Solitude 

Time for some random links:

• Drop Shadows - CSS drop shadows in most browsers (not IE).
• Cellular Automata - A constantly evolving header graphic, depicting flowers reacting to weather and interacting with each other.
• SScrable - A (slightly flawed) single-player scrabble game. Fantastic (and I hate scrabble). Via Submit Response.
• Crazy Game - The most insanely difficult but compulsive game of all time.
• When Word To XML Conversions Get Nasty - An article on converting nasty word docs to XML; a rather large project on its own.
• Ontology, Taxonomy, And Vocabularies - The differences explained.
• PHP mag - A decent resource for PHP related tutorials.
• 10 Myths Of Copyright - Some of the more pervasive copyright myths put to rest.
• How To Write Good - “There are many more writing hints I could share with you, but suddenly I am run over by a truck.” Genius.
• Helicopter game - Great one button game. Fly a helicopter through a tunnel.
• Definition Lists Explained - A clear article on the usage of definition lists, with some interesting ideas on how to style them.
• CSS Pencils - Making images of pencils entirely from CSS. I remember seeing something like this except with images from KnightRider.

That’s all for another few days.

Currently burning a lot of time in this part of the world (specifically, computing labs) is the psychedelic game Dolphins.

Possibly the most insane, challenging and fun game to pass these shores in months.

After having received the first piece of Comment Spam, I started thinking about the various strategies I could put in place to fight it should things get worse. Bayesian filters, compulsory previewing, proxied links (to make the act pointless), throttling, allowing previously visited IPs only, putting the comments system into the brain of a monkey and using pavlovian techniques to train it to fight spam…

… Then it occured to me. The number one, must-have feature of any comment spam filtering system is: the ability to delete spam.

Although the delete function has been done since the comments system was created, it was never wired up to the admin interface - leaving me with undeletable spam. Doh!

It is, of course, hooked up now.

Advertising is everywhere. TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, billboards, clothing and the web. We have gotten to be relatively good at tuning these things out.

At each step along the way, the advertisers need to try and improve (read: get more annoying and intrusive) to keep enough people watching to make money. All sorts of stupid ideas have been tried (the Mortal Kombat blood-squirting posters, anyone?).

They’ve got a new idea.

RSS Ads is going to provide a way for advertisers to put their ads in RSS feeds. Sign up for it and you could make money from click through or per view advertising.

In principle, this is a nice idea to let people make a little money from their sites. I’m all in favour of that. But, and you knew there was always a but coming, it simply won’t work.

Some people will immediately black list any sites containing the adverts. Others will come up with clever filters to get rid of the majority of the adverts and get back to normal browsing. The rest of us will simply use these filters and hope for the best.

The outcome of ignoring the adverts is the same as everywhere else. The market plummets, the advertisters get more desperate, and a new round of annoyance begins. Ad infinitum.

Maybe this is just pessimism, but web users don’t like adverts and are becoming more and more savvy to ignoring them every day. It won’t work.

Dylan Greene is discussing the 7 must-have features of RSS. I disagree with most.

1. Authentication - RSS uses http authentication, if you want it. If you don’t need it (as in most cases), it is bloat.
2. Query Standard - Outside of the scope of a simple syndication standard, and certainly not a “must have” for mainstram use.
3. Content Standards - I agree on this.
4. The Name - The name is fine. Call it the more generic “syndication” is you must.
5. Ad Standard - Hardly a must have and a bit of a pipe dream. Ads will never be standardised, because that makes them easy to filter.
6. DRM and encryption - Avoid proprietary cludges? Not going to happen. The corporations will put in whatever they like, regardless.
7. Attachment Standard - It already exists but is never used.

I doubt very much whether the average web browser cares about any of those things, or what effect they will have.

A new toy for you all: ActoRss. It generates RSS feeds for any actor available on IMDb.

The idea for this came when I recently wondered what Steve Buscemi was working on. Rather than going and finding out, I’d prefer to be told. And along came ActoRss.

If you want to make stalking following Liv Tyler easier, just go to the spangly new Liv Tyler RSS feed.

Enjoy.

The makers of Kazaa have created a new uri scheme to help make P2P files easily retrievable from a web link. Called Magnet Links, the scheme is supported by Kazaa (2.6 and up) and various Gnutella clients (including limewire). While this idea has been done before (poorly), this particular iteration is an open freely implementable standard.

This is definitely a good thing, bridging the gap between the web and the file sharing networks.

Interestingly, they specifically mention bloggers on their site. They’re probably hoping to use us as meme propagation. And it’ll work. It’s a great idea, and could save bloggers bandwidth. Got a big file to give to your readers? Shove it onto a network and magnet link to it. We will be watching it closely.

More random links, this time of a web/tech persuasion:

• PHPDoc - After being recently impressed by JavaDoc, I thought this might prove very handy. Haven’t tried it yet, but it looks promising.
• IE Behaviours - A whole bunch of scripts to make IE behave itself. Could be the way forward now that development has stopped on IE.
• HTTP tracking - Track users secretly with Etags. Avoid long boring part at the start, before the real exploit comes in.
• Minimise IE flickering - Minimise flicker in internet explorer. Another fix.
• Url2Bmp - Converts urls 2 bmps. Similar to Khtml2png, but works on windows.
• Pure CSS tooltips - Style tooltips for users. This will cause some severe accessibility problems.
• The Behaviour Layer - More client side scripting.
• Site Mixer - Mixes the content of one site with the design of a site. Odd.

Done.

Writing is difficult. Anyone who tells you differently is either lying or has no sense of their own inadequate writing.

Take that last sentence for example. The first section (before “or”) is ok, the second poor.

Now look at that last sentence: it is better, with a much shorter, snappier second clause.

Finally, look back. The previous is weaker; using lazy words.

Ten Mistakes Writers Make.

Having recently read Why I Don’t Like Databases, I find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with Stuart.

Further to his second point on a databases good points (the power of SQL), I don’t think that is necessarily a clear advantage now that XPath is available. Given that XPath can run across any XML file, it’s easy to imagine XML files in a filesystem that can be queried with as much power as SQL.

As time goes on, I hope to see the differences between database backends and filesystem backends become more transparent. There’s little reason for it not to happen, and plenty to gain from it.