Update: URL Fixer was acquired and is now hosted at http://urlfixer.org/
URL Fixer will now correct “.ku” to “.uk”, but I’ve made no decision on colour, metre, or encyclopaedia.
Cheerio!
Author Archives: Christopher Finke
Netscape 9.0 Teaser
This post originally appeared on the Netscape Blog.
What you are looking at is a draft of the main toolbar of Netscape 9.0, running on Windows XP.
Netscape 9 will be a standalone browser, and from this screenshot, you can infer several things: unlike Netscape 8, Netscape 9 will contain more standardized support for newsfeeds (a.k.a. Live Bookmarks); it will also have tight integration with the Netscape.com service, as evidenced by the icons for the two available Netscape.com extensions (Friends’ Activity Sidebar and the Sitemail Notifier). Several Netscape.com-based extensions will be built into the browser; only these two have been previously announced.
I’ll be posting a new announcement, feature teaser, or progress report right here each Tuesday, so stay tuned.
Netscape 9.0 is coming
I’ve posted the first in a series of teasers for Netscape 9.0 at the Netscape blog:
[…] Netscape 9 will be a standalone browser, and from this screenshot, you can infer several things: it will be tightly integrated with the Netscape.com service, as evidenced by the icons for the two available Netscape.com extensions (Friends’ Activity Sidebar and the Sitemail Notifier). Several Netscape.com-based extensions will be built into the browser; only these two have been previously announced. […]
The blurb is also posted at several forums for discussion: UFAQ.org, Netscape.com, and the Netscape community discussion boards.
Update to URL Fixer (1.2.12)
Update: URL Fixer was acquired and is now hosted at http://urlfixer.org/
I’ve updated URL Fixer to version 1.2.12. In addition to including a Catalan translation, there are two main changes to the correction algorithm:
1. “;//” will now be corrected to “://” (http;// => http://).
2. All commas and other semicolons will be changed to dots (www,google;co,uk => www.google.co.uk).
You can install or upgrade URL Fixer from its homepage.
The A to Z of me
I’ve been thinking recently that it’d be fun to see what domains are listed first in the auto-complete for my URL bar for each letter of the alphabet. Shall we?
archive.org: a digital library of Internet sites. Most recently, I checked it to get a cached copy of the RSS 0.91 DTD.
blog.netscape.com: the official blog of Netscape Communications Corporation.
calacanis.com: The blog of Jason Calacanis, Internet entrepreneur.
digg.com: User-driven social content. A great place to stay current on (mostly) tech news.
chrisfinke.com: Duh.
fark.com: It’s not news, it’s one of the Internet’s greatest time-wasters.
gmail.google.com: The best webmail application ever.
hyperculture.typepad.com: A fairly interesting blog that covers various tech news.
imdb.com: The Internet Movie Database. I probably used it last to see what other movies the actors from The Office have been in.
jacob.chrisfinke.com: My little brother’s website.
kb.mozillazine.org: Documentation for Mozilla products.
lifeintheoffice.com: A blog that covers all things Office.
meatgasm.com: A blog focusing on the wonderful world of meat.
netscape.com: Social news with editorial oversight.
opera.com: The Opera Web browser.
php.net: Documentation for the PHP programming language.
q – None. Apparently, I haven’t visited a domain starting with “q” in the last month.
reddit.com: Another social news website.
slashdot.org: The place to discuss the latest tech news.
techmeme.org: The place to find the latest tech news.
userstyles.org: A repository of styles for Mozilla applications. They have some great Firefox customizations.
videos.netscape.com: The Popular Videos channel of Netscape.com.
woot.com: An online store: One Day, One Deal.
xulplanet.com: Documentation for the XUL markup language.
youtube.com: Oh, you haven’t heard of it? It’s this obscure unknown website where people upload videos of themselves tubing down various rivers of the world.
zefrank.com: The funniest three minutes of my day.
I think this list sums me up pretty well. I’m not sadistic enough to try to turn this into a pyramid meme, but does anyone else want to reveal the A-Z of their browser history?
Long Live RSS
This post originally appeared on the Netscape Blog.
Earlier this week, I wrote about our decision to stop hosting the DTD for RSS 0.91 after July 1, 2007. Since then, we have received a torrent of feedback from users in both support and opposition to our plan. Based on this feedback, we have decided to host this file indefinitely. We apologize for any headaches our initial announcement might have caused.
Nonetheless, if you’re a content producer using RSS 0.91 and you are at all concerned about your feeds being dependent upon an external file, we recommend that you consider upgrading to RSS 2.0, which does not require a DTD. While we’re proud of it’s history as a Netscape innovation, RSS 0.91 is deprecated, and its use should be avoided when possible.
On deprecating RSS 0.91
Our decision at Netscape to stop hosting the DTD for RSS 0.91 has inspired some healthy discussion around the Web on the topics of RSS and DTDs. Since I was speaking for Netscape in the official blog, I wanted to lay out my personal thoughts on the matter. However, as is normally the case, the main points I wanted to make have already been made in the Slashdot discussion.
werewold1031 writes:
And they can’t set up a redirect to the new hosting location?
What in the world would be the point? That would merely duplicate the problem to a different location. As was clearly stated in the article by Mr. Finke, four-million hits every day is a crapload of bandwidth wasted re-downloading a file that will never change. The RSS 0.91 spec is finished, complete, and yes, for all intents and purposes, written in stone. Stop looking at it every damned day. It will not change. Ever. It’s truly stupid for client-side software to be accessing it over the Internet to read its forever-static contents. That’s like checking the writings of a dead poet every day to see if anything’s changed.
And any dev who codes his app to check a file like this every day instead of caching it client-side should be smacked oh-my-god-so-frickin-hard.
I couldn’t have said it better myself, so I’m not going to try.
Schraegstrichpunkt writes:
This is the perfect example of why a URI is not necessarily supposed to be treated as a URL. http://my.netscape.com/publish/formats/rss-0.91.dtd is just a unique identifier for the RSS DTD. It used to also be hosted there as a convenience, but your software isn’t supposed to rely on that.
Indeed.
BuffaloBandit writes:
Seriously though, Isn’t 0.91 dead anyway? Why not get on the 2.0 bandwagon? Is there still value in 0.91?
Exactly. What is there to gain by staying with 0.91 over 1.0 or 2.0? Most software companies have support life-cycles for their products; just think of this as Netscape sunsetting support for RSS 0.91.
To DTD or not to DTD
This post originally appeared on the Netscape Blog.
Over the weekend, the tech community noticed that a file crucial to the operation of certain RSS readers was MIA. This file, the DTD for RSS 0.91, had been hosted at my.netscape.com, and its purpose was essentially to explain the structure of RSS 0.91 documents and to provide definitions for a set of character entities that could be used in such documents.
Theoretically, RSS readers load this file when parsing an RSS 0.91 feed. However, In practice, most readers (including those built into Firefox and Internet Explorer) either just ignore the file or load their own cached copy.
my.netscape.com is undergoing a redesign, and when we announced the redesign about 10 days ago, the DNS entry for my.netscape.com was changed to point to the new server where My Netscape will be living. This had the effect of making anything under the old my.netscape.com unavailable, since the only thing public on the new server is a splash page. So, ipso facto, the DTD was no longer available.
The unavailability of this file had the effect of causing certain feed readers – Microsoft’s Live.com RSS gadget, for one – to refuse to display RSS 0.91 feeds. This is what we call in the technical community “not good.” So, we’ve restored the file (along with the DTD for RSS 0.9) for the time being, but this experience has raised a few important questions: should feed readers be relying on the availability of a static document on a third-party Web server (and thus a connection to the Internet)? Is it truly necessary to request this document every time an RSS 0.91 feed is being parsed? (The RSS 0.91 DTD is requested over four million times per day – that’s a lot of wasted bandwidth for a file that won’t ever change.) In our opinion, the answer to both of these questions is no.
So until July 1, 2007, the DTDs for RSS 0.9 and 0.91 will be available via my.netscape.com. If you are a software developer, use this time to ensure that your RSS software is capable of displaying RSS feeds even if the DTD is unavailable, or have a backup copy cached locally for your parser to use in the absence of the specified DTD. If you are a content provider, either update your feeds to point to another copy of the DTD, or accept the fact that your feed may not be available through feed readers that don’t have a backup plan in the case of a missing DTD.
Netscape and RSS DTDs
We’ve resolved the missing RSS DTD situation at Netscape, but the file won’t be around forever. Read my post at the Netscape blog to get the full details regarding the availabilities of the DTDs for RSS 0.9 and 0.91.
Minor update to URL Fixer
Update: URL Fixer was acquired and is now hosted at http://urlfixer.org/
I’ve updated URL Fixer to version 1.2.11. A bug was causing the Chinese translation to be displayed for English-speaking users, so if you were seeing “?? (R)” or Chinese characters instead of “Confirm corrections” in the context menu for the URL bar, go ahead and upgrade. (You can always download the newest version of URL Fixer from the addon’s homepage.)
This version also includes 4 new locales: Hebrew, Korean, Turkish, and Ukrainian. Thanks to the translators over at Babelzilla for all their hard work.
Who are you? Who, who, who, who?
Apparently, when you post to Slashdot claiming to be someone you may not be, people don’t take your word for it. In the hour after I wrote that post, my access logs show that 10 different people searched Google for “Christopher Finke” and ended up at my site. (This normally happens about twice a month.)
Yes, Slashdotters, I am who I say I am.
A gentleman and a scholar
C.K. announced yesterday his departure from Netscape. It’s really too bad; he’s been an incredible boss and an exciting person to be around. I especially enjoyed the caffeine-fueled afternoon when we created the Netscape Digg Tracker. Good times, good times…
He’ll be sorely missed, but I don’t harbor any sore feeling towards him for leaving. If I could get multiple job offers by just announcing my availability on my blog, I’d probably weigh my options too. ;-)
Our bad
According to this Slashdot post, my.netscape.com was hosting a DTD file critical for users of RSS 0.91 feeds, but when we closed My Netscape for a much needed redesign, the file got lost in the shuffle. (Why an RSS DTD file was being hosted under the my.netscape.com subdomain is anybody’s guess…)
We should have it available again fairly soon, but as it appears that this was noticed as early as Friday, I wish that someone had notified us about it before the middle of a three-day weekend, when making a change to a production site becomes much more time-consuming. (Actually, I wish that someone had notified us at all: as far as I know, nobody contacted anybody at Netscape to report the problem before it was reported on Slashdot.)
No worries though; this kind of thing just reminds me of how much Web history there is at Netscape: they invented Javascript, they pioneered the modern Web browser, and apparently, they hosted some obscure but very important DTD files.
I see what you did there…
Here’s an editorial cartooon I submitted a while back for publication in the Minnesota Daily, the overwhelmingly left-wing student newspaper of the University of Minnesota. (For those of you who didn’t go to the U of M, the Daily’s oft-used advertising slogan is “I get it Daily.”)
I wonder why they didn’t publish it…
Social Traffic Monitor 1.1
I have updated the Social Traffic Monitor WordPress plugin to support tracking traffic for WordPress “pages” as well as posts.
You can always download the newest version from the plugin’s homepage.
Sorry, Missouri
Update: URL Fixer was acquired and is now hosted at http://urlfixer.org/
I’ve updated the URL Fixer extension for Firefox; it was inadvertantly “fixing” all .mo.us addresses to .com.us. The latest version is 1.2.10.
Social Traffic Monitor: A WordPress Plugin
I’ve just put the finishing touches on version 1.0 of my first WordPress plugin, the Social Traffic Monitor. In a nutshell, it checks incoming traffic for visitors from social news sites (e.g., Netscape, Digg, Reddit) and when a post on your blog starts getting traffic from these sites, it begins to log each visit to that post. When it has at least one visit logged for a post, it displays a graph of visitors per hour, as well as a list of referrering sites and how many visitors each sent your way.
The full writeup and download are available over here; now all I have to do is write something in my blog that is interesting enough to get submitted to Digg or Netscape…