I never liked HTML e-mails. I never sent any and I often got annoyed receiveing them.
Now the Email Standards Project aims to ensure that emails render consistently in different email clients and webmail applications.
This will take some time and will need a lot of effort.
It has been nine years ago, in 1998, when Tim Berners-Lee wrote Cool URIs don’t change. Since then that text has not lost any of it’s relevance. Of course more people are aware of the problem and know how they can assure that permalinks stay permalinks. But as now there are more sites with more content out there in the net, the problem that pages can’t be found where they once have been is still very much alive.
Fortunately a lot of sites offer the possbilitiy to search the content and search engines help to find the page that we are looking for.
But what is annoying me more and more nowadays and becomes a problem for me is, that RSS and Atom feeds change. This happened to me with several blogs and sooner or later I will have the same problem with podcasts and videocasts. Of course I know that the address of an feed is nothing else as an URI, so that Tim’s article also applies here. But it seems people do not think about it.
People make changes to their blog platform or their CMS or they use another tool to publish their articles and this new tool’s feed has a different URI. Maybe after a while I may realise that a blog has not been updated for a while and having a look at the site I may realise that there is new content. You may say if I don’t miss this site in my feed reader it won’t be so interesting or important. But with more than 100 feeds and some of them updating only from time to time it’s hard to remember all of them.
Google Reader shows you the inactive feeds in the Trends section and Bloglines marks the feeds that make problems. That’s nice and handy. Although Bloglines sometimes was so helpful to delete feeds although they still existed and only had temporary problems. Don’t know if this is still happening.
There are several solutions to avoid problems with feeds. There is Feedburner out there that provides a permanent feed also including statistics. But as Feedburner joined the big Google family, some may not want to use this service.
Maybe it is possible that the new publishing tool uses the same URI. If not, you could try to redicrect the old feed address to the new one. In any case you should inform your readers that the feed changed and they should update their feed readers.
People should not forget that changing the feed without letting people know about it, they will loose readers. Readers that may not be coming back.
So please try to keep your feed URIs and notify your readers of any changes, if possible in advance.
Sigur Rós from Iceland gave an interview that … just have a look at the video yourself. Via Jason Kottke.
Finally it is official: Apple will ship Mac OS Leopard on Oktober 26th. It will have more than 300 new features.
The iPhone in the UK. The iPhone in Germany. And now the iPhone in France: It will be available November 29th and the carrier will be Orange.
It has not been long ago when I upgraded this WordPress installation. There is now the update to WordPress 2.3 avaiable. For me the most interesting new things are canonical URLs, update notification of new releases of WordPress or of plugins that are used and native tagging support.
Since some months I have been using Ultimate Tag Warrior but have not very happy with it and in my opinion it was not working properly all the time. So I was looking forward for the native tagging support in WordPress 2.3.
As the last time the upgrade was easy and fast. Moreover there is an option import Ultimate Tag Warrior tags into the new native tagging structure.
Finally Google got into the social bookmarking market. Until now Google was only offering Google Bookmarks to store bookmarks for yourself. But last week Google startet Shared Stuff.
Like for del.icio.us there is a bookmarklet to post a web page to Shared Stuff. You can tag that page and add a description. for some sites a thumbnail of the page is displayed. But for now that is nearly everything you can do. It is not possible to edit the entries on your personal Shared Stuff page. This is only possible by using the bookmarklet on that page again and change the tags or description.
The same bookmark can also be used to e-mail the page from your Google Mail account or use third party services like del.icio.us, Furl, Digg or others.
One interesting thing is that if the page you want to add to Shared Stuff already is in your Google Bookmarks the tags you us in Google Bookmarks are automatically added. If you change tags in Google Bookmarks tags are automatically changed in Shared Stuff and vice versa.
But items on Shared Stuff are not automatically added to Google Bookmarks.
On time it is a bit complicated that you have two places to store your bookmarks, Shared Stuff for the ones you want to share and Google Bookmarks for the ones you want to keep private.
I guess there will be new and more features soon. But I don’t think that Google can convince me to leave del.icio.us. And there are rumours that del.icio.us will be relaunched in the near future.
MischMasch is the name for the category where I will publish links with short comments and stuff I stumble upon on the net.I don’t plan to write something in this category each and every day, I will just write something one or the other day.
Since I installed WordPress last year and this site became a blog I never upgraded. I always wanted to do it later.
Today finally I managed to upgade. And it has been as simple and as fast as has been setting up this WordPress blog. So now there is WordPress Version 2.2.3 running here.
Some days ago I found a link to a screen saver and installed it immediately. The name of the screensaver is Visionary Saver and it displays Twittervision and Flickrvision when I don’t use my iBook.
There are plans to add other visualizations like Breathing Earth.