Monday, March 14, 2005

The BBC has migrated to RSS 2.0. Until today they used 0.91. 

I'm sure Danny Ayers will not like this, but I'm definitely going to ship the outliner before the end of the month. Two things need to be changed in the application, it needs a new name (more on that in a bit) and it needs an icon. Since the native format of the application is OPML, the icon should be derived from the logo for the format. The icon has to work on both Windows and Macintosh. It should certainly be red. It's possible it could be just the OPML logo itself. And now for the name. As you might imagine I've named a few outliners in my day. The first had the best name. Now this is non-commercial software built on an open source base. So the name, it seems, should be simple and say what the program does. So I decided to name it after the famous format it edits. And this should change the way people view the format, because it's the rarest of XML formats, one that has an editor that reads and writes it, natively. Therefore, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, the name of the new outliner is... Click here. Surprised?  

Spent the afternoon at the eye doctor. I need surgery, I'm legally blind in my left eye, the right eye is okay. It really sucks, but it's not really news. Got a new prescription. My eyes are dilated now, all blurry. Oh well. Life goes on. My vision will return, in stages. Later today I'll be able to walk on the beach. Later this spring I'll get some of the vision in my left eye back. 

Don Park says, among other things, that OPML needs a Wiki. 

I made a guest appearance on the Bluggcast yesterday. We had a lovely cross-oceanic conversation. They call it "being assimilated."  

Not sure exactly what Butler is, is it just for Firefox? It claims to modify Google, removing ads, adding pointers to their competitors' sites. It seems unfair to use Google to drive traffic to their competitor's sites. I wonder how Google feels about this? I read on Scoble's site that it removes links to his blog, I imagine (since it comes from Mark Pilgrim) that it performs the same service for this blog. 

Rogers Cadenhead: "Mark Pilgrim's half-year search for a hobby that doesn't involve electricity appears to have been as fruitless as OJ Simpson's hunt for the 'real killers.'" 

Rogers has a screen shot for Butler. 

Hey after unplugging things and re-plugging them I was able to get back online. So if you're listening Time-Warner, no need to come out to service this connect. I'll have to remember to call them. Yeah. I'm sure I'll remember that.  

BetterBadNews #23 is up and it's hilarious, as usual. "Here's a big cluestick for these morons." 

It's probably going to be a light day here, the Internet at the beach house is down. Spent an hour on the phone satisfying the troubleshooter from Time-Warner cable, I knew the problem was on their end because I have two laptops, two routers, yet they had me uninstall and re-install all kinds of stuff. Starbucks is reliable, but expensive. Maybe I'll do some work at Barnes & Noble later, the wifi there is free.