One needn't assume from the title of this post that I'm unhappy with Atom. For the most part, I think the specification is good. But if it were up to me, a few things would be different. That's probably true for everyone in the Working Group, and we probably all have different gripes. Here's my...
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What do you get when a programmer works at home with a small child? An homage to Slashdot, sung to the tune of the cartoon Caillou:

I'm just a karma whore

Each day I earn some more

Not quite sure what it's for

Slashdot

So many things to write

All day and every night

My...
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The bookmarks file generated by Mozilla is busted. The other day, I tried to create an XHTML file to turn my bookmarks file into a CSS-powered cascading menu, but I ran into a problem: since bookmarks.html doesn't have closing tags for many of its elements, I couldn't get the CSS styles applied as desired. Mozilla--please...
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My yesterday's entry in Mental Arc about the difficulty of finding a website among a growing number of TLDs prompted me to write a pre-draft of an RFC for a generalized method of autodiscovery of information about and services provided by a website. The core idea is to have an "autodisc" folder at the root...
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Everybody knows who the domain name "microsoft.com" belongs to--that 10-ton gorilla from Redmond. But what about hansen.com? That could be any of many millions of individuals. Let's take a slightly simpler example: hansens.com. That could be any one of probably hundreds of companies--some big, some small, some in one industry and some in another. Unfortunately,...
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If your search engine optimization efforts are focused solely and capturing visitors who are searching for products like yours, you may be missing a huge chunk of your market. Don't forget about those people who are looking for complementary products, services and information.

Over the last six months, some of the things I've done that...
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As the details of the Atom format are tuned in preparation for publishing the 1.0 version of the specification, a question that has been touched on before has been raised again: should feeds be required to link to an alternative representation of their data, ie. must each feed carry the same content as an associated...
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Here's a message I've attempted twice to post to Bugtraq, but it appears to have been lost both times. Traffic on Bugtraq has been spotty lately. It talks about a security problem with Blogger's handling of comments:

Having notified Blogger of this twice over the course of a number of months, and not seeing them...
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When someone publishes an RSS or Atom feed, what are they expecting people to do with it? View it in their feed reader? Display it on their website? Aggregate it with other feeds and republish the results in a new feed? Display an aggregated feed on their website? Some publishers include comments in their feeds...
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Well, I managed yesterday to get in contact with the people who were sliming my server with referrer spam. I asked them to stop, and they removed me from their database! Amazing! My referrer logs look better today.

How did I manage to contact them? Their domain names were registered to someone with an email...
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