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Wednesday, June 19, 2002 |
Mandrake available at Wal-Mart. First it was no OS, then it was Lindows, and now Wal-Mart will be selling computers pre-loaded with Mandrake Linux. I have no idea what the larger significance of this is, but it's pretty cool. [rc3.org]
5:50:01 PM 
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There is No Disputandum with De Gustibus.
At dinner with friends a couple of weeks ago the subject of Murakami Haruki came up. I've tried to give him a fair shot (if only reading his novels in translation can be considered fair) but somehow I just don't get it. His work just leaves me cold. L–, who has just finished a first draft of his own novel, tried to enlighten me, but I may be beyond it. I was the lone dissenter at the table.
A very dear friend who's back in New York now sent me a copy of a Murakami short story from the April issue of The New Yorker which I finally read last night. Same thing – no go.
Let's look on the bright side: the unassailable mystery of taste persists. [Antipixel]
5:48:32 PM
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John Dean's “Unmasking Deep Throat” Published.
Caveat lector!
On May 7 I made mention of an 'e-book' (i.e., PDF file) by John Dean to be released today by Salon. The 158-page file costs $8 ($5.95 for Salon Premium subscribers) which, considering that it fails to deliver in the most crucial way, may or may not seem reasonable to you. The original article in Salon said:
Now, on the 30th anniversary of the June 17, 1972, Watergate break-in, John Dean and Salon.com will unmask the real Deep Throat.
Did we really think that was going to happen? Hmm… maybe. Anyway, it hasn't. What we get is a shortlist of four men who, based on Dean's sleuthing, are the most likeliest candidates (and no, even after being duped out of my six bucks I'm not going to repeat that list here; it will undoubtedly be available elsewhere in a matter of hours).
To be fair to Salon – fairer than they've been to their readers I'd say – they did publish a Q&A article with Dean by Scott Rosenberg in which Rosenberg's final question is “Are you disappointed that you have not named one person as Deep Throat, but instead identified a very small group who could be Throat?” but this seems a less than full-hearted attempt to rectify their earlier hyperbole.
Disappointment aside, the 'book' does seem like a worthwhile read (I've only given it a quick skim) although ultimately of course we are not much closer to knowing the identity of “history's most elusive news source.” [Antipixel]
5:47:53 PM
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RSS Feed for YACCS users. For those of you who use YACCS for the commenting system you may find it interesting to know that they also provide an RSS (0.91) feed for the comments on your site. You can get to it by logging into your "control panel" and then clicking the "more >>" link situated to the right of the middle section. Here is my comments feed. [/serdar/]
5:42:53 PM
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Wired: "For a perfect example of the changing dynamic between the GPU and CPU, look at the Xbox. It uses a special version of Nvidia's nForce chipset, built around a tricked-out GeForce3 to handle graphics and sound. Microsoft paid Nvidia more than it did Intel for its 733-MHz Pentium III. For Huang, it's a proof of concept." [lawrence's notebook]
5:42:00 PM
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Adding a date to your Radio archive pages. Day 8 of Mark Pilgrim's "30 days to a more accessible weblog": Constructing meaningful page titles. Mark writes:
"Every page of your weblog should have a unique and meaningful page title... Date-based archive pages should include the name of your weblog, followed by the date (or date range) for the page... "Unfortunately, I do not know how to customize page titles satisfactorily in Blogger or Radio. Radio has a <%longDate%> macro, but it can not be used as part of the page title..." It's true that longDate doesn't work in the template, but there is a way to do this. Here's how: 1. Edit your home page template. 2. Find the line (probably near the top) which reads: <%local (d); if radio.weblog.file.getArchiveFileDate (radioResponder.fileBeingRendered, @d) {": " + string.dateString (d)} else {""}%> Note: be careful if you copy and paste this code -- there should be no line-breaks. 4. Click the Submit button. The next time any of your archive pages are published, they'll have a date in their title. There's no need to stick with the default date format. You can format the date however you want -- Just replace the string.dateString (d) part with your own code. See the DocServer pages for the date and string verbs for some places to start digging. [Jake's Radio 'Blog]
5:40:28 PM
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Lee Braiden on kuro5hin.org: Artists, It's Time to Choose a Side. "The days of huge corporations which do nothing but publish and distribute information in tediously slow and awkward ways are rapidly disappearing. No longer is it possible to claim that art and other forms of information have to cost a lot simply because of production and distribution economics. If middlemen still claim so, then they should be declared redundant 'social thieves', and swept aside." [Jake's Radio 'Blog]
5:39:50 PM
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The Economist deCODED?. "AMID the brouhaha surrounding the Human Genome Project and its commercial rivals, the fact that there is more than one way to map a genome has got rather lost." "Linkage mapping has been somewhat neglected in recent years. The best available map was created in 1998 (a lifetime ago, in modern genetic science) by the Marshfield Medical Research Foundation, in Wisconsin, based on data collected in France. But a new one has just been published by deCODE, an Icelandic firm, in Nature Genetics. Besi [snowdeal.org > {bio,medical}informatics]
5:38:21 PM
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Day 8: Constructing meaningful page titles.
Every page of your weblog should have a unique and meaningful page title.
- The home page title can simply be the name of your weblog.
- Date-based archive pages should include the name of your weblog, followed by the date (or date range) for the page. For example, I have daily archives whose titles look like "dive into mark/June 19, 2002", and monthly archives like "dive into mark/June 2002".
- Category pages should include the name of your weblog, followed by the name of the category. For example, all of my CSS-related posts are archived on a page entitled "diveintomark/CSS".
- Individual entry archive pages should include the name of your weblog, followed by the entry title. I don't have separate pages for individual entries, but Jonathon Delacour does, and he gets this right. For example, his post of June 17, 2002, Accessibility matters, is archived on its own page with the title "Jonathon Delacour: Accessibility matters".
The exact punctuation is not relevant, although some screen readers will read every punctuation character out loud by default. As a general rule, excessive punctuation sounds as dumb as it looks.
Who benefits?
- Jackie benefits. JAWS has a special keyboard shortcut (INSERT + F10) which displays (and reads) a list of the currently open windows, by window title. In the case of web pages, this would be your page title. It also reads the window title while ALT-TABbing through open windows. Other screen readers, like Home Page Reader, read the page title out load as soon as you visit the page.
- Marcus benefits. Lynx displays the page title in the first line of output, so it's always the first thing that Marcus reads in Braille.
- Bill benefits. Because of his stroke, he sometimes gets confused and momentarily loses track of what he's reading. The page title in the window titlebar acts as a visual anchor; it stays in the same place, even as he scrolls the page. He can always glance back to it to jog his memory.
- Google benefits. Google displays the page title in its search results, and it ranks keywords higher when they appear in the page title. This is a Good Thing for you, especially for those individual entry pages. (Choosing good entry titles doesn't hurt either.)
How to do it
Movable Type has separate templates for the various types of index and archive pages. The default templates are quite accessible already; if you are using the default template, you don't need to make any changes.
- Main Index:
- Archive Index:
- Category Archive:
- Date-Based Archive:
- Individual Entry Archive:
Greymatter has a similar set of templates, but a different templating language. Greymatter does not have a separate template variable for the name of the weblog, so insert your own weblog title in each case.
- Main Index Template:
- Archive Master Index Template:
- Archive Log Index Template:
- Entry Page Template:
Manila (at least in the default configuration) lets you specify a title for each day, so you should use that in the page title instead of the date, since it is more likely to be relevant to the content.
- Home Page Template:
- Template:
Radio is a little trickier, you can still add the date to your date-based archives by using Radio's macro language. Be careful copying and pasting this macro; there should be no line breaks anywhere, and Radio cares. (Thanks to Jake Savin for these instructions.)
- Home Page Template:
- Main Template:
Unfortunately, I do not know how to customize page titles satisfactorily in Blogger. Suggestions welcome.
Keep in mind these are only suggestions. You can include the word "Archives" in the daily and monthly archive pages, or not. The exact punctuation really doesn't matter, as long as it's not excessive. You can put the site name at the end rather than at the beginning. It's a good idea to include your site name somewhere in your page titles, though; it's an important contextual clue, especially when people are switching between multiple open windows.
Further reading
- Jake Savin: Adding a date to your Radio archive pages
[dive into mark]
5:37:03 PM
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Schools' Tech Support: Students. A survey reveals that students are providing technical support to their districts in striking numbers. Teachers aren't too surprised. Katie Dean reports from San Antonio, Texas. [Wired News]
5:35:27 PM
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Popular Mac Columnist Mourned. The suicide of a controversial Mac columnist has prompted a mass online mourning. Rodney O Lain, the iBrotha, had more friends than anyone suspected. By Leander Kahney. [Wired News]
5:35:12 PM
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Imaging Group works on Web Services Standard. CNET has a very interesting article on CPXe, a web services standard being put together by Kodak, HP and Fuji to allow ordering of prints online... "Cook envisions photo kiosks at tourist attractions such as Walt Disney World, where consumers could order prints from a hometown camera shop as soon as they filled up their camera's memory card. "
More information on CPXe is available at i3a.org [ericfreeman.com]
5:32:36 PM
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© Copyright 2002 Mark Oeltjenbruns.
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