I’m sorry but we need government
When I was coming of age, in the time of Watergate and Vietnam, like many others I was so fed up with government, that I came to believe that we needed to fuck up the government so it could stop fucking with us. The United States was bad, that’s what we thought, and there was a lot of justification for that point of view. I voted for Reagan, as a lot of other people did, because he said what we believed. Let’s get on with doing our thing, and keep the government from screwing up. Of course it turns out that isn’t what Reagan was doing, he was just saying that to get our votes. Figures.
The Day the Internet Broke
Everything was going normal, until I wanted to go look at my feeds using the wonderful Google Reader of course, when this showed up in my browser:
Then, I asked twitter about it and got a reply from who is now a newfound friend @MathGeek06, who reported that he too was having troubles. After a couple messages or so, I got this:
It looks like the Internets are conspiring against me tonight. Google, tell me, why are you crashing so much lately? We need you, we depend on you, YOU ARE THE INTERNET!
I'm just kidding of course, but this has allowed me ample time to reflect on how dependent I am on central services. Just about the same time as I was giggling at Dave Winer for blogging about Why Decentralizing Twitter is so important. I'm starting to agree with him.
JavaScript: Changes to the Simple Twitter Feed
Recently, I had resumed working on the Simple Twitter Feed, and decided to make some improvements after reading Dave Winer's "What am I up to?" post.
So, the Simple Twitter Feed has one fix, and four additional optional parameters.
| start | STR - Symbol or Text to look for at the beginning of a post |
| time | BOOL - Whether or not to display the "about x minutes ago" |
| client | BOOL - Whether or not to display the "from x" |
| br | BOOL - Whether or not to place a break between the tweet and the extra data |
The simple fix is that the count parameter would check the last (x) amount of tweets, whereas now it displays up to (x) amount of tweets.
First Post
This is the first post for my new technical blog. What will go here? Well, probably stuff like XHTML, CSS, HTML, Dave Winer, Twitter, and other random useless things that have something to do with the internet.
I'm not really sure how to start off this blog but by breaking the third wall and recognizing its a blog.. or does that only work in Cartoons and Movies? Either way, Third wall broken, Hello Audience :3
I guess that is all for now, I'll write some more later.
Needed: An Open-Protocol System for Commenting on the Web
One thing that many blogs have embraced is the trackback system for blogs to shout out to other blogs that they’re linking to them or using their information. This is a wonderful idea, and a similar solution should be applied to comments.
Now, I’m not fully up to speed with micro-formats and RDF, and such, but such a system should be easy to create and implement. The first thing we should do is extend RSS to include it. We already have the <comments> tag, which should obviously link to an RSS feed of comments for the item (using this new system, anyway.) So we need to add a <postComment> tag, yes?
This tag could go in either the <channel> element (for Comment-Streams) or in the <item> element (for news-streams and/or as a direct reply to other comments). Lets break it down something like this:
This would allow a large amount of customization for systems that have different fields without too much change needed. Just an extension to the current RSS spec. Essentially something similar could be done. What are your thoughts, improvements, and ideas for this?