Month: February 2004

See the following bit, Google spurns RSS for rising blog format, where there’s a quote from Dave:

“A good way to provide feedback to the Google people is to switch away from them,” Winer wrote on his site, citing a blogger who had suggested RSS supporters bolt from Blogger. “Let them make the connection that the day they started playing unfair, is the day the users started moving away.”

Meanwhile, Dave had this bit about one of my comments:

In a comment on the Cadenhead site, a guy named Pete says: “Just a reminder, you don’t have to use Google.” Perfect. A good way to provide feedback to the Google people is to switch away from them. Let them make the connection that the day they started playing unfair is the day the users started moving away. Companies always respond to this kind of input. It’s where users have the most power.

Just to put things in context (since I am that guy named Pete) I wasn’t specifically recommending that people move away from using Google because of this RSS/Atom controversy. I was recommending that people move away from Google when they become uncomfortable with any of their practices. Don’t sit on your backside and complain about Google, do something about it. There are alternatives, use another search engine. Do the others not have the features you like? Suggest them! Though you might be surprised by what some of the others can do. When’s the last time you used a search engine that wasn’t Google? If you have to really thing about that question, it might be time to switch. Remember, users are customers, and the customers are a big part of what made Google so successful. The whole “don’t be evil” thing is a good guideline, but I often think once a company becomes popular and grows to a certain size, evilness will creep in, it’s just inevitable, you just can’t please everyone, and the more customers you have, the larger the percent that might think you are evil.

Is Google the next Microsoft? Let’s hope not, but once again, if you want to look at a company that people continually complain about, Microsoft is it. I can’t tell you how many co-workers complain about some Windows problem they’ve had at home, and whine about Microsoft. How many times have I heard of people who use Windows all day at work, but when they get home use a Mac, or Linux because they actually want to enjoy using a computer… Sure, they’ll argue that Macs cost more, or they don’t really know how to use Linux, but again, the reality is, you have the choice of what kind of computer you use in your own home, don’t you?

Just remember this: You’ve always got a choice… You can choose what products to buy, what companies to support, what operating systems to run, and what search engines to use…

We hear a lot of talk about Linux on the desktop, and how this is the year it will really happen. Heck, I’ve heard that IBM has it’s own desktop Linux distro with 15,000 internal beta users. I’ve no doubt that Linux on the desktop will continue to improve and get more popular, as will Mac OS X, and I think both will happen at the expense of Windows. That’s just my opinion of course, and what I’m here to talk about is Linux under the desktop.

What is Linux under the desktop? It’s the practice of sticking a server under your desk to get the job done. In some companies they’ve got a lot of Windows servers, and they do all these official things like email, file/print services, DNS, etc. But when some geek type needs something done that can’t be easily done by Windows, they stick an old PC under their desk, load up a Linux distro, and installs the tools needed to get the job done.

Over time, these machines become useful, or even critical, and you need to move them into the server room along side all of the Windows boxes. And then gradually, over time, the Linux boxes outnumber the Windows boxes, and guess what? They’re more reliable, and they’re cheaper to put in place, and as long as you have people who know what they are doing, they’re easier to maintain.

That’s the plan anyway…

Oh yeah, what about Linux on the desktop? It’s coming… I hear this is the year it will really happen!

Dave is meeting with the IE team.

I want to talk about how the browser can be made more useful to people who use RSS and who write weblogs. I’m going to ask for features that work for all blogging software and all aggregators, foolish me, maybe I’m the only one who thinks we all do better if everyone has a chance to compete.

Um, Dave, you do realize that the next version of IE will be a pay-to-play affair. As IE for Windows will only be included when you purchase Longhorn, and IE for Mac will only be available if you purchase MSN. So if you really want to help “all blogging software and all aggregators” and want us all to have “a chance to compete” will you also be meeting with the Mozilla folks, the Opera folks, the Safari folks?

The funny thing is, if Dave wanted to make the browser work better for these things, he might do well to look at the Mozilla project, which has a huge pile of extensions at MozDev, many of which aim to make the browser known as Mozilla a better blogging and aggregator component. If Mozilla has these components, and they are done right, won’t Microsoft sit up and take notice, and do something about it?

Dave is getting closer… He’s released a new service for people who want to be sure their feeds are in good shape.

I say getting closer because it’s a step in the right direction. It’s aimed toward people who want to make sure the feeds they have online are valid. That’s a good thing.

I went a step further. The software used to publish this site attempts to validate the feeds produced at publish time. Meaning, I create an entry, the feeds are produced, and then they are checked for validity. If I screw up and write some invalid markup, I know it right away, before the feeds ever get published.

Here’s an example: Let’s say I accidentally paste in some HTML and end up with an extraneous </a> in my text. When I render out my pages, I’d see an error like this: line 37, column 149: XML Parsing error: <unknown>:37:149: mismatched tag.

Now, here’s the interesting part. The feedvalidator doesn’t see any problems with the RSS 2.0 feed, it reports ‘No errors or warnings’ for it, but the Atom feed is the one that returns the error. Since I screwed up and created invalid markup, I’d expect an error. You can make your own call here as to whether having an unmatched </a> is screwed up or not. (Add stuff about XML, strictness, etc. if you wish.)

Oh, we also run the HTML output through Tidy to check for well-formedness, and lo and behold that stray </a> is reported by Tidy as: line 117 column 148 - Error: unexpected </a> in <p>.

Now all this does not mean that errors won’t slip through the cracks every now and then, but it makes it that much harder to let them slip through. Since we’re calling existing applications and libraries, the whole process of adding in these checks took very little time. The majority of time was spent installing the software and figuring out how it worked. There’s also less than a dozen lines of code to actually do the checks and report the errors. I know that this can’t be built into all publishing system quite so easily, but it is getting easier to do these sorts of things everyday.