A minor request to the blogging world

I read blogs almost exclusively via RSS in a reader (bloglines), and as a result I never get to see the purty formatting, links, etc. that people have on their pages for non-reader-using viewers. I'm fine with missing out on the window dressing, but I do have a gripe that I think individual bloggers need to address: don't refer to "the above post" or those links "over to the side" of your current post. In fact, don't use any locational references at all; they mean nothing to me, because all I see is pretty much plain old RSS and no special formatting. Because *I* control the order in which I read posts and because I happen to like having the posts show up most recent first in my reader, it makes no sense to refer to something "above" the current entry, because 1) "above" means after for me, not before; 2) the post I am reading might be the only one on the page rather than part of a long line of them.

Now, you might argue that because it is my choice to read posts in newest-to-oldest order, I have taken it upon myself to figure out the sorting and references and too bad for me if it isn't chronological the way the author intended. I would counter by saying that by choosing to publish a RSS feed you are putting your content out there in a way that you should reasonably expect someone to consume it differently from what you intended. Maybe most people *don't* read in reverse chronological order like I do, but other methods of getting to your post, like permanent linking into archives, etc. will suffer the same problem.

I do have a solution to go with all this griping: make the reference to the other location a hyperlink. Keep on using the locational language if you have to (it *does* admittedly add at least some context in the sense that it points to a time in the past, but link to it as well, so that if I am looking at a feed with only the one post on it and you refer to something else and I want to know what the heck you are talking about, I can just follow the link.

Here's an example:

• Down below, when I made fun of Comcast, I forgot to take into account that I might be hurting their feelings of fiber-envy.
• Earlier, when I made fun of Comcast, I forgot to take into account that I might be hurting their feelings of fiber-envy.
  

Which is easier to follow?

Test post from IE to see if Blogger is broken

So here is a test post from IE7 to see if the problem is browser related.

[UPDATE] So it looks like there is a problem with Blogger if you try to post from Firefox. I keep getting this error message: "URL contains illegal characters" without any explanation about which URL or what characters. Looking around Blogger's help turns up nothing useful that does not relate to URLs to images (I wasn't posting with an image). So, I tried posting from IE7 instead of Firefox, and encountered no problems.

Just for kicks, I am linking to the search results in Blogger's help just to see if embedding a hyperlink really does cause trouble.

Comcast "fiber optics" vs. Verizon FIOS

UPDATE: I didn't get a picture of the billboard, but I did get a mailer the other day with basically the same message:


We are getting FIOS from Verizon installed today now that it is available in our neighborhood. For the same price ($55/month) that Comcast charges us for 1.5ish down/500 - 700ish up, we will be getting 15 down/2 up from Verizon. Comcast is good sometimes, but not always, and that's a problem. The thing with cable broadband is that depending on how much your neighbors are using the bandwidth that is shared in your neighborhood area, your bandwidth may be severely limited.

My installation experience so far has been good. The initial sales person was very professional, and all the steps he told me would happen (initial survey/line painting for other buried utilities, trenching of fiber from the local box, installer appointment) have happened as described and on time. The installer called today to say he was about half an hour away, and while I had him on the phone I described our existing setup and asked what his plan was for running copper from the fiber terminal to the location where I want the router. He said that because we already are using the coax for DirecTV, he will run CAT5 into the room, and even asked where we would like the wall plate to be located which I think is awesome (we had back luck trying to run DirecTV and Comcast over the same coax, so I didn't want to add yet another service into the mix, even though we will be getting rid of Comcast as soon as possible).

Anyhow, Comcast must be getting hammered by Verizon and losing customers left and right, if the billboard on the major road through our town is any indication. I don't have a picture of it, but it cracks me up every time I see it. It is a photograph of a bundle of fiber optic strands with the words "Comcast: powered by fiber optics" in big letters on the other half of the billboard. I guess they hope unsuspecting consumers will think twice about getting FIOS because, at least according to the billboard, they already have fiber optic service from Comcast.

I'm not falling for it, and I can't wait to compare the two side by side, right before I ditch Comcast for good.

Opera on the Wii

I am writing this from Opera on the Wii. Pretty cool for a game console. Can't use the WYSIWYG editor though. Opera doesn't recognize the editing area as an input box and doesn't let type in it. Multitap works really well and I can type faster than on the virtual keyboard.

Poor application design (and bad data)

What is the deal with all the crappy data on web sites these days? I don't know if it's because I develop web applications for a living, generally have too-high expectations, or just because I am super picky and pedantic (most would vote for the last, I suspect), but I have become really frustrated lately with web sites that don't "just work" the way I think they should.

Some examples from the past couple of days: I wanted to find out more about Ryobi lawn equipment because I have one of their gas-powered string trimmers and I wanted to see if they have an edger attachment that you can use with it (it has interchangeable heads to do different things). So, I get to their web site and start the painful process of locating the product I have, figuring that's a good place to begin finding attachments for it. In spite of the pain of the menus not expanding as I scrolled over them, and having to decide whether I wanted "power tools" or "outdoor tools" (it's both, right?) I was able to locate the product page for the particular model of trimmer we have (ooh, check out the spiffy AJAX-Y grayed out window/image popup when you click the image). My hopes rise as I see they have a "features" tab that tells me the trimmer has a heavy duty coupler for use with Expand-It attachments, which confirms that I am looking at the right product. But, do you think they have a "here is all the cool stuff that attaches to your trimmer using the heavy duty coupler" section on the page? Heck no! What they *do* have is a link to Home Depot, where evidently I am supposed to go foraging myself for the attachments, so I click the link aaaaaannnnndd the page I have requested cannot be found (I requested? I didn't write the stupid broken link!). No sweat, thinks I, because I am resourceful and they have a handy-dandy search box on the page. Type in "ryobi" and voila: nothing. I don't mean "sorry, no items match your search request" type of nothing, I mean a blank page, no message, nothing but white screen and nothing to see in the source behind it either that might clue me in. Being the extremely patient person I am, I click the big Home Depot logo to get to their main landing page and try the search again, and success awaits me on the search results page. They have the attachment I want, the price is about what I expected, and I am ready to go buy that sucker (better yet, let me pay online, right now, and go will-call pickup that thing (OK, maybe that is asking too much)).

So, hmm, it's 6:30 on a Sunday evening, I wonder how late they are open, and more importantly, if they even have one in stock at my local store. Check it out: there's a "Check Your Local Store" link that looks perfect for what I need to know, so I follow it, type in my zip code (that seems reasonable), click "make this my store" and it happily tells me that they do in fact sell that attachment and my local money pit. But wait, do they actually have any in stock? And what about that closing time? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Got sidetracked and all giddy finding out I now have a Home Depot that is mine. OK, found another link labeled "Store Finder." Thought I just did that, but OK, I click it, and WTF? again; it wants to know my zip code that I just typed in 45 seconds ago. See "my" store listed again and the phone number I must have missed before, but still am curious about whether they can just tell me the hours on the page, because I really don't like calling places like that to ask if they are open. So, I click the "more details" link, hoping for a nice list of store hours, but, and this is what got me, they don't show the store hours. They do say that store hours vary by season, but they aren't getting any more specific than that. Drat, if only there was some way to centrally locate that information so that it could easily be updated by someone as the seasons change. If only there were some way to predict when the days and months were going to change so that the application could automatically make the changes for you; imagine it!

That's an example from just one relatively small project; I could rant for days about all the stupid stuff that is out there (like how the blogger site warned me just now that I had unsaved data on the page, even though they have this handy-dandy autosave feature that keeps telling me, annoyingly, that it automatically saves my work as I go; so did it or not?).

So what's the deal? Has the quality of data on the web gotten worse in the past couple of years, or am I just noticing it more now for some reason and being much less forgiving than I used to be?

Blogger classic templates

Back when I first heard about blogger beta I thought it was going to be cool using it because of the new features it offered, such as comment feeds. It *is* cool, but there is one major problem with the new version: you can't post via FTP to your own host the way you can with the classic templates. You can forward your site or point your domain at the blogger site, but I don't want to do that, so I am stuck using the old templates.

I have spent a lot of time getting things set back up the way they were before, hassling with the paths and filenames in blogger to get the FTP publishing working properly, and to get the RSS feed links pointing into the correct locations. It all is working well now, except for one thing: my blog does not see my old archives that I still have on my site. I can force the links to the archives into the site template, which works well enough, but it made me curious about how blogger knows about the archive files that are there when it generates the template pages in the first place. Looking at the template, you can see it is doing an expansion to pull in the archive links, but I don't know enough about it to know where it is pulling that list from.

Maybe it's good to make a clean break from the past, but I like having links to the old stuff around, and at any rate it seems like it ought to be possible to do what I am trying to do. Will post more if/when I get it sorted out.

[update] I thought I had it figured out after doing a little poking around the blogger help area and examining the expansion variables a little more closely. It looks like blogger just takes the path and filename as you configure it and anything in that path will get added to the automatically generated list, but I'm not seeing it. No matter, I guess, but it is bugging me.