Misc...

Beware the ç

Oh my! I ruined Peter Rukavina's blogroll. It's probably the saddest side-effect I've had on the blogosphere so far (but I'm confident I can outperform myself again in the future). Peter, I'm sorry. But you should blame the US ASCII monoculture for that. Don't you think that, in 2003, it's an absolute shame that a character as common as ç can still cause such trouble for most information technologies out there? I share your pain, I can't tell you how many times a day I struggle with registration systems, cookies, etc. that cannot properly swallow my first name. François is my second name :(.

We'll talk about that again around 2010. After a decade spent at exporting all IT jobs to Mumbaï, we'll see if that helps us sort this problem out.

[padawan.info 2.0]

Europe discovered America in 1492 (?) United states of America discover european languages in 2003.

The fact is that the tools are not really good.
In MovableType, the default encoding is ISO-8859-1. If you discover later that you need or want UTF-8, you are in a bad situation.
And if you look at NetNewsWire, it post with entities instead of utf-8. This is not a big issue for now. But that's too bad.
Add to this the poor handling of encodings in many RSS feeds, which gives work to read and to correct when citing someone else text.

1,000 words

[Seb's Open Research]

Astonishing !

Women in blogging world... Or is it infuriating?

Over at eWeek, Steve Gillmor took on (John C.) Dvorak's anti-blog stance by offering a list of "a few of the original blog voices who (he’s) grown addicted to over the last few years." That list of nine names doesn’t include one woman.

Disappointing.

(Shelley agrees.)

[misbehaving.net]

There is still a lot to do

Identity and social software (FOAF)

[...]We will soon add FOAF to Ublog. I like it.
[Loïc Le Meur's WebLog]

FOAF is a good idea. It has been developed with the old timer net citizens in mind. And lack a lot to scale up to the current net users.

To start being really widespread, FOAF must be perceived as easy and safe.

There is no safety built in.
People are afraid to give personal information on the web. There are good and bad reasons to it. But it is easy to be afraid with right reasons(*). So one good condition for FOAF to "take-off", would be to have some form of "built-in" access control.
It would have basically some levels:
- Public
- Friends
- Business
- Private

And access to the various levels but Public would be granted by the owner.
Given the current norm, it would be a multiple file FOAF system with access restrictions. So there is a need for an easy management of the access restrictions.

There is no good editor.
(I participated to the localisation of one of them http://www.ldodds.com/foaf/foaf-a-matic.fr.html)
Up to now, when you create a FOAF file you have to start from scratch and copy/past information inside various fields. The minimum needed is a web service where one enter his FOAF file URL. The service shows the content on a web page and allow for editing. Then after validation, it open up a web page with the content generated allowing one to save the file or copy/past the content to a text editor.

Autodiscovery must work.
There has to be some norm to FOAF (and other metadata) auto discovery so that tools can really easily discover them. I followed a proposal some time ago.

(*) Try the http://www.kartoo.com/ service with your name as search...

Favor fully formed feeds!

Jim McGee: Full text please. Quoting David Buchan:

A number of the people whose blogs I read regularly have not set up their systems to provide a full text feed of each post. 40 words is not enough for me to accurately decide if I want to read something or not. More often than not the post gets deleted.
[thought?horizon]

Jim writes:

... if your primary goal is to get your content read, then a full feed is your best bet from my selfish perspective.

Let's try and amplify that meme a little bit. My last attempt seems to have fallen flat. If you have goodwill but lack know-how, a few weeks ago Lee explained how to include whole entries in your feeds in Movable Type.
[Seb's Open Research]

I do agree with them. I rarely go up to read a post on the web. I read them, or don't if they are too short, on my news agregator.

Quick Links - 2003 11 12

I am sure that most of you have heard of htaccess, if just vaguely, and that you may think you have a fair idea of what can be done with an htaccess file. You are more than likely mistaken about that, however. Regardless, even if you have never heard of htaccess and what it can do for you, the intention of this tutorial is to get you two moving along nicely together. If you have heard of htaccess, chances are that it has been in relation to implementing custom error pages or password protected directories. But there is much more available to you through the marvelously simple.htaccess file. [blog.scriptdigital.com]

For further reference and exploration.

To Spam or Anti-Spam, that is the question...

[...] links to James Seng's Bayesian Anti-Blogspam plugin and my personal favorite, Jay Allen's MT-BlackList, which he states is not released yet - huh? what have I been using for the past month then?[...]

[Luke Hutteman's public virtual MemoryStream]

Just as a quick reminder for these two solutions.

Zappe ta PRAM - Appel au peuple

Dans l'espoir fou qu'un Zappe ta PRAM français voie le jour, je lance un appel à la francosphère.

[...]

Répondez en commentaire ou via un TrackBack sur ce billet.

[padawan.info/fr 2.0]

Pourquoi pas ?

Mais je sens ça dur à organiser.

PS :Sorry for a post in french on this english language blog.