Daniel E. Renfer’s Blog

I’m going naked today.

It appears that the default Wordpress theme has a little bit of style information left. I’ll have to fix that some day.

Edit: fixed (and on the same day no less)

There’s more to publishing your page in XHTML than just simply throwing an XHTML doctype at the top of the page and putting xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" on your html tag. You actually have to, you know, make sure it’s well formed.

I see this as the only way to end the Browser Wars once and for all. From now on, this site (as should all sites) is meant to be viewed in HTML from the command line. Better brush up on your HTTP/1.1 Spec!

Since I can’t remember what I did with my old one, I’ve created another chatbot based on ALICE. You can view it here. (powered by Pandorabots) I’ll be adding new AIML files soon, so it hopefully won’t always be quite as brain-dead.

I just wrote a quick and dirty FOAF to OPML converter. Type in your Livejournal user name, and get a handy list of your friends. Perfect for importing into Newsgator, or any other similar agregator.

http://www.kronkltd.net/programs/livejournal/foaf2opml.php

If anyone would like the source, just let me know.

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 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.)

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?

This is a test to see if this works

(view as application/xhtml+xml)

Scatman Dan has released an OpenId plugin (sorta) for Wordpress. It’s still really early beta, and not quite working right for me, but I’ll finally be able to allow Livejournal users to use their own id’s to leave comments here.

One note: I tried messing with one of his RegEx’s, and I kept breaking the page. If you see just a white screen in the next few days… I’m working on it.

Is it wrong to want to re-write half the Wordpress files in my style of coding so I can read them better?

All it really takes is a quick Google search to turn the crappy comment system that comes with Wordpress into a spiffy nested comment system. Thank you, Brian’s Threaded Comments!

You can now get the feed for my blog in valid Atom 1.0!

Oh, the geekiness is just dripping, isn’t it?

The K&R Indentation Style pisses me off! “One True Brace Style” my ass! I’m sorry, but it’s so much easier to read code when you can draw a straight line from the ending brace to the beginning brace. That’s why I always use BSD style

If you want to see what tags I have used for my posts, click on: http://www.kronkltd.net/wp/tags.php.

File sizes for some of the core files in my Mycylopedia database: (as of 2005-06-01T16:56:00.0000000-07:00)

• Database Files

  • mycyclopedia.xml 210,425 bytes 8,375 lines
  • definition.xml 69,565 bytes 1,454 lines

• Stylesheet Files

  • mycyclopedia.xsl 36,822 bytes 1,058 lines
  • link.xsl 658 bytes 13 lines
  • func.xsl 2,313 bytes 54 lines
  • list.xslt 25,832 bytes 420 lines

• Schema Files

  • mycyclopedia.xsd 8,320 bytes 239 lines

• PHP Files

  • display.php 1,552 bytes 71 lines
  • list.php 2,449 bytes 89 lines

After getting majorly pissed off the other day because I couldn’t get my stylesheet to use the Exslt extensions I needed without including all of their *.xsl files in my Mycyclopedia folder, I realize that it works just fine without them. This will make things a lot easier.

I have to give them credit. My hosting company, Zenjohost, cut off my service because their last two attempts to get money out of me (only $7/mo) failed. I don’t really blame them… I blame my bank. I updated my address with Standard Federal, yet they insisted on sending my new card to my old address. Had they sent me the card on time, none of this would have happened.

So, I just made a few major changes to my site, refresh, see that all of my pages are breaking, fix something, refresh, cannot find server. I go to paypal, put in my Comerica account, send them an email… nothing. I come home for lunch, send the same email through the propper channels, not even 5 minutes later my site is back up and running.

I never got that quick of a response from Global Internet Solutions.