Just a quick note to point out Mark’s pioneering work with using the HTML link element to help aggregators pick up XML/RSS feeds.
I’ll add the code to Caveat Lector this weekend, and will make sure the next incarnation of AKMA’s redesign has it also.
Looking at my draft for the blog entries, I see three design changes that I made:
Any of these changes can be undone, though I would argue pretty strongly for the last one.
The trick with the timestamp: It’s not as simple as just setting a big ol’ top margin. The problem with that is that the margin will still be there after date headers and blog entry titles, and the extra whitespace will look just plain dumb. Fortunately, we can fix that, in most browsers anyway. (Hello? Microsoft? CSS2 selectors in IE/Win, please?)
CSS2 contains the + selector, which joins two other selectors and means “the second selector, when it immediately follows the first one.” Which seems weird, but watch it work. I set a margin-top: 4em on the selector .blogtime (hm, perhaps I should change that to .timestamp, since that is how I am referring to it). Now, we don’t actually want such a big top margin when a timestamp follows a date header (coded as <h2 class="dateheader">) or a blog entry title (coded as <h3 class="blogtitle">). Here is the rule that accomplishes that:
.dateheader+.blogtime, .blogtitle+.blogtime { margin-top: 1em }
I thought I might have to Box Model Hack this for IE5/Win (which understandeth not +), but it seems to look all right. Not entirely sure why, but I’ll take serendipity when I can get it.
Some other tidbits of possible interest (view source on the test page to see them):
The belt-and-suspenders id/<a name> system is in place. I put the identifiers on the timestamp rather than the blog entry title, because AKMA does not always title his entries, but the Blogger template always puts a timestamp on.
(For those who missed the earlier discussion: the entry identifiers in AKMA’s current template cannot be used as XHTML id attribute values because they don’t start with a letter. Changing them, however, will break all the links to the archives, not a good thing. So the new template will have both legal ids and <a name> elements per the old template. From now on, permalinks will use the id attributes. Both old links and new ones will work.)
text-indent property instead. (margin-left or padding-left would also have worked.)<p> tags now have corresponding </p> tags, a lot of unneeded <br> tags are gone, all tag names are now lowercase, and… really that’s about it. The code was pretty clean to start with. I have definitely seen worse. Much worse.The next step (assuming all this is more or less acceptable) is turning it into Blogger, MT, and Radio templates. Give me a few days on this one; I still have to read up on Radio.
Hey, everybody, check it out: AKMA got tenure! Congratulations, AKMA! Now you can sit around doing nothing the rest of your life!
Kidding. K-I-D-D-I-N-G.
And my husband got straight A’s, so the MA is in the bag.
Following Jonathon and Burningbird, I want to add a note or two to the emerging blogcerto on journalism.
Burningbird:
In our weblogs, we hold to our own moral code of what we consider responsible writing; we can say what we think and feel, issuing compliment or slander with impunity and disregard for consequences.
If you’re Burningbird, a footloose contractor, this may be true, to a limited extent. No blogger has been sued for libel yet; I know it’s going to happen one of these days. Might even be me; I am good at saying the wrong thing the wrong way. (Or even the right thing the wrong way.)
Life is even harsher in the workin’-for-Da-Man world, as Mark and Heather can attest. Da Man worries about what his employees say about him, about his industry, and about the larger world, and he is not shy about asserting his power over those employees to pull their words into the company line or silence them altogether. Consequences? Oh yeah. Big ones.
Burningbird again:
The Journalist, though, is held not only to their own code, but to their editor’s, their publication’s, their peers’, the code of the law, and, ultimately, their readers’ codes. And if they slander without fact, they risk loss of respect, at best, and a lawsuit at worst. If they tell only half the story, they are condemned and censured when the full truth is told.
I’m not clear on how most of this is not true of bloggers, myself. Aside from the lack of a formal blogger code, that is. If I accuse Burningbird of bribing Jonathon with links in return for cookies, and it ain’t so, I am ever so going to hear about it. Perhaps my blog would survive the uproar. Perhaps not. I haven’t seen a big enough blog dustup to be sure what would happen. In any case, I do have editors and a larger publication, in a sense: my fellow bloggers, and the blogsphere.
As for weblogging and bias, which Burningbird goes on to talk about—I happen to believe that “objectivity” is a myth. I prefer open admission of bias to a pretense of non-bias. In that sense, I’ll take an honest blogger over a journalist any day; because of the objectivity myth, the journalist cannot admit to bias even if s/he wants to or should. (Possibly this has something to do with why some journalists are blogging. Their blogs aren’t hobbled by the objectivity myth; they can be up-front about where they’re really coming from.)
Jonathon asks why on earth we would want to be journalists, when doing journalism right practically involves submerging ourselves in our subjects, and when doing journalism wrong is such a crock? (True story: My husband got interviewed on a local news channel the day LotR: FotR came out. The interviewer begged him to tell her what to ask, as she had never read the books, hadn’t paid any attention to the movie, and had no idea what he had actually done for New Line, despite two articles on him in local newspapers!)
Other bloggers seem to want to call themselves editorialists, to duck the question of their relationship with what they write about. I’m not wholly convinced, myself. The whole question seems to rest on mediation. The journalist is the mediator between the subject and the readers. The journalist is theoretically outside of the subject—I say theoretically because, as Jonathon’s movie anecdote demonstrates, the best journalists really are involved—and that outsiderdom either creates some value by itself, or is necessary because the insiders can’t or won’t write themselves.
Now that you think about it, though, isn’t this rather a strange sort of system?
Insiders can and do write, these days, when Da Man isn’t looking or has been de-fanged somehow. I write ebooks because I used to live them. I write markup because I live it. You guys know that about me by now; you know what subjects I am a worthwhile source on. I would no more go to Jonathon for RDF advice than Burningbird for insights on Japanese literature.
Rather than the appearance of non-bias created in part by the journalist’s outsider status, we have a multiplicity of available viewpoints whose bias is either stated outright or can be gathered from archive perusal. (Or both. I try to record my biases, but I can never be sure I’ve remembered all the pesky things.)
The usual gesture at this point, I believe, is to ask rhetorically what we need journalists and media news outlets for anyway. I dunno, for a shortcut when I don’t know who the right bloggers for a particular subject of interest are? For discovery of topics I would not normally search out? For topics that for whatever reason don’t have bloggers? For those times when I really do value the outsider (or even naive) perspective?
Blogging will change journalism, certainly, but so did the telegraph. Like Jonathon, I don’t see much point in playing zero-sum games with journalism and blogging. Unlike him, I confess to an eagerness to take over some of journalism’s role as mediator between subjects and readers—only a few subjects, mind you, and I daresay only a few readers!—as well as a wild curiosity to see how the journalistic establishment reacts to all this.
(I thought about majoring in journalism as a youngster. I really did.)
The next segment of AKMA’s redesign is up, in draft form. I haven’t tested it on IE5/Mac yet; looks more or less OK on IE5/Win and Opera/Win. I couldn’t resist a couple of little design tweaks (I’ll discuss them later), but for the most part I left the design alone. Let me know what doesn’t look right, AKMA, or what you yourself want to change from the original design.
The markup is pretty solidly what I like to see, so examine it (“view source” or “save as HTML” in your browser) and let me know what doesn’t make sense to you. You should find that by and large it’s simpler than what you’ve been doing; most of the complicated markup will end up residing in the template where it belongs, so you won’t even have to remember it’s there.
One thing I may have incorrectly bulldozed, however, is a differentiation among horizontal rules. Are mid-post rules in fact shorter than end-of-post rules? If so, I can allow for that, no problem; I just wasn’t sure if that was the intent.
The CSS is completely up in the air still. Let me know what you don’t like, and it will change.
I put my glasses on this morning and the left lens fell out.
This happened to me before, my last semester in college. It was awful. My left eye, you see, needs much more correction than my right, so when the left lens is out of commission I can’t wear my glasses at all because the contrast between perfect vision and thoroughly messed-up vision gives me headaches. I spent three weeks bumping into trees and things. (I did gain a whole new appreciation for Impressionist art, however.)
Fortunately, this time the frame wasn’t actually broken; the screw had fallen out, was all. My husband took a screw from an old pair of his glasses and had mine fixed in a jiffy. So I can see, given the limits of an aging prescription.
I take this as a warning, though. I’m calling the optometrist as soon as opportunity presents itself.
I thought of this, but I could never ever have coded it: Exegenix is touting a new gizmo that accepts Postscript, analyzes text formatting, and uses that analysis to make guesses about document structure.
Now, if you think this is going to solve all your problems, you are fooling yourself. (Does it even have a built-in dictionary to deal with cross-line and cross-page hyphenation? Does it do Word Art, as seen in slick foreign-language textbooks? Show me it handling floats—figures, tables, pull quotes. Show me it handling frontmatter.) Still, just as proof-of-concept this is a cool thing. Wish I could see it work.
The other gizmo I desperately want to see is Rick Jelliffe’s markup editor. My, my, is that ever going to be cool. C’mon, Rick, get it outta beta so I can buy it! Please?
(News once again courtesy of xmlhack.)
Another fine attack on the workplace code of silence, from John Ralston Saul via wood s lot which I have no idea why I haven’t been reading regularly:
But my argument has always been that because the quasi-totality of the elite belongs to structures, they are prevented from saying and doing what they believe. We have the appearance of freedom, but we have a very real lack of freedom. We have the appearance of freedom of speech, but we have a very real lack of freedom of speech, because almost all expertise is either locked up in an employment contract (either with a corporation or with a government department) and therefore that expertise can only be expressed as if you were a spokesman or a spokeswoman for that organization. That’s not freedom of speech, that’s propaganda. That’s rhetoric. You don’t hear nuclear engineers saying, “Well, I’m leaving my office at so- and- so company or government department and now I’m going to tell you what I think of nuclear engineering.” They don’t do that because they get fired if they do that.
What is there to say but “yep”? Been there twice, upped and left both times partly because of it, came within inch of getting fired once, still have the dratted shirts (but picked the company logos out).
The Chronicle of Higher Ed has an article on NetLibrary after its takeover by OCLC. I am cautiously optimistic; certainly OCLC has a clue, and from what I am reading they are moving in good directions. The milk-it-for-moolah management is gone, at least. I should like to know what they’ve done with production—but as I understand it, the production floor was the first thing NetLibrary fired when it first got into trouble, so perhaps OCLC had no difficulty moving in a better system.
Moreover, both publishers and libraries seem to be entering sadder-but-wiser mode, neither foolishly exuberant nor angrily skeptical. That’s good. And if academic publishers are getting interested, even better.
The juicy tidbit occurs near the end of the article:
The University of Chicago Press sold about 100 older titles to the service years ago, she added. However, the press is not expanding its relationship with netLibrary because it is developing its own electronic-delivery service, Ms. Summerfield added.
They are, are they? Interesting. Are they really developing something in-house, or is this statement just code for talking to other potential distribution channels?
Tom blogs it right on the head:
Before anything else made in the USA, this power to block things out is our most important product.
Yep. Chuck your ethics at the office door; no need for them inside. So say those who typically consider “professionalism” some sort of substitute.
Here I am in the pink-collar ghetto once again, despite emerging from it briefly. I bloody well hate the pink-collar ghetto. Inhumanly boring place. Still, it was my decision to come back, and Tom just reminded me why it was the right decision. What I do is boring, low-paid, and hard on my hands and eyes, but it’s useful, honest work that harms no one and compromises none of my ethical and professional principles.
Unintentionally I am sure, Tom also reminds me of one reason I refuse to have children. “Gotta take care of the fam-lee” is an all-too-common reason given for accepting unethical employment. I can imagine some wrenching decisions arising from this, and I sympathize with the dilemma even as I have taken pains to avoid it. I also have plenty of scorn reserved for slimy employers who exploit necessity.
Most times, though, I don’t see wrenching decisions being made, just facile excuses from people who could make better choices but refuse to. Whose phrase is “the banality of evil”? This is a living example.