Monday, January 20, 2003

Hixie: RSS vs XHTML ...Jay also implies that without RSS, computers can't read a site. This rather misses the point, though. XHTML is just as computer readable as RSS, in fact, as others have said in the past, XHTML really should be used instead of RSS. [Hixie's Natural Log] Good point. XHTML can deliver the very same info as RSS, but also include a presentation view as well. So perhaps news aggregators should be adding XHTML to their list of supported file formats, along with RSS 0.9x, RSS 1.0, and RSS 2.0, which if I understand correctly, are all slightly different and somewhat incompatible formats. Ah, standards! 11:37:33 PM

Introducing: Seb's matchmaking service! If you're a newcomer to the world of weblogs, one of the first things you will want to do is to find people with similar interests to yours. Unfortunately, it's so difficult right now that some human assistance can come in handy. I've been blogging for a while now, and I've seen a lot of high-quality blogs, more than I can read actually, about a variety of topics such as science, philosophy, literature, knowledge management, e-learning, information architecture, communication, design, social software, etc. Most of those I can remember are written by articulate, investigative folks. I've already helped a few people connect in the past, for example Alex Halavais and Liz Lawley, or Alf and Richard Gayle. So here's my offer to new bloggers. (Veterans are welcome too, but there are more chances that I'll point you to people you already know). Post an explanation of what your core interests are on your weblog, and send me a link to that post. I'll do my best to find a few good blogs that match those interests. I won't spend a day on this though; your mileage may vary. You can also post to the new webloggers blogchannel to improve the visibility of your post. One thing to keep in mind: the more precise the description, the better the results. Oh, and it's a free service. [Seb's Open Research] How funny! This guy wants to manually match weblogs, whereas I want to build an automated system to do this on a grander scale. 11:07:52 PM

bidding on our first home we've been working with a real estate agent, donna, for almost a year now, looking at places, learning about the market, various areas, what we can afford, etc. It hasn't been an extremely active search, but we have spent several sundays driving around town, jackson in tow, popping in, and furrowing our brows. Over the holidays, our search cooled with the rest of the market. Donna called on saturday and said that a listing had just been reduced for the second time, over on Ashbury just a few block away from where we live now. She said she just had a hunch about this one, and strongly suggested we take a look. On sunday, we went by, only to discover that the selling agent hadn't told the tenant about the open house, so we couldn't look inside. We went back over tonight, and liked the place. It's at the top end of our range, but its roomy, on a nice street, in a nice part of town, close to where we are now. If you're curious, you can see some photos of the place. Anyways, long story short, we're putting in an offer. We should hear back by wednesday. I can't say we were planning for this, but I also can't say I'm surprised. Ever since we got back from NY, I've had an inkling that a place would present itself, and this may be the one. 11:04:19 PM