I’ve always liked the Atom spec. It’s neat and tidy with strict rules about what’s valid and what’s not with all those rough corners and incompatibilities of RSS sorted out (well, mostly). If I run into one of the silly sites that offer both RSS and Atom I pick Atom just because it feels right even though both would work perfectly well for me. So it came as quite a surprise to me to discover a major weakness in the Atom spec – it’s a right pain to generate. Let me explain…

Working in the world of editors there are a range of blog posts that float back up to the surface every so often, generally because they discuss an age old concern that just keeps resurfacing.  Recently a post from Moxiecode resurfaced complaining about the lack of focus on editing support in browsers. There’s been a few such posts in the past that I’ve seen and while the world of contenteditable support has definitely improved lately, it’s still one of the weakest areas of modern browsers.

For those who are interested, I’ve put together the collection of links that I found on getting MathML to render in browsers on LiveWorks! I’m a little unsure about the status of Safari and Opera so if anyone familiar with MathML in those browser could provide any info that would be greatly appreciated.

Also, as a bonus tip that I’ve picked up while researching XHTML modes in browsers, if you save a file with a .xhtml extension (or .xhtm or even .xht I think) browsers will actually use their XML parser to read and render the file. Much simpler than reconfiguring your web server to send the right mime type if you’re just testing stuff. Web servers with up to date extension to mime type mappings will also serve the file as application/xhtml+xml which is handy if you are serving static files too.

Sylvain Wallez:

If your application uses java.net.URL, and chances it does are very high, and you are using Sun’s JVM (since 1.4.2), you should set the sun.net.client.defaultConnectTimeout and sun.net.client.defaultReadTimeout system properties to a reasonable value. Otherwise, if a remote site hangs, your application or server will also hang. Useful to know…

A couple of years back I went on a crusade against manual deployment of pretty much everything in Ephox. It was originally driven by a desire to “dog food” our products so we needed to automatically deploy each nightly build to our internal systems. From there it went out to automatic releases (still problematic due to a dodgy FTP server at our hosting provider) and got a fancy webapp front end that let you pick which version to deploy.

Dear Lazyweb,

Since this worked so well to find a great article on HTTP caching… Does anyone know of a good introductory article for how to get MathML to display in Web Pages across multiple browsers etc.

My primary recommendation unfortunately will be to convert it to an image, but I’d like to provide instructions for the folk who want to maintain accessibility for their equations as well. Related and also interesting is anything discussing mime-types, XHTML and how to solve the IE problem.

I’ve just gotten back from a wonderful trip around Italy and have discovered a second endemic fail-point for mobile technology solutions: assuming you always have network connectivity. I suspect this really only applies to mobile phones more than mobile devices that only have wifi. When travelling internationally, your mobile phone becomes incredibly expensive if you leave international data roaming on so while you’re away you only have internet via wifi. When travelling in Italy (and Australia), this means you don’t have internet access, period.

I’m going to need this soon and I’ll never find the link again in the IBM forums so I’m putting it here.

Exporting and Importing a Web Content Library

It should let you move web content (minus drafts and previous versions unfortunately) from one IWWCM server to another.

There is so much effort put into coming up with complex ways of filtering spam, yet somehow the blatantly obvious posts still get through. Google Blog search for sites linking to my blog is 100% spam and they are all the most common form of splog these days:

%NAME% wrote an interesting post today on %SITENAME%
Here’s a quick excerpt

%COPIED POST CONTENT%

Get more information from %SITENAME% %LINK%

The copyright of the above excerpt belongs to %SITENAME%. We welcome any comments from the copyright owner.

CMSWire – News You Can Use:

When the homepage is dominated by news you are not necessarily communicating more. In many situations, you are damaging your reputation as a quality news source. Forcing news into people’s faces just annoys them. The fact is, most intranets really don’t have that much news that’s globally interesting, so most intranets need to focus on the commonly used resources or the targeted information that’s specific to smaller groups – often that’s not PR written news or even news at all, more just status updates.

Dear Lazy Web,

Can anyone point me to a simple introduction to HTTP caching? I know quite a lot about it and can just dive into the relevant standards, but I’m writing an article that will be read by people who have never heard of HTTP cache control headers before and I’d like to give them a good starting point.

Thanks,

Lazy author, er believer in reuse…

Answer

This article on MNot has an excellent overview of the whole issue.

Kevin Gamble:

I know I must sound like a broken record on this point, but the message just isn’t sinking in. What’s it going to take for people to “get” this? A million dollars or 10 million dollars. It doesn’t matter. The people are not coming. You have to go to them. It’s pretty simple actually. The thing is, corporate thinking is all about owning stuff. So the natural tendency is to want a community that you “own” and thus you have to build a new community and get people to come. It’s nice to see some studies highlighting how rarely that actually works though.