Monthly Archive for December, 2005Page 2 of 2

NYPL v NLB

Published
by
acroamatic
on Thursday, 8 December 2005
in Musings and Review
. 1 Comment

I found out about the New York Public Library’s RSS feeds from the RSS Compendium Blog.

Now, this is a library which gets Ress (or RSS, if you haven’t been clued in). There are feeds for librarians’ recommendations, events, exhibitions and the latest additions to their databases and indexes.

Unfortunately, this is all lost on our National Library Board. Yes, the NLB is either ignorant or dismissive about RSS. Or a concoction of both.

Which is strange ‘cos there are bloggers like Rambling Librarian around.

What truly astounds me is how… Well. I’ll not call the NLB names. I’ll let you judge for yourself. I sent them this email:

Hi there,

I’m just wondering if you have an email update for events or a regular newsletter covering the latest happenings at the libraries around Singapore. If there is, I’d like to subscribe.

Thanks!

This was the reply:

Dear Sir,

At present we do not have email services for library events/activities. You may refer to the library programme brochure or website for events update.

Regards
XXX XXX
NLB Helpdesk

The NLB does a terrific job with their activities, events and exhibitions. Fullstop.

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Test post for Elaine

Published
by
acroamatic
on Tuesday, 6 December 2005
in Tech
. 1 Comment

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
RSS is badly named,
Not many people Everyone doesn’t have a clue!

=)

(This is a test post to demonstrate RSS for a friend.)

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Ress

Published
by
acroamatic
on Monday, 5 December 2005
in Tech
. 1 Comment

What is Ress?

Ress is a simple solution to an unpronouncable problem.

That problem is RSS’ less-than-friendly name.

It already has an identity crisis: Really Simple Syndication, RDF Site Summary (the person who came up with this one must be a Singaporean), Rich Site Summary…

The least we can do it to give it a proper name. Something that can roll off peoples’ tongues.

Ress.

Say it together now: Ress.

No more Are Ess Ess. Just Ress will do, thank you very much.

I’m not the first to propose a name change. Amy Gahran ran a ‘Rename RSS’ contest on her Contentious blog.

The winner was ‘webfeed’.

I didn’t take part then, as I hadn’t thought of a new name at that point.

Webfeed doesn’t roll off my tongue.

Ress does.

You can say Ress in different languages. (Is webfeed webmakan in Malay?)

And.

The name maintains a link to its convoluted and confused identity: Really Simple Syndication.

Spread the Ress, everyone! Spread your Ress too!

Now, if only I can rename this other unpronouncable thing at work.

Oh, forgot to mention. This post is in response to Yahoo’s RSS White Paper, part of my little push to “help move RSS into the mainstream”.

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Backlinks

Published
by
acroamatic
on Saturday, 3 December 2005
in Tech
. 0 Comments

I’ve enabled Blogger’s Backlinks for a while now. It’s not the best implementation of this function. Most people wouldn’t bother to paste the permalink URL of their post in my blog, assuming they have referred to a post here.

Then, I came across Jasper de Vries’ custom blogger backlinks. After tweaking with the code, I got it to fit the look and feel of my blog.

But…

I need someone to test it! Someone please link to this post. It should be picked up by Google’s blog search, and it’ll automatically appear under Links to this post e.g. here.

It is like a pseudo-technorati “who links to me” or an Icerocket feed monitoring a certain search term. In the case of Backlinks, the ’search’ is on a post level and the results are displayed in the referenced post itself.

Besides Jasper’s Browservulsel, I’ve only seen successful implementation of backlink automation on Richard Chappell’s Philosophy, et cetera.

Backlinks or trackbacks take comments to a step further. It enables a discussion to be thrown open to a wider audience. It is also encouragement for bloggers as they can see that others value what they write enough to comment or critique it.

Update Siva has linked to this post from Otterman speaks… and his Blogger sandbox.

He linked to this post in both blogs as Google’s Blog Search might not index non-blogger blogs. As it turns out, Otterman speaks… (and Raffles Museum News) are indexed by the GBS. It will be interesting to find out how often GBS indexes blogs and whether it prioritizes Blogger blogs.

I’m not sure if GBS uses pings to detect blog updates. Regardless, there are a few incongruent results.

Raffles Museum News is referenced in GBS by its Feedburner feed. It indicates that the blog was last updated 12 hours ago. But the posts marked as updated 12 hours ago are from more than a month ago. Each Raffles Museum post is referenced by the feed.

On the other hand, Otterman speaks…, which also has a Feedburner feed, was apparently last updated on 26 Nov. Interestingly, the search results for this blog reference the blog itself!

Why does GBS index a Feedburner Feed in one case but not the other? Does this account for the time lag? Or are the spiders that index the two sites on different schedules?

This is all quite puzzling and intriguing.

Further update As if these weren’t a big enough mystery, this post has already been backlinked in Browservulsel’s custom blogger backlinks post.

Perhaps because I used KingPing? Or is it because I use Blogger?

And more Looks like I have inadvertently backlinked myself. At least now I know it works. Pinging probably helps.

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Ode to the learning capacity of three-year olds

Published
by
acroamatic
on Friday, 2 December 2005
in Musings
. 2 Comments

I stumbled upon this blog entry of a student from the place where I work. Never underestimate kids’ ability to put things together.

I was watching the biology animations that were posted in the [LMS] jus now… then came Bernise. She sat on my lap and watched with me. For your info, she is only 3 years old.. Anyway, she was watching and listening to the description of a bacteriophage (virus that infects bacteria).. While watching, she pointed to a string-like material and asked me whats that?? I was lazy to describe the scientific word to her. So i said “worm”.. She wouldnt know the difference anyway. Haha… and den guess what!! she looked at me and said… “Its VIRUS” . I was amazed! She actually listened to the animation. I thot she only look at the pictures and diagrams! I guess at this age, they are learning fast!! haha…

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