September, 5, 2002 archives

i think articles like this one about how the carp ruling is killing online music radio should go out of their way to point out that broadcast radio is not subject to similar fees or reporting requirements. (and here's more about clear channel and payola from the los angeles times. of course, the record industry isn't happy about that situation, either.)

rael weighs in with a very long, and very good, exposition on the state of the rss standards. he also echoes my earlier beef about the <rdf:Seq> junk.

assuming i didn't miss the mark too much, this blog now supports trackback. if you are familiar with the implementations other people are using, you may be wondering where the link that says trackback is. there isn't one. the trackbacks get integrated into the comments. along the way, i also implemented (optional) titles for my items here. very exciting.

phil was going to suggest i autogenerate titles. consuming tools that want titles should autogenerate them—having producing tools do so results in data loss unless you then add further metadata to say this title isn't real, it was just something i made up to appease some people's notions of what a weblog entry should look like.

bill suggested i make the trackback links visible on the front page, for those who don't have tools that sniff them out of the page. (i can relate.) i didn't like the idea of just adding a link that would then be useless to most people, so i made it so the standard comments link also serves as the trackback link. (it uses the presence of the url parameter to detect that it is a trackback ping, and then does the right thing.)

this isn't particularly intuitive, but i think the audience of non-rdf-sniffing trackback users is likely to remain fairly small.