ski boots were the right place to start investing in gear. Man, were we right. My feet feel so much better than they ever have after skiing.

The skis were a mixed blessing. On the plus side, we paid $10 less per pair than we would have at the mountain, and didn’t have to deal with the line (which cost us almost an hour on Monday). On the minus side, the skis were crappy. I don’t know if all Rossignols are bad, or just the ones we’ve rented. But then we did rent them on Saturday.

And, oh my goodness, it was freezing up there. Icy road conditions from Issaquah all the way to the summit, and about 7° F on the slopes. (Fortunately it warmed up. A little.) But good skiing, even a little fresh powder on the slopes, which for Snoqualmie is really saying something.