Posts Tagged ‘blogging’
What’s wrong with Roger Ebert’s blog
March 9th, 2010 at 12:21 pm
It’s not the content, of course, it’s the formatting. Have you tried to read his RSS feed on an iPhone?
I started reading Roger’s latest blog entry this morning and ran into the same problem I always do when reading him on my iPhone.
The screenshot above is from the MobileRSS feed reader, but I get basically the same horrible formatting when reading it through NetNewsWire
and through the Google Reader mobile page.
Everything past the first couple of paragraphs gets squeezed down to pass through a narrow chute.
Grabbing the feed via
curl http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/atom.xml > ebert.rss
and isolating the area where the formatting goes crazy, we get
<p> Todd McCarthy reviewed films for Variety for 31 years.
He was the ideal critic for the paper -- better, we now
realize, than it deserved. His reviews and the reviews of
Kirk Honeycutt at the Hollywood Reporter were frequently the
first reviews of a new film to see print. Honeycutt
fortunately continues. <br /> </p>]]>
<
and here’s the page for the latest entry
Each entry on main page has an image and a paragraph or two of text. You’ll note that the length of the text matches the height of the image almost exactly, a feat that probably comes easily to a guy who’s been writing newspaper copy for five decades, but which seems amazing to me.
The triple <blockquote> comes right after those lead paragraphs and is what gives the subsequent text its left indentation. And turns that text into a thin trickle running down the center of my iPhone.
(The indentation also appears when I read his feed on my computer, of course, but it’s not as annoying on a full-sized screen.)
I don’t know whether it’s Roger himself that’s putting in those <blockquote>s or whether it’s some blogging program he’s using, but whatever the source, it’s the old problem of using HTML for formatting instead of semantics. I wish one of Roger’s web-savvy friends—Andy Ihnatko, say—would step in and give him a little CSS assistance.
-
I call him Roger instead of Mr. Ebert not just because his persona in print and on TV makes everyone feel like his friend. And not just because we share an alma mater and happy memories of Champaign-Urbana. No, there’s a deeper bond.
Back in the late 80s, my wife and I were driving down through the center of Illinois on I-57. We pulled into a rest stop and noticed a BMW with the license plate ROSEBUD (or maybe ROSEBD) in the parking lot. As I went into the men’s room, I passed familiar-looking portly guy with big glasses coming out the door. It wasn’t until I got back to my car that I realized I’d just had a brush with greatness.
It’s the intimate relationship that comes from nearly sharing a rest room that puts Roger and me on a first name basis. ↩
Tags: blogging, css, html, rogerebert
Post #1190 in blogging, media | 1 Comment
Headline Fallows
February 27th, 2010 at 9:27 pm
The Atlantic rolled out some big changes to its website a couple of days ago. Normally, I wouldn’t notice something like this, because even though I’m a regular reader of James Fallows’ blog, I almost never visit the site itself. As I do with all my favorite blogs, I subscribe to his RSS feed and read his posts in Google Reader. But since the redesign, I can’t do that anymore.
Oh, there’s still a feed, but it provides only the headlines of Fallows’ posts, nothing more. Not even the first paragraph or two to give a you a decent sense of the post’s topic. I assume the idea behind this change is to force us to go to the main site, pumping up the pageviews for The Atlantic’s advertisers. It won’t work; you can’t force someone to follow a link, and readers who’ve jumped on the RSS train will not be jumping off.
Merlin Mann has written a couple of tart posts today about the stupidity of this change. I’m more disappointed than angry, but the source of our displeasure is the same: we like reading Fallows, and we will read much less of him because of the anemic new feed. I sent this email to Fallows:
Is there some way you can prevail upon the Atlantic’s webmasters (and their masters) to return the RSS feed to providing the full text of your posts? I understand the need to make money and would not complain if the feed included ads. Many of the feeds I subscribe to have ads (Talking Points Memo, for example), and I stay subscribed to them. But I won’t continue to subscribe to a feed that provides only headlines.
I’m sure I’m not alone in this. People who do a lot of reading online have gotten used to using RSS and will not go back to the old way of clicking back and forth between dozens of sites. Especially since much of our blog reading is now done on our smartphones.
I mentioned Talking Points Memo because I know it’s a site Fallows is familiar with. I could just as easily have mentioned Daring Fireball or TidBITS. They’ve all figured out ways to get ads in their feeds, meeting the advertising requirements necessary to keep their businesses going while still providing articles in a form their readers want.
Update 2/28/10
Fallows sent me (and, apparently, about 800 other people) a polite response, agreeing with our complaints. Later came this post, acknowledging the RSS feed problem, and this one, telling us that it’s been fixed. I’m not sure that it has been fixed just yet—the “fixed” post still hasn’t appeared in my RSS reader—but it’s clear that a fix is at least on the way.
Interestingly, the headline-only feeds were not a bad commercial decision; they were just bad programming. Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.
Tags: atlantic, blogging, jamesfallows, rss
Post #1183 in blogging, media | No Comments
CWOB without tweets
February 7th, 2010 at 8:49 am
Looking through my RSS reader this morning, I noticed that Andy Ihnatko has installed a WordPress plugin that collects and summarizes his Twitter stream from the previous day and publishes it as a blog post on the Celestial Waste of Bandwidth.1 Since I
- subscribe to his RSS feed
- follow him on Twitter, and
- don’t feel the need to read everything twice,
I’ve used Yahoo! Pipes to create a customized feed that filters out the Twitter summary posts.
The URL for the feed is at this link.
Regular readers of this blog may be arching their eyebrows. Didn’t Dr. Drang inflict exactly the same sort of redundancies on us last year? Yes, I did, and I’m sorry for it. In my defense, I’ll point out that I
- linked to Pattrick Mosby’s Pipes filter, which filtered out the posts with my tweets;
- later provided my own Pipes filters that did the same thing; and
- eventually dropped the Twitter posts entirely.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see Andy go through the same steps.
Update 2/17/10
I think Andy has turned off the daily Twitter update, but a few days ago a weekly Twitter summary showed up in my RSS reader. I’ve reworked the above-linked Yahoo! Pipes filter to get rid of those, too. The screen shot shows the current filter.
-
Ah, I remember when it was just a Colossal Waste of Bandwidth. ↩
Tags: blogging, cwob, ihnatko, pipes, twitter, yahoo
Post #1170 in blogging, programming, twitter | No Comments
PHP Markdown Extra Math
December 17th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
Tuesday’s MathJax post reminded me that I’ve never made public my modifications to PHP Markdown Extra that allow me to easily write equations here on the blog. So I took a virgin copy of Michel Fortin’s latest version of PHP Markdown Extra, applied my modifications, and put the result in a GitHub repository. From the repository’s README:
PHP Markdown Extra Math is an extension of Michel Fortin’s PHP Markdown Extra, a PHP script for converting text written in Markdown to HTML. The extension consist of adding support for mathematical equations written in LaTeX to be processed by Davide Cervone’s jsMath system.
Here’s how it works. The author, writing in Markdown, inserts inline equations like this
where \(\alpha = (t_1 - t_0)/L\) is the rate at which the thickness increases
enclosing the math in a \( … \) pair, just as if writing in LaTeX. PHP Markdown Extra Math converts that to
where <span class="math"> \alpha = (t_1 - t_0)/L </span> is the rate at which the thickness increases
which is then converted by jsMath into
where \alpha = (t_1 - t_0)/L is the rate at which the thickness increases
Similarly, display Math is written like this:
Putting this into Castigliano's equation, we get
\[\Delta = \frac{\partial U^*}{\partial F} = \frac{12F}{Eb} \int_0^L \frac{x^2}{(t_0 + \alpha x)^3} dx\]
which PHP Markdown Extra Math will turn into this HTML
<p>Putting this into the Castigliano equation, we get</p>
<div class="math">\Delta = \frac{\partial U^*}{\partial F} = \frac{12F}{Eb} \int_0^L \frac{x^2}{(t_0 + \alpha x)^3} dx</div>
which, in turn, will be rendered by jsMath like this:
Putting this into Castigliano’s equation, we get
\Delta = \frac{\partial U^*}{\partial F} = \frac{12F}{Eb} \int_0^L \frac{x^2}{(t_0 + \alpha x)^3} dx
The examples were taken directly from my post on Castigliano’s Second Theorem.
For posts that have just one or two equations, there’s not much to be gained by using the \( … \) and \[ … \] notation in place of <span class="math"> … </span> and <div class="math"> … </div>, but it’s a real timesaver when the equations start to pile up.
If you’re a jsMath aficionado, you may be wondering why I don’t take advantage of its tex2math extension, which will interpret the \( … \) and \[ … \] notation directly. It’s because Markdown already has a backslash escape syntax that works with parentheses and brackets, and there’s no way for me to keep the notation straight if Markdown and jsMath fighting with each other. So I have the tex2math extensions turned off.
Tags: blogging, jsmath, markdown, php, programming, wordpress
Post #1137 in blogging, programming, text editing | No Comments