Category: Know the Code

I’ve been giggling about this all day long, but no one at the office could really “get” it. However, I know you will.

When I first interviewed at the law firm, the attorney I met with (now one of my bosses) told me he is also in charge of the firm website. Uh huh, you can see where this is going, right? Yep, added to my job description of being a paralegal was the fact that I would maintain the website too.

It’s a pretty straightforward website, mainly just HTML with some javascript rollovers for the buttons. Nothing too unusual. However, my boss was convinced that the previous designer was a complete idiot. Simple text changes would take her months.

Anyone involved in web design for awhile knows that there are fonts that you should use for websites – the common fonts that everyone has on their machines. If you use wacky fonts and a visitor doesn’t have them, they won’t see your site as you intended.

However, I really don’t know where she was coming from when she added this font tag on every page of the site:

font face=”Arial,New Font Name,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular”

Errr… can we say someone forgot to clean up their WYSIWYG code? Because in all my years of font addiction (I have tons and tons and tons of fonts), I can guarantee there is NO font named “New Font Name.” I am considering having one made though…

Yes, that is at the top of my list of the code that needs to be cleaned up.

Dear Mr. Winer,

I hope you won’t mind me being so forward as to write to you. I know that we have never talked before, although I have followed your site for some time and I have especially paid attention to your trip to Boston and your work now at Harvard.

On your site recently, you have talked many times about Creative Commons licenses and integrating them in to Radio weblogs. It is a good thing to see a developer who cares about implementing things to benefit the users of the end product.

To that point though, I’ve discovered something that I find somewhat distressing over at Weblogs.com. I appreciate the fact that you allow me, someone that doesn’t use Radio, to ping the site. I use the XML feed that you offer in my news reader software to find new sites on a regular basis. But it wasn’t until recent discussions on the use of Weblogs.com for populating Blogshares that I took the time to dig through all the pages of the Weblogs.com site.

With all of the other documentation provided in your other projects being so well written, I found it interesting that there is NO mention of what the data from Weblogs.com can or might be used for. There is no terms, no policy, not even a blurb stating that the data is wide open to the public and can be used for anything under the sun. This is the reality of the matter – anyone can parse the feed that you offer there – but it’s not stated anywhere on the site.

Perhaps this was simply an oversight. I know when I am deep in a project I don’t always see little details like this. However, for the blog novice who is pinging Weblogs.com with no understanding of what that ping truly means, what XML or RSS is, and what can be done with the data, I think the time has come to post a disclaimer or additional information of some sort to make them aware.

Mr. Winer, I feel this is your responsibility as a leader in the Internet community, a software developer, and the owner of the Weblogs.com site. So, will you do it? At least warn people that their data is up for grabs once they ping your site, and that you have no control over who uses the data or for what purpose once the ping occurs.

I look forward to your response.

Sincerely,
Christine

After reading the post on Robyn’s site about opting in to Blogshares and opting out of it, I realized something…

When I ping Weblogs.com, who can use that data? Can anyone use it? What can they use it for? Obviously, I’ve agreed to have my site listed there because I ping it … but what about all the other sites that then parse that data for their own use? Is there a list of everyone that uses it and what they are doing with it?

Anyone know? Some uber-techno-geek out there that has developed stuff with it? Anyone? It’s an XML feed, I can pull it in to my news reader, but what else is going on with that data?

It was pointed out last night that the new blue & white skin isn’t working right in IE 6 or Mozilla. I posted a note not to click on it, and if you did click on it, you could easily get back to the default skin. People are still getting stuck in the blue & white skin. Don’t! Don’t go there! But if you do…

Here is the link to reset your cookies to the default skin.

I’ll try to fix the other one tonight. It’s on my long list of things to do.

I’ve hit that point … the point I knew would be coming soon. I’m tired of fixing code. So there are three skins that work, and the rest work “good enough” for now. I walked away from the computer earlier to do other things, and it felt so good I’m going to do it again.

Isn’t that ironic? All that time to fix things, and now I have nothing to say…