I know I’ve changed my permalinks before and really don’t like changing them at all, but today I finally got around to doing the work that allows them to be the way I want them to be.

They no longer have crufty parts, and each permalink goes to a page with that item and that item alone (previously it was a page containing any items from that day). So they’re now in the form: /Archives/YEAR/MONTH/DAY/TITLE. No closing extensions, no ids.

And since I couldn’t have my permalinks breaking, all previous forms of permalink still work and should continue to do so. Real content coming later, perhaps.

A day or two ago, I introduced a very subtle change to this site. Go on, see if you can spot it. Done? For those weak of eye, the XML button I had is now a “Sub” button. What is that and what does it do? Read on.

The Syndication subscription service is a way for sites to help their users subscribe to their RSS feeds, for whatever aggregator they use. By simply clicking on a Sub link, they are taken to a page which lets them pick the aggregator they use and hands off the subscription process to their app; making it easy to subscribe to any feed that uses the process.

So far, so simple. Unfortunately, I offer two RSS feeds (excluding the 3.0 feed). I don’t want two buttons. So, to get round this, I used the OPML support in the subscription service. Now, if you click on my sub button, you’ll be able to pick the RSS flavour of your choice and then your aggregator.

At some point, I might add my blogroll to the OPML file, but that’s for another day.

I’ve been involved in the atom/pie/echo wiki since day one. Lately, the initial forward motion has been dwindling. Part of this is that every topic that is started brances off in a dozen directions. After a few iterations and loops, resources and opinions are scarce on any given page; making consensus difficult, and prolonging the minutia.

So, today I spent 90 minutes cleaning the wiki. This mostly involved looking at the pages of unanswered questions and answering as many as I could, refactoring old dead pages, and generally abbreviating old content.

I want to encourage others to do the same. Unless the wiki is pruned, we’re going to have a jungle of branching conversation so dense (in more ways than one) that no right thinking developer is going to want to delve in. So let’s cut a path through, shall we?

More on this soon.

Words fail me for a review of The Hulk. While certainly not as bad as, say, Dreamcatcher, it still ranks as one of the worst films of modern times.

The first hour or so is just tedious. A very obvious plot is frameworked, predictable plot devices planted, and paper thin relationships are set-up. So far, so boring. Then we get an array of highly stereotyped characters prancing around, pretending to act.

The editing doesn’t help matters. Why Ang Lee thought that using comic book framing would be good is beyond me. At the most serious moments, we get multiple views of each character in a boxed view moving around the screen; making watching it and taking it seriously a real chore.

The worst moment is the inevitable dream sequence (I did say it was bad). Bruce Banner sees the eponymous character in a mirror, who then pulls a bad Morbo impression.

To be fair, I went in expecting it to be bad, but not this bad; Lou Ferrigno would be rolling in his grave if he was dead (and didn’t have a cameo in the damn thing).

Stuart Langridge has come up with a better way of doing image replacement with CSS. It removes the redundant markup of the Fehrner technique, thereby silencing the critics of the method in at least one way.

Meanwhile, Tom Gilder continues his look at the future of CSS with an article on the CSS3 border model. Looks like being very powerful stuff.