Saturday, November 19, 2005

For discussion: A way to identify the owner of an OPML document using the address of a web page. It's lightweight, yet powerful, and gets the job done while reducing spam.  

11AM: Just arrived at the Harvard Business School conference, in Palo Alto. We're watching a guy on TV, speaking in Cambridge, I imagine. He's the CEO of Blackberry. Fascinating story. He's describing how a back-door-sell works. I didn't know that's how they got started. The wifi here is pretty good, free. We're at SAP, right next to Xerox PARC. 

Today's podcast is about advertising and TechCrunch; and a lightweight approach to author identity and OPML. 

Jeff Jarvis asks important questions about Google Base. 

Amy Gahran is going to do the Women in Podcasting list in OPML. This is a good application for OPML, and the updating process she describes is a good use-case for the ownerId element described in today's opml.org post. 

A two-page fax from Markos Zuniga (DailyKos) and Michael Krempasky (RedState.org) sent to members of Congress on November 9, apparently on behalf of bloggers, requesting an exemption from campaign finance law. Let's look into the ideas behind this, and who will profit from it, and why. It's not clear to me if this is something we should support. 

NY Times: "If Google is allowed to go down this path unfettered, he added, copyright holders will have no way to stop others who want to do the same thing, perhaps with greater financial harm to authors and publishers." 

Convincing Firefox to select-all on click 

Recall my whining post on Wednesday this week.

Turns out Firefox has a cryptic but powerful preference system, accessible by entering about:config into the address bar. This is an important bit of information I didn't have.

And then there's a pref called "browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll" that is set to default false in Firefox 1.5. If you double-click on it, it changes to true, and when you open a new window, voila, I get the behavior I want.

Now, does this survive a restart? Let's hope so.

And imho, the default is wrong. I've gotten tons of email on this, and have conversed with a few people, including a couple who claim to be on the Firefox team (no reason to doubt them, of course). They say it changed in 1.5 to be consistent with the Mac UI guidelines, people cite Camino as being correct, and they want Firefox to be Camino-like apparently. To which I say it's great that Camino is there, and that makes it possible for Firefox to be consistent with itself, on Windows. And I hear that even Apple breaks the UI guidelines when it makes sense to. They're meant to be guidelines, not orders -- UI design requires judgement, it's an art, not a science.

And yes, I do know there are times when you need to take part of a URL, but it's relatively rare compared to the number of times you need the whole URL.