Wednesday, January 30, 2002

News to go... Newspapers Lose Web War [via Dane Carlson] is interesting. A long time ago, and then more recently I asked the Los Angeles Times to make it worth it for me to give them more money. This time I am going to do it more publicly. I've been a newspaper subscriber since I was in my teens; I was taught then to scan the whole darned thing (a habit which I learned and is useful, but sometimes hard to turn off) and read more deeply what is interesting. I've been a LA Times subscriber of one sort or another since moving to the Los Angeles area in late 1987. For many years, we had the daily paper. Then we moved out of LA, and took only the weekend paper. After a bit, we went back to the daily paper, which continued even after our move in 1999. Eventually, the toll of soggy papers (often the paper would be on the sidewalk or near the street, we live in a very hilly area and if it rains, the paper is toast) and lack of time on my part made us cut back to only the Sunday paper. LAT offered us a deal, for basically the same price, we also get the Saturday paper. Here's what I want and will gladly pay for... I will pay somewhere in the ballpark of what you get for daily delivery. I want the Sunday paper delivered, without incident (treat me like a VIP?) by getting the thing at least a few feet up the hilly driveway. No other physical delivery is required, but errors should not happen (I guess I'm old enough to remember when bad delivery was a thing that everyone in the neighborhood knew about -- it pisses me off because it's now another low wage earning adult job, which is wrong in so many ways). Screw up the Sunday paper, and I get a refund for the week (scary, eh?) I want to be a digital subscriber, but I want rights, a lot of them. I want the paper delivered each day to my mailbox as an XML outline of major sections with headlines, columns, editorial, feedback, etc. I will want to have a way of tailoring the full paper to also create 'my paper'. If you deliver full featured XML, people will show up to use it. I also want unlimited search rights back to 1987. I've been subsidizing this thing since then, why should I be treated like someone who has just heard of the LA Times? I also want reasonable linking rights. LAT articles move around for various reasons, but as a subscriber I want to link to them (for a long time, or why would I mention them?) A reasonable idea for commercialization might be to have them decay into digests, although that's more difficult than the current situation. I want to be able to tell my son to go read 'this article' three weeks later without worry, just like I would hand him a piece of paper today and if he passes that link off to my granddaughter somewhere down the line, she should have some sort of idea what the article is about before paying for the whole thing. 11:58:49 PM

Mac Browser Redux Rob McNair-Huff (of Mac Net Journal) gives us his take on 'The state of OS X Web browsers'. A couple surprises from his review. He still favors Internet Explorer (I've pretty much moved to OmniWeb) and he finds IE getting in his way during his working day. OmniWeb, as much as I like it, crashes far more often than IE ever did (but I'm using 4.0.6, perhaps I need to move into the 4.1 betas), the window ordering hot key drives me nuts (instead of bringing a window forward, it sends the top window to the bottom of all visible process windows -- oh, thanks!), and it's idea of window tiling is absurd. After the first few windows tile where you expect them to, all hell breaks lose and eventually it starts piling windows on top of windows which are already open (yeah, I open a lot of browser windows). One more while I'm on my horse, the download window which looks like a pallette and acts like a window is just goofy; there are lots of things wrong with this puppy. OTOH, OmniWeb is beautiful, stunning really where IE looks worse than it ever did in Classic (Cocoa display rendering baby!) In OmniWeb I have no accidental popup windows, a major advance. I can also resize windows at will and every new window is the size I like my windows; this is a major advance on the IE system, where it remembered the size of the last window, which of late had become the latest window popped up by some idiotic ad. When tiling gets out of control I finish up what I am doing and quit, OmniWeb starts over from scratch when I restart. Writing this I realized that I need to go give Omni my money, they're due. 9:11:33 PM

The Foundry Lives It lives! I've finally connected to OSX Foundry, which was hyped all over the Mac development industry as a Mac development portal, but no one I knew was actually able to make a connection. Not much there yet, we'll see. 8:35:33 PM

Apache Axis Sam Ruby posted a blurb about Sun's 'JavaTM Web Services Developer Pack, Early Access Release 1' on Monday and included a question. Which led me to check out Axis (from the Apache group). Axis looks like it's a lot further along than I thought. I guess I'll have to try it under JBoss and see how it goes. 8:18:52 PM

California Freezin' Yes folks, it's cold here (relatively speaking). You folks in Minnesota, I'm sorry about whatever it is that just erupted onto your keyboard. Tonight it's supposed to be 32 degrees here. We have one log (one, singular!) left. Yesterday (during the day), it was sleeting in Simi Valley (famous forever because of the Rodney King trial); when I went out to pick up my son from school, KNX 1070 was talking about an accident because of sleet. Certainly, Southern California does get snow, but not normally at an elevation of 1200 feet. Usually, it's about an hour northeast of here, elevations of 4000 feet or so and higher. We had snow for a few days last year in the mountains near Ojai and in the northern part of the county. Meanwhile, New York is in the 60's, North Carolina is in the 70's. And I thought the weird weather was going to be next year. 7:37:57 PM

Addendum Greg Hanek asked me to add an addendum to yesterdays item about Radio. Mostly, he wanted me to caution others that mucking in the root is a bad thing and that Dave Winer is pretty adamant about people keeping their hands out. Now back in the day, hacking around in the one and only root was the only way to do things, but it could become a mess. Many times I had to reload bits and pieces from one of the root pieces. People used suites to add their functionality, but on occasion, tools were released which patched the system and caused some interesting problems. In Radio today, it's easy to create a new .root file (Tools -> Developers -> New Tool) and it's best to play there. My hacking last night was done in the workspace, because that's where I always wack around, but I moved it out this morning. With all that said, the pointers and information posted yesterday are invaluable as a learning resource. If you want to really do things in UserTalk, you are going to need to look at some complex examples at some point to figure it all out. 7:12:34 PM

A Radio break through I got some very useful mail on Tuesday from Greg Hanek regarding macros and such: Depending on what you're trying to do, it may be easier to use Dave's drawLeftLinks macro to chug thru an OPML file. It creates something which looks rather like the navigatorLinks results, but much easier for a mortal to accomplish, and less likely to get whacked by a root update. http://samples.userland.com/stories/storyReader$209 That said... The single name macros are really placeholders that use other radio macros to create their results. Some of them are built inside the script at system.verbs.builtins.radio.weblog.render Expand everything in that script using that Expand everything command in the outline menu, and look toward the bottom part of the script. Awful lot of setting values and substituion going on there. Also, for the navigatorLinks related items, you might start by poking around in system.verbs.builtins.radio.html.drawNavigatorLinks and perhaps system.verbs.builtins.radio.html.includeFile and maybe system.verbs.builtins.radio.webServer.pageFilter Cheers, The article and system.verbs.builtins.radio.weblog.render finally got me headed in the right direction for the navigation links stuff. So now I've built a call that loads a local OPML file, and builds nav links. It might make a nice tool once I iron out all the rough edges. My thanks to Greg for his help! 12:38:23 AM

© Copyright 2002 Dave Ely.