This is handy. A [list of

DTDs](//www.w3.org/QA/2002/04/valid-dtd-list.html) all in one spot.

Three days ago I began searching for a better RSS aggregator.

Sharpreader was getting goofy on me, RSS Bandit was goofy and wouldn’t

let me use the system browser for links and the others were either

web-based, which is too slow, or for the wrong platform. I was

about to give up when I was reminded of Nick Bradbury’s upcoming FeedDemon. You remember

Nick, he’s the guy who originally wrote what is now Homesite and also

the great TopStyle CSS editor. The first FeedDemon beta was just

released, and it just may be what I was looking for. Here’s what I

like…

1. Very well-done interface (for Windows anyway)

2. Support for password-protected feeds

3. Organization of feeds into “Listings”

4. “News Bins” as a way of sort of bookmarking feed posts from

multiple sites

1. Support for using the system default browser instead of only

IE

What I don’t like…

1. It took me too long to grok the terms “Listing” and “Channel.” This

might be fine for folks new to RSS feeds, but I would have preferred

something like “Feed” and “Feed Group” instead.

1. I’d prefer the old collapsible-folder-hierarchy metaphor for listing

and organizing feeds.

1. The listing Newspaper seems unnecessary to me, but hey, it doesn’t

really get in the way - much

It is the only current aggregator for Windows that looks and feels

finished. There are still a few bugs, but it’s in beta, so I’m sure

they will be taken care of before 1.0. Nice work Nick!

I keep preaching the benefits of Mozilla Firebird, and for good reasons. The trouble begins when I actually convince someone to try it. Great! Go to mozilla.org and, oh wait, can’t find a link there. Try the projects page. No link there either? Well there’s always Google. How about mozillafirebird.org? That’s got to work right? Well it doesn’t. Or at least it didn’t until now. I registered mozillafirebird.org .net and .com not 5 minutes ago. I’ll create a nice page pointing to the Mozilla Firebird project page for those folks who try hitting the obvious domain. Should be available in a day or two. Yes, I know that the roadmap says that the name Mozilla Firebird is temporary and will change right after Mozilla hits 1.4, but I’ll bet in the ensuing confusion folks call it “Mozilla Firebird” for at least another year or so.

Over at Tim Bray’s place, he had nearly the same reaction that I did

when first being exposed to a wiki. Except [he

describes it better than I did](//www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/06/26/Explosion)

“The weird thing about the Wiki work is that successive refactorings

appear to produce coherent structure out of chaos via the sum of a lot

of independent collective action. Which feels like it ought somehow to

be a violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. But there you

go.”

By the way, he’s referring the the amazing stuff happening out of

nowhere with RSS and the Echo project in the Echo Project Wiki

I’ve been watching the [amfphp

project](http://www.amfphp.org/) pretty closely. It’s basically Flash Remoting via PHP, and

open source as well. There has been little word on whether Macromedia

was going to give the project any grief over its use of the Action

Message Format. There is a new article titled [Connecting

Macromedia Flash and PHP](//www.macromedia.com/devnet/mx/flash/articles/amfphp.html) whice seems to indicate that they’ll

endorse it, at least initially.

Jesus, is there anything left worth reading on slashdot?

Remember when it was just news for nerds? It’s become instead the last

refuge for socially inept bottom feeders pretending that they matter.

Bah.

Safari 1.0 and Panther are nice and

all, but it’s things like Metapkg that are going

to make me switch.

I totally lifted this from [Tom

Gilder’s Blog](http://blog.tom.me.uk/), but what a clever little trick. Notice the drop

shadow around the banner (where it say’s White Noise up there.) This

effect used to require a number of nested tables, which we all now

know to be a Bad Idea. Instead, there are 6 nested DIV elements, each

with a different background image. Mix with some fancy CSS bits like

repeat-y and repeat-x and viola! A simple, lightweight drop shadow

effect without a TABLE element to be found.

Here’s a CSS snippet:

.shadow-1 {
background: url(/images/shadow-b.png)
repeat-x bottom left;
width: 12em; }

One question: Do nested DIVs suffer the same performance issues as

nested TABLEs?

Is it just me, or does the link cosmos for jackbaty.com show me as somefoolwitha.com?

Something seems amiss.

Well I moved this weblog back to using Blosxom.

Tough call, since I liked PHPosxom just fine.

Truth is, I wanted to play with the large and growing number of

plugins that are available for Bloxsom. The plugin implementation is

simple, intuitive and elegant.

I cleaned up a few other things also. I love the buttons from [Steal these

buttons](//gtmcknight.com/buttons/index.php). Not sure who to credit for the idea, although the first

place I recall seeing them was Antipixel.

Imagine my suprise when I spotted a nice little button for PHPetal.

Credit for that goes to Matthew