homepage - Dave's Blog

1996 HULU

2011 Apr 3, 11:32Hulu's would-be homepage from 1996 April 1st. Includes X-Files slow loading 256 color gifs!

Inspired by one of Penn's (of Penn & Teller) articles in which he mentions he has his computer tell him what he wrote in his journal that day the previous year, I've wanted to implement a similar thing with my blog. Now that, as I mentioned previously, I've updated my blog such that its much easier to implement search and such, I've added date range filtering to my site's search. So now I can easily see what on Delicious and my blog I was doing last year.

I've also otherwise updated search on this site. You can now quote terms to match an entire string, stick 'tag:' in front of a term to only match that term against tags as opposed to the title and body of the entry as well, and you can stick '-' in front of a term to indicate that it must not be found in the entry.

blog search homepage

Blog Layout and Implementation Improvements

2009 Jul 19, 11:44

I've redone my blog's layout to remind myself how terrible CSS is -- err I mean to play with the more advanced features of CSS 2.1 which are all now available in IE8. As part of the new layout I've included my Delicious links by default but at a smaller size and I've replaced the navigation list options with Technical, Personal and Everything as I've heard from folks that that would actually be useful. Besides the layout I've also updated the back-end, switching from my handmade PHP+XSLT+RSS/Atom monster to a slightly less horrible PHP+DB solution. As a result everything should be much much faster including search which, incidentally, is so much easier to implement outside of XSLT.

blog database redisgn xslt mysql homepage

draft-masinter-dated-uri-05 - names are readily assigned, offer the persistence of reference that is required by URNs, but do not require a stable authority to assign the name. The first namespace ("duri") is used to refer to URI-

2009 Feb 4, 4:30New URN schemes with no central minting authority. duri allows you to name a resource that was identified by the specified URI at the specified date (e.g. refers to the IETF's homepage at the end of the year 2001). tdb allows you to name a physical object or entity that was described by a resource that was identified by a specified URI at the specified date (e.g. refers to IETF the orginization as referenced by their homepage at the end of the year 2001). Date format is concise but I'd prefer RFC3339 rather than roping in another date format.

duri tdb uri url scheme reference ietf date datetime rfc

Senseless Venn Diagrams

2008 Oct 14, 12:54Jason Eppink has some creative and sometimes funny projects in the form of videos, photos, streetart, and more.

jason-eppink art video image photo homepage

Search and Archive of Dave's Things

2008 Apr 7, 10:31

I now have search and an archive available for my site. I previously tried to setup crappy search by cheating using Yahoo Pipes and now instead I have a slightly less crappy search that works over all of the content that I've produced on my blog, uploaded to flickr or youtube, or added to delicious.

You can now read my first LiveJournal blog post or, for probably much more entertainment value, view all the photos and videos of Cadbury by searching for 'bunny'.

The search is only slightly less lame because although it searches over all my content, I still implemented it myself rather than getting a professional package. Also, the feed supports the same search and archive as my homepage so you can subscribe to a feed of Cadbury if you're so inclined and just skip all this other boring stuff. My homepage and feed implement the OpenSearch response elements and I've got an OpenSearch search provider (source) as well.

technical search archive opensearch homepage

c a t z o o k s . c o m - Building the Swift Solo

2008 Apr 7, 9:55Warren Steven's blog on building a sailboat.|Warren Stevens

warren-stevens homepage blog boat sailing

DeleteThis.net on NearlyFreeSpeech.NET Update

2008 Mar 23, 12:38

The move of my website to NearlyFreeSpeech.NET is mostly complete except for a few server side things not working yet: RandomGrammar and parts of Vizicious. I'm still very happy with the NearlyFreeSpeech.NET hosting and so far I've only spent a few cents on hosting. At this rate I'll only spend a few dollars a year.

I've moved all my pages to use the same CSS and hooked it up with cookies to my Kuler color options so now changes to the color theme will stick and apply to all my pages. I haven't figured out the caching for this yet so you may have to refresh to see changes to color applied.

nearlyfreespeech.net technical webhosting kuler homepage

Now using NearlyFreeSpeech.NET to host deletethis.net

2008 Mar 17, 1:25

I've switched from using my own home web server of which one of the harddrives died, to using NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, an actual real live web hosting service. So far I'm very happy with them and they give me almost exactly what I had on my own home server: ssh access, vim, php, java, etc. etc. The only notable things they don't do are (1) cron jobs which I use currently and (2) SSL which I don't use currently. I can replace my cron job usage and I suppose I'll have to reevaluate my web hosting if I ever need SSL. At the moment many of the server side things like Vizicious will be unavailable. I'll work on getting those working again at some point.

technical webhosting webserver server homepage

Personal Search with Yahoo Pipes

2008 Feb 3, 11:59

I've setup a minimal search page that uses a Yahoo Pipe to sort of search through my content. I say sort of search because I only get full text search over my recent item feeds and otherwise I just search over my tags.

To get real search I'm going to have to keep an archive of all my content on my own website. This is a pain but on the other hand it will let me easily backup my content or display old items on my page. Why didn't I just use a prebuilt solution?

yahoo search rss yahoo-pipes homepage

LibraryThing Developers are Responsive

2008 Jan 31, 10:47

I use my recently added books feed from LibraryThing, a site I've mentioned before where you track, review, recommend, and share your books, and I put the recently added books on my page. I thought it might be nice to include the book covers so I suggested adding book covers to RSS feeds in LibraryThings 'Recommend Site Improvements' group. The next day I had a response from the founder and lead developer Tim Spalding who had started implementing the feature. I noticed a few bugs, reported them on the same thread, and he fixed them soon after. Fantastic! It makes me want to upgrade to a paying account.

Incidentally, if you notice the Ghost in the Shell book appear multiple times in my RSS feed its due to the previously mentioned iterative bug fixes. The same item appeared multiple times slightly differently with each bug fix and your RSS aggregator may have picked them up as distinct items.

tim-spalding librarything rss homepage

Theme Options

2007 Dec 24, 12:41These days it seems like there's a social sharing website for everything representable as bits. Like Scribd for (mostly legal) documents, SciVee for scientific research videos, Wordie for words, and Kuler for color themes. Kuler seems like a ridiculous website (overkill) but I had been meaning to update my homepage's color design and Kuler has an RSS based REST API. The API lets you obtain things like the most recently added color themes or the most popular or all themes containing the color dark red, etc... So of course rather than update my website's design I hooked up my css to the color themes coming out of Kuler. Select my main page's color theme from a list of random Kuler themes. As I'm sure the regular readers can guess I use an xslt and blah blah blah... It looks OK with

Silver Surfer and

Happy Hipo but in general changing the colors this way doesn't produce something pretty.

When reading about Kuler I found that they may have stolen the whole idea wholeslae from ColourLovers. They discuss the thievery in an article on their blog. I would have switched over to ColourLovers out of principle but they don't have an easily accessible API.

colourlovers color xslt theme homepage technical kuler design

Banksy

2007 Dec 23, 8:47Banksy's website.

art culture graffiti homepage streetart satire public politics banksy cultural-disobediance

Joho the Blog

2007 Nov 4, 6:44David Weinberger's blog. He wrote Everything is Misc.

david-weinberger web monthly copyright folksonomy information homepage blog taxonomy tagging research

FoaF on my Homepage

2007 Oct 14, 3:12I've updated my homepage by moving stuff about me onto a separate About page. Creating the About page was the perfect opportunity to get FoaF, a machine readable way of describing yourself and your friends, off my to do list. I have a base FoaF file to which I add friends, projects, and accounts from delicious using an XSLT. This produces the FoaF XML resource on which I use another XSLT to convert into HTML and produce the About page.

I should also mention a few FoaF pages I found useful in doing this:

FOAF Vocabulary Specification - The standard on which I based my XSLT to add in info from delicious.
FoaF Explorer - Turns any RDF XML FOAF resource into a webpage with links to the other people, projects, etc mentioned in the FOAF file.
FoaF-a-Matic - I used this to produce my base FoaF file.
RDF Validator - This is the closest thing I could find for validation. It does RDF in general but unfortunately not FoaF specifically. I found two links to sites that are down or dead that claimed to do what I actually wanted.

technical xml foaf personal xslt xsl homepage

Video Woes

2007 Aug 15, 3:30I've been experimenting with adding video to my webpage. I tried to embed video in my livejournal blog posts previously however ran into some issues with that. When creating the LJ post I added an tag but when I submit that tags turned into an

 pointing to a page with my video. Only the first of these appears to work. The RSS item for the corresponding LJ entry has a tag instead of my video. This is even less
useful than the iframe because it uses some internal id to identify the embed rather than a URI or something I could actually use.<br />
<br />
As a place to store videos and possibly as a means around the previous issue <a href="http://www.youtube.com/sequelguy">I tried youtube</a>. YouTube provides <a href="http://youtube.com/rssls">RSS
feeds for their users</a> which is great for me since my page is made from combining RSS and Atom feeds. I've incorporated it into my site already although I'm still in need of a better icon, I don't
have a comments link at the bottom, and I'd like the text to flow around the video. I was able to hide the automatically added portion of the RSS item I didn't like using CSS. On the topic of YouTube
not giving me a lot of control over the description, it doesn't seem to allow HTML in the description of a video. I don't particularly care about free form HTML if only I could get some links!<br />
<br />
Well I didn't try very hard to get HTML into my YouTube video description so there maybe something I can do about that. Otherwise, I think the better solution is to post videos to YouTube only as
storage like I do with photos on Flickr and use LiveJournal to talk more about particular videos. To get around the LJ video issues, I'm going to try creating some new tags in my blog post that LJ
hopefully won't mess with and will hopefully make it cleanly into my RSS feed. At that point I can use XSL to turn the new tags into the appropriate embed/object tags for the video.

technical youtube video personal livejournal homepage

Andrew Bucknell

2007 May 7, 10:49|Andrew Bucknell

andrew-bucknell blog homepage friend microsoft semanticweb

Commenting Wishlist

2007 May 1, 4:33In the past I've come up with ideas for software and find that the very idea is implemented soon after. So this time rather than getting down about it I'm going to make it work for me. I'll state what I want to use and hope that its magically implemented. In order to uniformly support comments on my website I want a web service with the following features:

Allow users to view and add comments for any particular URI.
Use OpenID and optionally Card Space to identify users.
Use a captcha system that's optionally cute or humorous.
Has atom or rss feeds of the comments available.
Doesn't require users to register.
Doesn't require any extra steps for commenting on a URI that no one has commented on.