Categories - Dave's Blog

Retweet of NiemanLab

2015 Feb 24, 8:14

Magazines are trying to create new categories of “super-subscribers” http://nie.mn/1DUg1f8

Results of the Grand C++ Error Explosion Competition

2014 Jan 28, 4:58

tgceec:

After much deliberation, the winners of the Grand C++ Error Explosion Competition are finally selected. There are two different award categories. The winners of the first category are those submissions that produced the largest error with the smallest amount of source code. These entries contain a…

Yahoo! Accepts OpenID Authentication with Google

2010 Oct 28, 6:32

OpenID Second Level Features YDN Theme Categories technical

Creating Accelerators for Other People's Web Services

2009 Aug 18, 4:19

Before we shipped IE8 there were no Accelerators, so we had some fun making our own for our favorite web services. I've got a small set of tips for creating Accelerators for other people's web services. I was planning on writing this up as an IE blog post, but Jon wrote a post covering a similar area so rather than write a full and coherent blog post I'll just list a few points:

The first thing to try is looking for developer help for the web service, specifically if there's a REST-ful URL based API. For example, Bing Maps has great URL API documentation that would be enough to create an Accelerator.
The Accelerator XML is very similar to HTML forms. If you can find an HTML form for the web service for which you want to create an Accelerator, you can view the HTML source and create an Accelerator based on that.
I created the FormToAccelerator extension based on the previous idea. You can use the extension to create an Accelerator from an HTML form, or just use it to create the start of one and edit it manually after.
If the page doesn't use an HTML form, you can start up an HTTP debugger like Fiddler, use the web service from the normal web page, and then in Fiddler see if you can find a REST-ful looking URL you can use.
When looking to create a preview for your Accelerator, see if the web page for the web service has a mobile version or a version that's intended to embed in other web pages via an iframe. On this same line, iPhone apps make great Accelerators usually with lovely previews.
If there's no mobile or embeddable version and the only thing wrong with the normal web page for the web service is that the useful information doesn't fit in the preview window then see if you can find an HTML tag with a name or id near the useful information, and stick a '#' fragment pointing to that tag onto the preview URL template.
Without a reasonable REST-ful API you can use a combination of Google's "site:" and "I'm Feeling Lucky" to find the most relevant page on a particular site.
The value of a name and value pair need not consist of only a single Accelerator variable. You can get creative and put other text in there. For instance, I implemented a Google currency conversion by setting the query to "{selection} in US Dollars".

technical accelerator ie8 ie

Tag Metadata in Feeds

2008 Aug 25, 10:13

As noted previously, my page consists of the aggregation of my various feeds and in working on that code recently it was again brought to my attention that everyone has different ways of representing tag metadata in feeds. I made up a list of how my various feed sources represent tags and list that data here so that it might help others in the future.

Tag markup from various sources
Source	Feed Type	Tag Markup Scheme	One Tag Per Element	Tag Scheme URI	Human / Machine Names	Example Markup
LiveJournal	Atom	atom:category	yes	no	no	, (source)
LiveJournal	RSS 2.0	rss2:category	yes	no	no	`technical` (soure)
WordPress	RSS 2.0	rss2:category	yes	no	no	, (source)
Delicious	RSS 1.0	dc:subject	no	no	no	`photosynth photos 3d tool` (source)
Delicious	RSS 2.0	rss2:category	yes	yes	no	`domain="http://delicious.com/SequelGuy/"> hulu` (source)
Flickr	Atom	atom:category	yes	yes	no	`term="seattle" scheme="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/" />` (source)
Flickr	RSS 2.0	media:category	no	yes	no	`scheme="urn:flickr:tags"> seattle washington baseball mariners` (source)
YouTube	RSS 2.0	media:category	no	no	no	`label="Tags"> bunny rabbit yawn cadbury` (source)
LibraryThing	RSS 2.0	No explicit tag metadata.	no	no	no	n/a, (source)

Tag markup scheme
Tag Markup Scheme	Notes	Example
Atom Category atom:category `xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"`	category/@term Required category name. category/@scheme Optional IRI id'ing the categorization scheme. category/@label Optional human readable category name.	`term="catName" scheme="tag:deletethis.net,2008:tagscheme" label="category name in human readable format"/>`
RSS 2.0 category rss2:category empty namespace	category/@domain Optional string id'ing the categorization scheme. category/text() Required category name. The value of the element is a forward-slash-separated string that identifies a hierarchic location in the indicated taxonomy. Processors may establish conventions for the interpretation of categories.	`domain="tag:deletethis.net,2008:tagscheme"> MSFT`
Yahoo Media RSS Module category media:category `xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/"`	category/text() Required category name. category/@domain Optional string id'ing the categorization scheme.	`scheme="http://dmoz.org" label="Ace Ventura - Pet Detective"> Arts/Movies/Titles/A/Ace_Ventura_Series/Ace_Ventura_-_Pet_Detective`
Dublin Core subject dc:subject `xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"`	subject/text() Required category name. Typically, the subject will be represented using keywords, key phrases, or classification codes. Recommended best practice is to use a controlled vocabulary.	`humor`

Update 2009-9-14: Added WordPress to the Tag Markup table and namespaces to the Tag Markup Scheme table.

feed media delicious technical atom youtube yahoo rss tag

The Wii Fit's Mind Games

2008 Jun 19, 2:49

Wii Fit Logo Sarah received her Wii Fit a few weeks ago. The Wii Fit is a game for the Wii and a balance board accessory that can tell how you're standing on it: leaning forward, standing on one foot, leaning backward and mostly on your left foot, etc. The game puts you through various exercises grouped into the categories of aerobic, balance, strength, and yoga. It also lets you set goals and keeps track of how well you do, how long you play, and a graph of your weight.

The portion I didn't expect were the mind games. Sarah turned it on after not using it for a day and it said something to the effect of 'Oh, didn't have time to exercise yesterday? Huh. Interesting....' I'm paraphrasing of course but the Wii Fit was definitely trying to lay down some guilt. In another instance when starting up the Wii Fit Sarah was asked 'Did you know that Dave has been using Wii Fit?' She selected yes and it then asked her how she thought I was progressing giving her four options. She selected the worst one, that I was getting worse (jokingly I hope) and it told her to tell me that, but not to use those words. In conversation Sarah should mention to me that I've been "living large". Now I'm not paraphrasing. It reminded me a bit of this xkcd comic 'Zealous Autoconfig'. Hopefully this is the extent of the manipulation and mind games that the Wii Fit will perform.

xkcd wii-fit sarah guilt nontechnical wii