Happenings

The Power Of Feedster

Move over, Google! I’ve recently been looking at Feedster, and realised how insanely powerful it is. It has a bewildering array of options (thesauras, regex, soundex functions and more), and a highly up-to-date index.

While it’s ranking algorithm might not be as good as PageRank, it certainly makes up for it in the amount of things you can do with it. I hope the API documentation goes up soon, I’d seriously consider using it for my site search.

I’ll also soon be loading my entire archive into their system (via RSS), which will make an interesting off-site back-up.

Anyway, good work and good luck to those at Feedster.

CSS Top Menu

Another reason why web standards should be promoted: a very nice looking CSS top menu, working in all but IE based browsers. The best part is how beautifully simple the HTML is for it. I can also see CSS3 seriously simplifying the CSS.

Definitely a great tech demo, if nothing else. Via mezzoblue.

T In The Park 2003

A full write-up of my weekend at T In The Park would be huge in length and largely tedious. So I’m going to do this in the shortest style possible:

The Good:

  • The weather – Sunny and bright throughout the weekend,
  • Some of the bands – including Hell Is For Heroes, Idlewild, Biffy Clyro, The Mars Volta, The Darkness (entertaining, if musically poor), and Funeral For A Friend,
  • The blood red moon on the closing night – worrying, yet cool,
  • The good people at Lipton Ice Tea – giving a way a shedload of free ice cold liquid on a boiling hot day marks them as true heroes among men,
  • The copy of “Chandelier” I managed to buy after looking for it for a year or two.

The Bad:

  • The weather – Far too warm for most of the day, the queues for water got to be over half an hour long,
  • Some of the bands – including REM, Turbonegro, The Flaming Lips (sorry, but the lead singer was just boring), The Streets, and The Polyphonic Spree.
  • The finale by Caledon – embarassing and poorly done,
  • The price of food – this was always going to be high, but it was ridiculous.

There’s bound to be more that I’ve missed, so I might update this entry as I remember.

Atomic Syndication

The Echo Project finally has a name: Atom. While not my favourite, it’s not as bad as it could’ve been. Some of the names on the Project Name Proposals are truly awful.

Anyway, at least that chapter is over. We can concentrate on defining the format fully.

Catching Up, Giving Up

I’m back from a good weekend at T In The Park (but the inevitable write up of that will come later – tomorrow or the next day, maybe). Doesn’t seem like I’ve missed a lot.

There’s some fighting going on over Mark Pilgrim’s Winer Watcher. I can’t be bothered going into the politics of this thing since I’m still tired, but it’s a long running mess that just keeps getting worse.

Elsewhere, Tom Gilder outlines the ::outline pseudo selector. Since CSS3 is still at the working draft stage, I’d never heard of it before. If it works as advertised, we’ll all be able to get rid of a lot redundant markup and create better looking sites. That’s a very good thing.

That’s about it. I’m off for a needed rest.