Daniel E. Renfer’s Blog

I just noticed this. If you use A9.com, then Amazon gives you ^π/₂% off! see.

I just read on the A9 Developer Blog the other day that the new version of the A9 Toolbar (which I can’t use because it doesn’t support Mozilla Firefox 1.5b1, let alone the nightly) now supports SiteInfo! This is such a neat idea. I couldn’t wait to install the new version of Oxygen, which fixes the problem I was having with my hosting company’s ftp server forcing my temporary switch to EngInSite, and start marking up my site’s navigation structure. More people need to start doing this. I’m a big supporter of copious amounts of machine-readable metadata. This is a very good thing to do. Forget the fact that almost nobody has the A9 Toolbar, how long before we start to see other sites reading this information? This is great for accessibility. If every page on your site has a collection of links to every other important place on your site in a place that’s consistent across every site they visit, it makes it a lot easier for your users to get to where they need to be.

Someone needs to write a cross-browser implementation of XMLHttpRequest in pure Javascript, so Internet Explorer 6 users can still use AJAX even when ActiveX is disabled.

After reading the recent buzz over at IE Blog about IE7’s support for OpenSearch 1.1, I checked out the spec. It was one part in particular that got me.

Any site that has content, and a search box, can choose to return results in OpenSearch RSS. This includes travel sites, classifieds, encyclopedias…. If you can provide search results for something, it probably can fit into the OpenSearch model.

That applies to me. I use two different searches. one for my blog, and another for Mycyclopedia. I read through the spec, and decided that I really wanted to implement this. Then I googled. It seems that Williamsburger beat me to it. Granted, his version only supports version 1.0, and I’ll probably end up writing my own anyway, but in the meantime you can go to A9 and add my column, or if you have your own consumer, view my Description document at: http://www.kronkltd.net/wp/os-description

I have been meaning to do it anyway, but after reading Erik Möller’s post on kuro5hin, I couldn’t live with myself knowing that my site was using not only an overly-restrictive, but outdated license. That is why I’ve updated my CC badge to point to the updated, (and fairer) Creative Commons: Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license.

I really need to stop leaving for work early, I always end up being late.

I hate it when every 2 months or so, Amazon will update their API and change it’s namespace. This totally breaks my site. I have to manually open up amazon.xsl and change the xmlns:aws from http://webservices.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/2005-07-26 to http://webservices.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/2005-09-15. Because, if I don’t, it’ll turn the “Current Reading” portion of my site into a messy concatenation of all the text nodes in the response document. (not pretty at all.)

Go to my tag page and scroll down to where it says “meme”. See how freakin’ huge that thing is? I use a number of strong tags equal to the frequency that a particular tag is used. I then style it in CSS so that for each strong tag, it increases the size of the text by 20%.

Here’s the problem… here’s the breakdown of tag usage. (as of 9/15/05, pre this post)

• meme (21)
• baby (8)
• toby (7)
• pictures (7)
• quiz (5)
• wordpress (5)
• google (5)
• irony update livejournal comcast (4)

Look at that jump! I can explain this. I’ve been going back through some of my former posts, and have been tagging them at random. There was a time, back on livejournal, when I was a little lemming and would take every god-awful quiz that everyone else took. I lump those all together under the common tag of ‘meme’, and voilà! There this big ugly word staring me right in the face. I need to come up with some sort algorithm to minimize the size difference.

Since no one commented on my previous post about the dangers of MIME types, (if any,) I went ahead and did it anyway. You can now add ?mimetype=type to view that page served with a different mimetype. So now, if you are running Mozilla Firefox 1.5 Beta 1, you can go to: http://www.kronkltd.net/wp/?p=720&mimetype=application/xhtml%2Bxml and see what I was trying to do.

Note: The character ‘+’ gets translated to a space in url’s, so in order to specify a mime-type such as application/xhtml+xml, you have to replace the ‘+’ with a ‘%2B’.

Apperently, I must have broken the comments feature of my site some time ago. Why didn’t anyone leave a comment to tell me? (odd that the ads for online poker and v1@gra and c1al1s still make it through)

Can anyone think of any possible security vulnerabilities that I might face as a result of allowing visitors to specify what MIME type they want my pages served as in the query string? Are there any MIME types I should explicitly avoid?

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It has been almost 10 months since I switched to my new web hoster, and in all that time, I never took down the stupid “Under Construction” page that people get when they pull up http://www.kronkltd.net/ until today. I just never had anything good to put there. I still don’t, but it’s about time. (allthough it’s been replaced by a similar “excuse our dust” message.)

For future reference, God is hereby prohibited from joining in on games of Sink.

Dear carton of orange juice,

God, you precocious blade of grass!

I’d fuck a greedy bald kitten despite everything a million times if you’d only let me paint a goldfish.

I just want you to know that to drive you wild with desire, I’d torment a Doberman.

I love you, you dead rose. I promise I’ll fart on a sexy sexy greedy sweet delicious guilty bashful worthless syphilitic sweet German Shepherd just to make you happy. If you loved me like I love you, you’d blow kisses at a kitten. Oh, I can’t make clothes out of a guilty salmon because I love you so much.

I love you so much! What have I done to offend you? What do I have to do a million times just to remind me of you? I never meant to tickle a invaluable pirahna

I just want you to know that so that I could live in your dreams, no matter what they say, I’d propose to a dirty dirty greedy lawyer.

(from here)