I’ve added a few new syndication formats today, thanks largely to the fact that the generic feed creation script I wrote last week actually works. So what are these fun new flavours of syndication?

First up is my ESF feed. This is a very simple format: date, title and link all in plain text. And that’s it. The ESF spec explains everything you need to know.

Secondly, is my CDF feed for IE users only (after the enhancements users of better browsers get, it’s the least I could do for those poor people still suffering a slow bloated browser). Click on the link to the feed and it’ll try to add itself to your favourites. Let it. This will then give you a list of all the current items.

A little bit more difficult to implement. I basically copied the format used by Sam and Aquarionics and did my best to get it to work. The only thing that wasn’t fairly obvious was that it must be served with a MIME type of application/cdf.

Both feeds, and others, can be found on the syndication page.

I’ve made a few small changes over the past week or so that should make reading this site a bit easier:

1. Justified text – text on all pages is now justified. This took a seconds worth of work and makes everything look a lot better. To anyone who doesn’t do this already, add p {text-align: justify;} to your CSS immediately.
2. Smaller CSS – The remaining CSS has been made more detailed, yet the file is smaller. If you’re seeing any weird effects during the change, press CTRL and F5 together.
3. Valid XHTML for code – the code pages now show valid XHTML (where appropriate) rather than the default mish-mish. This is all thanks to conversion code from Xiven.
4. Meta tags changed – Hopefully Google will actually figure out how to follow my permalinks now that I’ve updated my meta-tags.

As with most things, you probably won’t notice most of these changes. That’s a good thing: I like seamless changes.

Ever have one of those zen moments when you see a problem in a perfectly clear way, removing the garbage that you had before? I had one today. It makes my previous effort really quite embarrasing.

I’ve updated the Palindrome code to make it a million times simpler. How did this happen? I was looking at the PHP manual for something entirely unrelated and noticed the strrev function. Everything immediately clicked into place in my head: rather than compare the first and last characters of a string recursively after stripping it down, just strip it down and compare it to its reverse. Simple.

The changes have been uploaded and should have propagated automatically through to the online palindrome checker and XMLRPC API interfaces.

For the past week or two, the weblogging community has been working on the conceptual elements that make up a well-formed entry for a website (parts that are necessary, and additional elements). Out of this has come the beginning of a new syndication format and editing API.

The reasons for creating a new format have been discussed elsewhere, with many important people are supporting its creation. We’ve got some very smart people working on it full time (a big well done to IBM for seeing the value in this project and letting Sam focus on it), and we have a constantly updated wiki for adding to the project. There are literally hundreds of people contributing to it, some a little, some a lot.

What is missing though is a name, a syntax and some real value. The name and syntax are in the middle of being decided on (nothing great so far, and I can only hope that Shelley‘s suggestion of Pubs is not used). What we really need is added value.

While I can see the wisdom in not inventing anything new, I doubt that a lot of users will. If they have no motivation to use a new format then what makes anyone think that they’ll change. RSS is a widespread format these days and it’ll take more than just being very specific in the specification to actually get people to use it.

Personally, I’ll be setting up a fed as soon as a stable specification is available (I’ve helped mould the project, I might as well use it), but I wonder if others will.

Igby Goes Down starts bleak, gets more depressing as time goes on and yet still manages to end cheerily without seeming forced. The story of a teenage boy born who rebels against the values he is born into: that of the upper classes. While certain parts of the plot are extraneous, it builds a fantastic view of the protagonists world and his (lack of) ambition.

Featuring a fantastic cast (including Kieran Culkin, Bill Pullman, Susan Sarandon, and Ryan Phillippe, among others), great direction and a genuinely interesting script: I would highly recommend this film.