Archive for May, 2004

Yes, yes oh yeah:

In response to all the requests: there WILL be a Skype ver­sion for Mac OS X. No info is pub­licly avail­able about when exactly it will be out, but it’s already in the works.

They are look­ing for beta testers… [from the Skype forum]

Ok, so I’ve switched (I can’t be arsed to link that up — you know what I mean). And apart from hav­ing to install every sin­gle piece of soft­ware I need (and find­ing quite a lot of new ones — yummy) , I’m oh-so-pleased.

But I’m not just find­ing OS X ver­sions of my old favourites. I’m try­ing out some new stuff as well. And being an RSS-fanatic, I thought I’d give the dif­fer­ent aggre­ga­tors a test spin. I love Blog­lines, but still. How­ever, it’s not so damn easy. I’ve sort of been here before, though. I’ve tried out dif­fer­ent aggre­ga­tors on my PC — same thing. OPML is so sim­ple! Or at least, that’s how it should be. But every aggre­ga­tor seem to add their own lit­tle quirk — and there isn’t a stan­dard for fold­ers, groups or what­ever aggre­ga­tor x choose to call it. That sucks.

So, with my lim­ited BBe­dit skills (which no doubt is a fine lit­tle piece of soft­ware), I had to cut the Blog­lines export into chuncks cor­re­spond­ing to my dif­fer­ent groups. But:

Shrook imported with­out has­sle. It keeps crash­ing on me, though.
Net­NewsWire doesn’t under­stand the exported file.
Pulp­Fic­tion sort of under­stands it, but though being a Mail.app like appli­ca­tion, I find the inter­face a bit con­fus­ing. Too yel­low, and think­ing about my feeds in quite a dif­fer­ent way than I do…

So, I’m back with Blog­lines — at least until I find the energy to either con­vert my feeds into a NNW-readable for­mat, or Shrook (which I think is my inter­face favourite) starts run­ning stable.

This is posted with ecto btw. Pretty slick, but I’m miss­ing my Zempt-like book­marklet that allowed me to launch the app from the page I wanted to blog.

But to sum up: How hard can it be to agree on an OPML stan­dard? Bloody hell…

Ikke et ondt ord om midal­drende jyder i halvtred­serne på Københavner-tur, men man sam­ler alligevel lidt ggod­bid­der op, når man sid­der og stener mor­genkaffe på den lokale cafe. 20 stk. af førnævnte type er netop trådt lar­mende ind, hvilket har­monerer dårligt med et reg­n­eark jeg havde håbet at få lidt styr på. Men, altså, Jør­gen var vist blevet væk. “Jøøøør­gen, hvor blev du af?” Jør­gen: “Nå, ja — jeg skulle lige ud og hive Peter Belli i ørerne”. WTF?

Update: Bub­ber fra k9k gør ven­ligst pr. mail opmærk­som på, at dels var kom­mentarer for denne post slået fra (pga. min man­glende erfar­ing med ecto, viser det sig), dels er “Peter Bel­lis ører” fra den så vidt jeg ved ganske fine teenage-terror-tegnefilm “Terkel i knibe”. Ak, ak — så uoplyst jeg er…

For those of you with­out your own Mac SE, take a look at this flash piece — you can play around with the 7.0.

I’m busy with OS X at the moment… oh joy…

This is just.a.test…

Today is a spe­cial day. Today the Dan­ish peo­ple will cheer on as yet another for­eign per­son (I thought we didn’t like those?) will get to by-pass laws, will get unlim­ited fund­ing in order to be able to fake inter­est in ancient Dan­ish his­tory, tacky cas­tles, the hor­ri­ble Dan­ish cui­sine and pick up a hobby; I hear water colour paint­ing is very pop­u­lar. In return, she will be asked to give up her demo­c­ra­tic rights and expected to accept every­one treat­ing her like a mon­key in a cage. Con­grat­u­la­tions. Love is a beau­ti­ful thing, but I’d like to see it in a repub­lic, please.

TV’s off, pollas.dk has gone black.

You-know-who is hav­ing a party, so now the whole street is blocked. That’s just dandy. What’s more of a prob­lem are the 100+ peo­ple who think it’s a great idea stand­ing for hours in the rain to maybe catch a glimpse of some­one royal. WTF?‘

Ok, so you’re not directly against monar­chy, you think the royal fam­ily are good rep­re­sen­ta­tives for our lit­tle coun­try and “in Asia, a monar­chy is a great way to make con­tacts — and we all want more export, right?” Besides, who says a pres­i­dent would do any bet­ter? And the new prins­ess is really pretty and bright.

So? Pretty, smart peo­ple who would gladly give away both their arms to save the world? I know lots of them. What bugs me is the total lack of respon­si­bil­ity on the yes men’s part for what’s really impor­tant here: Nowhere in a civ­i­lized part of the world, peo­ple should be born to power. Nowhere in a civ­i­lized part of the world should we expect any­one to give away their right to vote, to live a nor­mal life, to fol­low any form of guide­lines other than their own. These poor (pretty and smart, I know) peo­ple have just been given a life sen­tence; if they enjoy that, fine — if not, please don’t make their life harder by STANDING IN THE FUCKING RAIN LIKE A BUNCH OF IDIOTS STARING LIKE YOU WERE AT THE ZOO. 

“But if we can’t look up to them and stare at them and read about them in white trash mag­a­zines, what are they there for then?” Well, that’s really the point here, isn’t it.…

Apart from the obvi­ous need for a visual over­haul (some­where down the line the design just sort of self destruc­ted), I’m think­ing of going through all my code once again, as I’m not quite happy with the lack of lean­ness. It almost val­i­dates so that’s not the goal — it’s more of an exper­i­ment to see if I can make some real improve­ments while test­ing a few new tricks here and there. 

First of all I’d like to rethink the struc­ture of the con­tent — too much going on at the front page, not enough atten­tion to the goal of the blog, which, by the way, need some more thinking…I even promised a mis­sion state­ment on the future of my dig­i­tal home after last year’s blog­fo­rum. About time to blog the con­tent of that document…

But it’s time to drag out the good ol’ IA and UI skills while keep­ing focus on the con­tent — this is a weblog. What are best prac­tice weblog wise? How to respect con­tent, serve it in var­i­ous ways, pro­vid­ing thoughts on the ideas behind etc.?

So far, I’m think­ing of (in no par­tic­u­lar order):

• Doing a more clean front page design
• Arrange archives in a more intel­li­gent way
• Pro­vide feeds with var­i­ous con­tent combinations
• Keep a page updated with the var­i­ous plu­g­ins, hacks etc. used in build­ing the site
• Exper­i­ment with mix­ing types of con­tent in sin­gle view
• Seri­ously worh with lan­guage and com­mu­ni­ca­tion (need to. badly.)
• More tech and dev. Less rant­ing (as if…)
• More com­mit­ment to the stuff sur­round­ing us; gad­gets, orga­ni­za­tion, soft­ware I use etc.
• Play and exper­i­ment more with dif­fer­ent tools
• Nice urls
• High­t­light addi­tions to the blogroll — explain why

And so on and so on…

What do you like to be on a blog? Any spe­cial fea­tures you love at some blogs and miss at oth­ers? Any par­tic­u­lar struc­ture that works for you? I’ll update this list as progress is made. Com­ments greatly appreciated.

As soon as you want to serve your site as application/xhtml+xml (as it should be), vis­i­tor com­ments become a con­stant risk, threat­en­ing to crash your site. IT seems that you either have to serve your site the old way or become a info nazi, clos­ing com­ments. There is no other way. Or…? Simon Willi­son on Stay­ing valid:

There is: I’m doing it. Next Thurs­day will mark the one year anniver­sary of my switch­ing to application/xhtml+xml as the content-type header for this site, for user agents that sup­port it.

[via dion­i­d­ium] He’s run­ning com­ments through a PHP XML val­ida­tor and his own post­ings are made with a book­marklet check­ing input. Defi­nately some­thing I’ll look into when going through the code for this site.

Good writeup on switch­ing to Mac (which I’m just about to do): Spend­ing a Year with Mac.

I do have one Fleet­wood Mac CD which iTunes is con­vinced is a Chris de Burgh CD, I have both so that can be a bit weird.

Not really a prob­lem in my book…