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rantoblogcious

my life and stuff I care about, sometimes nice sometimes honest.


Special welcome to our visitors from Chillicothe, United States.

Friday, November 25, 2005

Attention Node Managers!

With plain audio, enhanced and video podcasts it is impossible for the consumer / user to tell what is what. For my node I use the category attribute to describe the content. Unfortunately the OPML Editor places an unnerving / in from of every part that I add, so all I get is a /Audio. While that might be acceptable with deep taxonomies, here it's disturbing.

So here's my rightClickMenu script for that.

In Tools > edit right-click menu Create an item, double-click that and paste the following code in the window that opens.


local (myCat);
op.attributes.getOne ("category", "Audio")
op.attributes.setOne ("category", "Audio")

When you click Run you'll get an error. Not to worry, that's perfectly normal as we want to apply this to an outline not trigger a dialogue.

Save it and close the windows, now you can access it via the contextual menu on Mac and Windows.

Here are the categories that I use

  • Audio
  • Audio Enhanced
  • Video

Feedback more than welcome

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

MediaTemple strikes again

Update: Weird, that only lasted 1h today, glad it's over and I can receive mail again. If i don't answer your mail within a day chances are it got burned by the outage.

And once again they fucked up.

Wonder what lame excuse they have this time...

Funny or scary that a free service like Blogger is actually more reliable than a $20 USD / month service at MediaTemple. Wager anyone? I bet that they give me the same shit that they always give me:

We have looked into the issue that you have reported and unfortunately could not find any problems with your service. Furthermore, using a series of diagnostic checks we were not able to reproduce any of the problems that you reported. We have been monitoring your services and all features are operational.

This basically means: Shut the fuck up, will ya... we don't give a shit what you want... our site works, that's important. You're just a customer, what's the point in serving you?

thanks another happy MediaTemple customer.

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

frankjonen.com OPML'd

For all those of you that are on the bleeding edge of technology or even just early adopters. Here's the full website, every article, every link, everything available in OPML format!

So if you subscribe to the top outline, you'll see how everything is linked together, how the content flows and extras such as links in separate sub-taxonomies. Each page also has its own OPML file, so you can start drilling from there.

So why all the hassle? Just finger-practice? Punk'd?

I believe it is a great addition in terms of accessibility as it provides another perspective on the content, way beyond the XHTML + CSS way of dealing with markup. Not a replacement for our trio XHTML + CSS + RSS but rather a 4th one that interacts with the XHTML + RSS part of it since the OPML can parse RSS feeds and display them right inside the outline structure.

When coding HTML correctly you already have a hierarchic representation of your content as (x)HTML is very feature-rich as we learned in the past. SO where's the point in doing it in OPML? Think content! The ability to expand and collapse whole context structures is just amazing when you want to skim down content to find something quickly.

Database Search vs. OPML

There's no searching of OPML content yet, you have to do it by hand, this way you remember stuff that you pass on the way and know where to find it faster next time. But there's an even greater thing up here... Subscriptions! Just like you subscribe to RSS feeds already, you can subscribe to ideas now and watch as they form. In the RSS paradigm we have finite items that correspond to articles. With OPML every object is marked with a date and pops-up and expands its children whenever one idea is updated.

Think of a world directory that everybody links to and gets linked back, this creates one file of not too large size (since it just stores links) that contains every aspect of the world in an open fashion. It takes the idea of the web to the next step. Too bad that OMNI Group doesn't want to participate, shoot them an e-mail and grill them some more, might help them to see the light.

I do know that from an XML perspective the OPML format is questionable, but as with everything in tech, there will be a version 2.

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

Welcome to the Internet Microsoft!

Kudos to Microsoft!

This looks exciting, probably the first time I say that about an MS product.

Stop banning Safari! Works nice with Firefox. I only need Excel, where's my Beta Account?

Monday, November 07, 2005

MediaTemple = Worst hosting company in the WORLD!

As some of you have spotted already my site it totally broken. I'm basically loosing money by the minute because MediaTemple decided to finger with the PHP parser. Now 95% of my php scripts are broken.

Currently I'm looking at the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to hold them liable for willingly damaging my content and some references on class action law-suits as they're actively damaging my business.

So after it was great in the beginning and sometimes their service is good, most of the time I have problems with them. Issues like loosing e-mails, not getting e-mails, waiting 4 hours for an e-mail that actually was generated on the server or simply that the server doesn't respond at all and the site wasn't reachable for hours.

But what's the most annoying is their staff! Arrogance is all that pops into my mind right now. Every time I report a bug, they blame it on me, if that doesn't work they try to put me off as a moron. Way to go MT! When I'm talking with closer colleagues and friends about MediaTemple we merely refer to them as the Hosting Mob, Bandwidth Bandits or a Seinfeld reminiscence that I won't publish here.

This is definitely NOT the company that I'm building our network on.

MediaTemple grew to big, too fast.

Tuesday, November 01, 2005

Birds on a Hippo's Ass

Ok who was that genius?

Isn't it humble-some and gracious to associate a product with birds sitting on the ass of a large animal that strolls in muddy/watery areas and wiggles its tail while having a landslide?

Way to go Adobe!