After 2 poor support bands and a far-from-capacity crowd, The Cooper Temple Clause were going to have to pull out something special to make it a worthwhile night. While they didn’t fully succeed in making it a fantastic gig, it was fun.

Despite playing too many new songs to begin with (“Promises, Promises” sounding good), they got going when songs from See This Through And Leave started flowing more freely. Best moment was the double-whammy of Film-maker/Been Training Dogs, easing into the last part of the set.

Even though the crowd clearly wanted more, they band didn’t play a very long set (around an hour) and no encore. On that front, they have to be looked down on.

I came across Ryochiji’s interesting new blog-matching site called, surprisingly, BlogMatcher (via mrry). It indexes blogs that ping weblogs.com and finds similarity in links. You, the imaginary user, then come along and give it a blog to find matches for. It then provides you with a list of similar sites.

Most of my BlogMatched sites focus on XHTML and other similar issues; not surprisingly, considering how tired I am of writing that acronym – really need to automate that. There are a few entries on random stuff (Halle Berry, Dreamcatcher, etc) as well.

Also, I hate BlogShares. I started playing a month or two ago for 10-15 minutes a day; slowly amassing money. And then I bought into FSP 1.1. Shares bought at $15.63 have dropped to $0.81, scrubbing $800 from my pockets. DAMMIT! Oh well, I made a grand on another site overnight so karma balanced.

Recently, I’ve been reading about Uberman’s Sleep Schedule – a way of hot-wiring your brain into allowing 2 hours sleep a day. I don’t think I could make it work just now (where could I sleep at university every 4 hours?), but might experiment a bit during the summer.

There was more, but it’s gone for now.

Further to my post about Content Sent Correctly, I’ve been added to Evan’s list of sites that pass all 3 tests called “The X-Philes“. So far, only 11 sites are on that list.

What I didn’t mention before-hand, is that there is actually a 4th test: Why do you use XHTML? So thought it might be worth answering that one, even if it isn’t necessary.

1. To learn – the best way to learn a new technology, for better or worse, is to use it in a practical application. For XHTML, that means building a website,
2. Because XHTML is XML – I like XML. It’s well-formed, logical, and if something isn’t how you wanted it to be, it’s probably your fault (rather than a browser bug, as is usually the case in HTML). It’s also scrappable. If I want to extract any part of my markup without going to stupid lengths, I can do so with any XML parser,
3. It’s semantically richer – no more name tag, only one language attribute, and lots more redundancy is gone.

I’m sure there are other reasons that I’ve forgotten for now, but I think those are sufficient reasons.

The single greatest innovation of recent times: automated pub crawling. Just give it some location data (post code, or city name) and it’ll generate a random pub crawl for you to go on. It changes every time, so the alcoholics (read: students) out there will never get bored. Isn’t technology wonderful?

A few days ago, I read about a test someone was doing on various sites. The test showed that of 119 sites tested, only 1 site had fully conformed to XHTML. So, I wanted to see if this site passed the tests.

The first two were easy: every page on this site validates as XHTML 1.1 (or it damn well should). The last one was a known problem: sending the pages you read as application/xhtml+xml rather than text/html. So off I went to find a solution.

It wasn’t long before I found Mark Pilgrim’s Road To XHTML 2.0: MIME types, which included a trivial piece of PHP that would solve my problems. It was quickly added to my headers.

Now, this change to my PHP meant that browsers who could accept the correct MIME type got that sent to them, others (like IE/WIN) got a normal MIME type that wouldn’t strain them.

Everything was going fine until I had to edit a post (I never spell-check this until well after entries go online). The editing feature of my CMS bawked at the new MIME-type. Why? Because browsers refuse to display any XHTML in a textarea when you use the proper MIME-type, leaving me screwed since my CMS dumps XHTML straight into a textarea to be manipulated.

After a bit of fudging, it all works. I can hardly wait for a new bunch of problems when XHTML 2.0 hits.

Sorry for how boring this all turned out. I’m a little ill today, and it seemed interesting when I started writing. Oh, how wrong.