13 October 2002

Sites I Read in My Aggregator Jenny Levine -- For months I've been trying to get to the back end of several sites I read through hypertext, but now I discover The Shifted Librarian has most of the RSS feeds of sites I like to read in my aggregator.

Good Languages for Mathematical Computations OPEN -- Dave Wilson has "been piggy backing on Excel via COM in order to do some calculations as ColdFusion isn't the best of tools for performing mathematical routines. Now, this is not ideal either as it requires Excel to be installed on the server and takes up valuable processing time." He's looking for languages better suited for mathematical processing, preferably with the ability to connect or extract results easily. He wants to avoid COM because CFMX doesnt work too well with COM now and COM is becoming an obsolete technology with MS pushing .Net and web services instead.

Behind Wired News Redesign WIRED.com -- Wired's staff explains the philosophy behind the Wired News Design. After the switch to XHTML and complete adoption of CSS, Wired News pages now load faster, and are at once more accessible to all Web browsers and specialised browsing environments used by the visually or physically impaired. By stripping out font, color, and margin rules from the markup, and aggregating all those style rules into just a couple of CSS files, design changes can be propagated to thousands of pages instantly. That's progress.

Schema Secrets Sam Ruby -- Noah Mendelsohn's DevCon slides are online. The opinions and analysis are his alone, and not necessarily IBM's, but the contents ©2002 IBM. More details at Schema Secrets.

Blogwalking LM ORCHARD et al -- If you mix the Blogwalking idea with Adam Curry's Audioblogs, you could arrive in a shopping queue where you buy a Nokia Communicator 9210i. I blogwalk with my 9210i, using it to send blog items over email. I blogwalked this upload that way. Then I cleaned it up with Radio a few hours later. In my case, my Radio is off most of the time my 9210i is publishing. This idea deserves a lot more reading. >>Blogwalking as an "Essential Web Writing" topic anyone?

It's Not About the Referrers. It's About the Reflection. DECAFBAD.com -- Leslie Michael Orchard argues it's all about the conversation, not the referrer logs.. Yet Mark Pilgrim's Further Reading RSS starts with the referrer. When I first started browsing, I wanted to know bookmarks of others. When I started reading news reports of the tech world, I wanted URLs. When I refined a way of searching the Web, I needed to figure out ways to drill down to first-hand info. Mark Pilgrim's further reading RSS takes this search for reflective knowledge into the blogosphere, and that should create a "nice game of follow-the-leader for referrer log watchers," in L.M. Orchard's words.

The Public Will Preserve the Public Domain LAW MEME -- Who Will Preserve the Public Domain? - The Public