Mooquackwooftweetmeow · Grey Nicholson

Answers on a Postcard

2007-08-26T21:55:00+00:00

Mooquackwooftweetmeow's never had a comment form; originally, it was just a collection of a few static pages of stuff that I'd written (and now it's just a lot more static pages of stuff I've written) rather than a “proper blog”. I wrote the entire site myself; a comment database was (and still is) way beyond my ability. (I still write everything by myself, in a way, since I wrote the Mooquackwhatnotbot and it generates the entire site.)

Anyhow: point is, no comments. Here's some proof: Justin Ruckman (of Centripetal Notion fame) emailed me a little while back saying he'd've liked to comment on one of my entries, but there's no comment form. So it's definitely true. (Justin ended up offering to host Mooquackwooftweetmeow (thanks for that, by the way). More emails like this, please.)

It'd be very difficult for me to set up comments here—I doubt any hosted “solution” would actually do what I wanted it to; I'd probably end up trying to write my own system. The upshot of all this would be that I'd get to spend x hours a month deleting spam.

Tom Coates has recently written some words about comments, in which he describes how back in the day, before comments were ubiquitous (and when the internet was in black-and-white), people would write full articles or posts on their own sites in response to other posts. I like that idea (old nostalgic, I am).

So, you can email me about anything Mooquackwooftweetmeow-related: mooquackwooftweetmeow@gkn.me.uk. You can also microblog at me: I'm @greytheearthling@queer.party on the Fediverse. Drive-by comments are welcome. If you write a longer, impeccably-thought-out chunk of prose somewhere else, you can point me towards it and I'll add a link here.

Hiatus

2007-07-11T01:25:00+00:00

I don't think Mooquackwooftweetmeow has ever really hit its stride. There may have been a few moments back when the Mooquackwooftweetmeow 4 weblog was new, and perhaps the odd moment of glory fairly recently; but it's never been a constant fountain of genius.

Now, I'm not saying that Mooquackwooftweetmeow will never gather momentum and flourish into the most spectacularly astounding website ever, just that it won't be doing so any time soon. Especially since Mooquackwooftweetmeow currently lives in my university webspace and I recently left university, which means there's a pretty good chance it and The Twaddle will fall off the edge of the internet at some point in the near future.

I am doing other stuff—it just all lives elsewhere on the web—so in the meantime, the front page has morphed into a summary of that stuff. The Mooquackwhatnotbot is a clunky old thing, and my connection to the university's servers is a bit dodgy at the best of times; so having The Man host my content is considerably more convenient than doing everything myself.

While Mooquackwooftweetmeow exists online, it'll always be at http://purl.org/mooquackwooftweetmeow/, and most probably at http://gkn.me.uk. (Hi, Google cache!)

Introduction

2007-07-09T13:45:00+00:00

So… This blog's going to be centred around the idea of decay and how it affects our perception. And then how that leads to assumptions, and illogical categorisations (putting things into boxes where they don't belong).

I'm already guilty after one sentence—to whom does “our” apply? Just me? Me and a few friends? Me and you? (Hi! by the way.) Every person alive today? Every human including the dead and yet-to-be-born? Every mammal? Every animal? Or absolutely every living being including plants and such?

Yeah. Tough one.

Of necessity, I'm going to have to reduce generalisations to only those that apply to me. Generally, though, I'm going to try to challenge assumptions by stretching applicability to the widest sense possible.

I'm not going to criticise directed writing or speech in English for assuming the audience is human—at the time of writing, only humans can understand English beyond a few words—but I will use things being assumed when they shouldn't be as starting points for wider thoughts.

I've written about this sort of stuff before—simplistic things like my “rant about foreigners” in which I complained about an American website using units of measure that were familiar to them, but that a wider, non-American audience found awkward or even incomprehensible. I've also written about what's in the solar system, trying to use language that most objectively describes the reality of what's there, as well as removing the historical misemphasis particularly of Pluto, but also of the “major planets”. (I only just realised that that entry was relevant to this.)

A lot of my photo art has a theme of decay and imperfection. In Four (I use ¡Forward, Russia! nomenclature for the pictures I publish) I tried to make a picture of a murky sky over Hartlepool (Great Britain, Earth etc.) look bright and sunny; the result has a clear air of artificiality (quite possibly due to my lack of GIMP mojo).

For Ten, I drew around the photo by hand, sloppily, creating an outline that was clearly produced in this way. Both of these were an attempt to highlight how the reality of what I photographed gets filtered en route from the camera to the viewer, by artificially filtering the pictures even more; and in the case of Ten, by intentionally introducing imperfections.

As another example of me playing with imperfections, I began my Thirteen series by focusing on the most obvious imperfection the camera recorded (part 1)—the overexposure of the Sun. I then focused on the same area but with the imperfection removed and the sky recoloured to blue, the colour you'd expect of a sky; the resulting picture (part 3) is—in my opinion—less interesting than part 1. And finally, I couldn't bring myself to “waste” such a good photo (again, my opinion, of course) by not publishing the full thing as it was “supposed” to look (part 4)—an example of the valiant fight against decay.

One more thing: there's an article on The Twaddle, a now-mostly-defunct website I run, about the English language (indeed any language) being an intrinsically imperfect representation of what the speaker is trying to express; it argues that this imperfection, the nuances that are applied to any perception that passes through a brain, ought to be appreciated. 00101 01110 00111 01100 01001 10011 01000 01001 10011 00011 01111 01111 01100 wasn't written by me (the author now prefers to remain anonymous for unstalkability reasons) but it probably comes closest to the type of thing I intend to write about on this blog.

(By the way, earlier, “our” applied to anything that can perceive, which I think means any animal.)

Six

2007-05-06T06:11:00+00:00

I've completely redesigned the site again and I'm calling this version Mooquackwooftweetmeow 6. I decided that the top of each entry's page was overwhelmed with a lot of stuff that needn't be there. Someone landing on an entry for the first time doesn't really care what the blog's title is—they just want to read the entry. Similarly, while the often-lengthy tagline—in prime position at the top of the page—used to be a bold statement of quirkiness, I began to find that it just looked silly—annoying, even.

What else was wrong with the old design?

One of the æsthetic ideas behind Arcturus (and thus Vega) was that the sections' backgrounds got gradually darker further down the page—essentially a poor man's subtle gradient down the sidebar. So the sections of the page were all positioned next to each other—connected together. With Canopus I changed to a one-column layout for the main body, to focus on the actual entries. This mostly broke the subtle gradient effect and left the front page with a significantly different layout to the entries' pages.

So the site's layout was a bit of a mess, really. The Mooquackwhatnotbot, my trusty website-building script, has always been a bit of a mess and it wanted tidying up as well. I finally found out how use XSL parameters in xalan (the program that the Mooquackwhatnotbot uses to produce all the site's pages)—I can now tell it to transform mqwtm.xml using bigbadxsltemplate.xsl, with the keyword cheese, which has simplified a lot. It means I can now use one template for every page on the site, and just pass in parameters telling xalan which page to produce.

What's changed?

I've rebuilt the entire site from scratch; the Mooquackwhatnotbot isn't entirely rewritten, but it is heavily modified. There are some things that I haven't added back in—nothing is still here just because it used to be. For example, there are a lot fewer dates flying about—I decided they were unnecessary and just added clutter. However, each entry still has a timestamp for when it was written and, if applicable, for when it was last altered (substantively—I don't count correcting spelling mistakes, for example). I haven't reincluded the content pulled from other sites (“Teleprose”) yet, but it will be back soon. The shameless promotion's gone, too; that might come back if I can find a decent way to do it. More likely, though, is that I'll just write entries pimping good stuff instead.

There are now archive pages for each year, month and day in which an entry was written. I'd always meant to do them, which was part of the reasoning behind the short-lived date-based entry URIs, but I hadn't worked out how to make the Whatnotbot do such tricks. The Recent Entries page was an attempt at doing something like that and so it, too, has vanished into the æther.

How did you come up with the new design?

For the new design—Spica—I disconnected everything. All the page's sections float in space, with a title floating nearby; a strong border separates and connects the title and its subject. With Spica I wanted to make much bolder use of colour than Canopus. The initial idea called for boldly-coloured borders; the real thing's also ended up with a deep background, contrasting with the light background behind the text.

A lot of TV programmes (particularly recent American dramas) have their title sequences at the end of the first part; I thought this might be a good idea to apply to the site. So I got rid of the site's title from the top of the page, and put the entry's title front-and-centre instead. This was the starting point for Spica. I've kept the links to other parts of the page at the top—they are actually useful: maybe you're trying to go a few entries forwards, so you just want the link to the next entry, and don't actually want to read this entry. The skip-links save lots of scrolling, and are pretty essential for keeping the site easy to use for everyone (especially keyboard-users).

At the bottom of every entry is essentially a replica of the front page—I'm embracing my bottom; been doing it since Canopus, and over at The Twaddle. Or rather: the front page is just an entry page minus the entry—a generic reception page. This was easy to do now that every page shares a single template. I did consider putting all the bottom-stuff on the archive pages as well, but it didn't seem right: no-one's expected to read to the bottom of an archive page, a list of other things to read.

What does the text look like?

One thing that wasn't broken in Canopus was the selection of fonts. Vega had used Georgia for titles and links, and a generic sans-serif font for the main text; Canopus changed that to Gentium for titles and links, and Franklin Gothic Book for the main text. Spica uses Gentium, URW Palladio L or Palatino Linotype (the first one that's available) for titles, and Franklin Gothic Book or DejaVu Sans Condensed for everything else.

The positioning of text in Canopus was a bit haphazard, though. Spica is largely composed to a vertical rhythm, although not entirely. The primary line-height is 2em but the page is laid out on a 1em grid, so there's kind of a syncopated, usually-2em–sometimes-1em rhythm. The 2em line-height leaves a generous gap between lines; there's a full line gap between paragraphs; and the line-length is limited to 49em—all of which should make the text thoroughly easy to read.

In-text headings are also set into 2em lines, which maintains the rhythm, but they have an extra blank line above them. This allows the headings to be big and clear without feeling cramped, and visually separates the heading from the preceding paragraph. The headings are all big enough that they don't need to be bold to stand out—serif fonts tend to look not-so-sexy when boldened.

Links are no longer set apart by being in the serif font: Gentium looks small compared to the sans-serif fonts at the same size (because its x-height is relatively small), so mixing the two together tended to look awkward. So links are now just shown in colour. It's a dark colour (actually the same one as the page's background) but it's sufficiently distinct from the grey body text without standing out too much. Unvisited links in the main text; links to unvisited entries; and links you're pointing at also receive an underline, or a border for images.

How about the Starburst and those other pictures?

The starburst background from Vega and Canopus has survived, but it's no longer semi-transparent; that was a throwback to Shades of Grey's almost-topographical presentation of the underlying HTML code. I decided early on that I didn't want a patterned background for the main text (as well as “no gradients, shadows or trendy stuff”), so the starburst only appears in the page's background. The content is all contained in solidly-coloured boxes that float in front of it. The starburst gives the design a sense of layering and a real depth—it looks like there's a lot of space behind the front layer (and the front layer is floating in that space).

The starburst also appears behind the main title on the front page and on archive pages. The border underneath provides a strong visual base for the intricate shape to sit on, and directly connects the site's identity with the design's most striking motif. (If I could have written bollocks like that when I was 15 I'd've done much better in my Design Tech GCSE.) Some entry pages feature their own decorative shape behind the site's title, to give the page some identity of its own. Most of these decorations are made from photos that can be found amongst my photo art; the rest should be self-explanatory.

Six? Wasn't the last version 3.1? Where did 4 and 5 go?

I did call the last version “3.1”, but it was actually the fifth Mooquackwooftweetmeow. “Version 0” was a naff page of randomness at the now-recently-defunct Express Page, which I made when I was 14. It was actually called “MooQuackWoofTweetMeow”. It had background music, marquees, a guestbook and animated GIFs.

“Version 1”, the second version, was a pretty unmemorable page or two living at GeoCities. The content was less absurdly random than its predecessor, but no more worthful. There were no background music or marquees here, but I can't say with certainty that no GIFs were seen to animate. And there was a guestbook.

By now I'd completely forgotten about version 0, so I called the third version “version 2”, which is how the dodgy numbering came about. This version was the first one with any sort of thought behind it. The concept was that it was a 2-D site—the entire thing was on one page with each section occupying its own column. Being made with GeoCities's “WYSIWYG” page-building applet, it was a horribly-inaccessible stew of worst practices, made largely out of JPEG images. The content was mostly an exercise in exaggerated arrogance and verbosity, although I do still find the heading for the Some Things column funny. This one still exists online; I'd steer clear of the guestbook, though.

The fourth version—“version 3.0”—was a hand-coded, best-practices site with a weblog, that lived at FreeWebs. Most of its content survived into the fifth version—“version 3.1”—hence the .1 version number. Both versions are described a bit in the welcome entry I wrote for Mooquackwooftweetmeow 5. There's absolutely no chance of me throwing away everything on Mooquackwooftweetmeow, so either it's stuck at “version 3.x” forever, or I do away with the dodgy version numbers.

And so this is Mooquackwooftweetmeow 6.

The Greatest Comeback Since Lazarus

2006-10-27T02:17:00+00:00

It's nearly November...

November

2005-12-18T11:54:00+00:00

Another November has come and gone without a single Mooquackwooftweetmeow entry. I don't have anything against the month, honestly. It is the month that provokes the most complaining, because the commercial Christmas run-up is in full swing by then; but then that makes reasonable spiel-fodder.

I did have an excuse this year - I was away at York with what I fondly refer to as the shitputer (or “Jonny”) - an old, slow, probably senile thing that runs Windows XP using the same technique the Egyptians used to build the pyramids. It doesn't like the Mooquackwhatnotbot. When I try to run it, it complains that it can't find a file that's clearly present; when I move that file and tell the Whatnotbot to look elsewhere for it, it complains that the file's contents are invalid and nonsensical.

Which is probably true, but Gaz (the other only-about-2½-years-old computer) never complains. And I don't want to fix the Whatnotbot for Jonny as that'll break it on Gaz. Probably. And I have University work I ought to be procrastinating over.

So, you see, I have many varied excuses for not writing during November which, multiplied together, probably comprise 90% of a valid excuse.

And I was drunk. Probably.

The Recent Entries Page

2005-08-20T17:38:00+00:00

In the category of “Changeblog”: The archive is getting increasingly heavy, so I've knocked up a Recent Entries page.

It's just a reworded copy of the archive page that only shows an entry <xsl:if> it was written during the one-month period prior to the site last being updated.

This is the first time since “for Workgroups” launched last July that I've deviated from the (sort of) original design of one page per entry plus the archive page and the front page and nothing else. Simplicity is cool. Seriously. That's why this paragraph isn't cool. 'Cos I keep inserting pointless full. Stops. And continuing typing when I should probably just stop.

Vega 2

2005-08-20T16:23:00+00:00

The process was bloody tedious but the site's now even colourfuller - this is Vega 2.

Grey's now an endangered species about these parts. ...Well, proper grey - all of the “black” text is actually grey, bar the main title. But you see my point - more colourifficness. Yay.

The aforementioned tedium came from having to calculate several background colours for each hue - 60 colours in total. It was just a matter of typing one number into Inkscape and copying out the colour code generated by it, but it was somewhat boring to do sixty times.

Just too much dedication - that's my problem.

Atom 1.0 Coming Soon

2005-07-31T18:03:00+00:00

It's been on my to-do list since Rakaz published his guide to moving from Atom 0.3 to Atom 1.0, but now I've modified the Mooquackwhatnotbot to produce an Atom 1.0 feed.

Doing so was virtually painless. The only problem I had was ensuring that entries without any descriptive blurb got some nominal summary text; but that was my fault for repeating the same code in two places and only remembering to change one instance.

As of the next entry, the main Atom feed will be in Atom 1.0 format. For those who're using a feed reader that only supports 0.3, I'll keep an up-to-date Atom 0.3 feed online at http://gkn.me.uk/atom-0.3.xml for a while, but I will stop updating it pretty soon (probably when Thunderbird 1.5 Beta comes out).

Vega

2005-07-30T17:55:00+00:00

Yesterday I changed the site's design. I decided a while back that I didn't want multiple styles any more.

The main idea behind Sirius, an alternate style that never got off the ground, was to add a bit of colour to the site. Of course, being me, I couldn't decide on which colour to use so I decided to have them rotate per page. I picked some colours and applied them as background colours in Sirius; here I've used them mainly as text colours but also as the colour of the background image. And the background colours. I'll let you figure out the criterion for each page's colour yourself.

The overall design of Sirius was mainly inspired by Stopdesign v3, but my GIMP mojo is far too limited to match that sort of detailed quality. So I've decided to stick with the more minimalistic style that I'm reasonably good at.

I call the new style Vega. Yes, it's very similar to Arcturus (it's actually just a modification of Arcturus) but it is a distinctly different style. Arcturus' “starburst” logo has been kept as the background image. I was going to also use it as the site's icon thereby making it into an all-out Mooquackwooftweetmeow logo, but it doesn't look very distinct at 16 pixels square. Besides, Mooquackwooftweetmeow is just a collection of stuff by me so it's OK to continue using the “GKN” emblem.

The Style Switcher is Dead; Long Live CSS

2005-07-29T04:11:00+00:00

I've killed the Style Switcher - see? It's just an empty shell of a page. This is mainly because I've killed the multiple styleage.

There's no need for random websites to evangelise the capabilities of CSS-driven design any more - total style-switching like that's just plain goofy nowadays. And it allows me to come up with some sort of consistent visual identity. More on that shortly.

For posterity's sake (and because I spent a little while creating them), the styles' logos:

Obfuscating Tedium

2005-04-12T02:59:00+00:00

Featured Entries are “now more featured-y”™, come with “added front-page goodness”™ and “get printed in full on the front page rather than just showing the first paragraph and affording the rest of the page to the latest entry, which I explicitly wanted not-featured anyway”™.

To demonstrate the full effect, here's a nominal second paragraph.

Now go back to the front page and read that nice entry I featured for you so you didn't have to find it by yourself. There's a good reader.

Where Next?

2005-03-31T05:58:00+00:00

I've finally figured out how to make the Mooquackwhatnotbot include next- and previous-entry links in each entry's page. The solution involves defining an XSL variable at the point where the link appears, and referring to the previous/next entry using the current entry as the axis; evidently I didn't think of this the first time round.

I included the “Find this entry in the archive by date” link as a substitute for next and previous links when I found the latter too tricky; it's staying because: it provides a nice chronological overview of the entry; the archive is primarily ordered chronologically; and it's doing no harm.

Also, because the solution uses <xsl:if>s anyway, I get the problem of cockups on the first and last entry fixed for free.

I originally planned to put the next and previous links at the bottom of the article, in the main content area. Looking at it now I think it makes more sense for them to go in the Blurb, with the links to the archive, thus leaving the content area for the content.

In loosely-related news, the address of the Atom feed is now tidier – I already had a PURL at http://purl.org/mooquackwooftweetmeow/atom pointing to http://purl.org/mooquackwooftweetmeow/atom.xml, which itself uses a PURL. So there was absolutely no reason not to drop the .xml to match the entries' new URIs.

Now Slightly Less Cool

2005-02-09T15:51:00+00:00

“From York, the greatest city in the world, it's Mooquackwooftweetmeow with Grey Nicholson!”

Mooquackwooftweetmeow now lives in my university webspace, and as I now have a computer here, access to some internetage, and a slightly-modified Mooquackwhatnotbot, I figured I'd write something here.

Since the “real” URI of everything around here would be changing anyway, I decided it would be a good time to reorganise mqwtm's URI structure, despite it being uncool to do so.

I originally used dates in the site's URIs because all the cool kids were doing it. Unfortunately those dates were really quite arbitrary, and the fact that I tend to write a lot at about midnight just exascerbated the problem. Not only could I not remember the URI of an important post I made a couple of weeks ago, I couldn't remember that of one I made yesterday (or was it the day before?)

I've also chucked the .html suffix and adopted the practice of giving every entry its own directory and calling them all index.html. This way I can just link to the directory, and any files associated with the entry are explicitly so by being within the entry's folder; before they were just associated with the day I made the entry. I did this mainly because seeing .html or .htm at the end of a URI just annoys me - I've no good reason for using them. Besides, this is technically XHTML.

I've just about managed to avoid Atom sacrilege (changing supposedly-permanent URIs) because the Atom feed only shows the last month's entries and this is the only entry in the last month. In order to diminish the uncoolness caused by the change, old versions of every page still live (for now) at the old URI at ntl (mainly because I don't have access to delete them) and at the corresponding URI here, so old PURLs will still work.

So, entries now live at http://gkn.me.uk/<id>, where <id> is a unique id that I manually assign to every entry. For example, this entry lives at http://gkn.me.uk/nowslightlylesscool, my contact page is at http://gkn.me.uk/grey and the style switcher is at http://gkn.me.uk/styleswitcher. Cool, huh?

Featured Entry

2004-09-22T05:22:00+00:00

Automation is all well and good, provided it's coupled with control. At this point this entry could go into a discussion of I, Robot; it's not going to.

To paraphrase something Andrei once said, “one of the things that had bugged me about Mooquackwooftweetmeow was the fact that as I wrote new articles, they always appeared as the lead story. I had no good way of adding new content without distracting from what I wanted to be the prominent entry, which was always the last thing I'd written. Maybe this is how weblogs are supposed to work, but I view Mooquackwooftweetmeow more as a publishing platform for myself than a weblog. I needed to break this model.” Hence the new “Featured Entry” item on the front page. Actually this addition was inspired by Andrei's change (which he later repealed), but my solution is a little less all-out.

Originally I'd intended to include the entire Featured Entry on the front page, but I ran into a problem with the Related Links list. It would be too complicated to display the Related list if either the Latest or the Featured entry had related links and if the Featured entry had related links include them and if the Latest entry had related links include them, but if neither had related links show the Perpetual Links list instead.

So I decided to display just the first paragraph of the Featured Entry on the front page. Then there wouldn't be the need to present the Featured Entry's related links, because there would be no pretense of displaying everything about the entry. A good side-effect of this is that it prevents the Featured Entry from completely obscuring the Latest Entry.

The Featured Entry is also added to the top of the Atom feed if it's not already present as a recent entry.

The key thing is that the Featured Entry is optional - I can simply empty the <featuredentry/> element in The Big, Bad Source File (which otherwise contains the Featured Entry's id) and the Featured Entry will simply disappear from the front page. No maintenance is required - fully automatic control.

Slight Delay

2004-07-30T01:06:00+00:00

OK, so I spent the last hour designing Sirius' logo. It is quite difficult to come up with distinct designs that look like stars and are viewable on a light background... so I've slightly cheated.

Anyhow, I might start writing some CSS soon.

Work-in-progress

2004-07-29T23:57:00+00:00

I've just been visiting Stopdesign; naturally, I'm inspired to do a bit of CSS design, so I'm setting about designing a new style for the site, Sirius.

It's a work-in-progress and probably will be for a while, but it'll be live on the site as I work on it. You may observe via the style switcher.

Reorderiffic

2004-07-22T14:58:00+00:00

The Blurb is now above the main content in the site's source and thus also in Toliman - it makes more sense that way.

I didn't even need to modify Arcturus to retain its layout. As you were.

Plan Change II

2004-07-19T23:15:00+00:00

It seems that updates to entries are actually considerably less notable than new entries, and don't deserve the front-page prominence I thought they did.

A minute ago there was a bit on apostrophes on the front page. It's an old v3.0 weblog entry about a contrivance I had to use then. I've updated it to say I'm no longer using this contrivance (i.e. the entire entry's redundant and irrelevant) and it makes the front page.

Obviously this won't do. I've rejigged the gubbins (technical term) and now the entry that was written last (rather than updated last) makes the front page. The title remains “The Latest”; although that phrasiology was only chosen to be ambiguous about whether it was a new entry or an update, “Latest Entry” just doesn't seem to have the same mojo.

The Recent Updates list on each page is now a Recent Entries list, too. Also, something I tweaked a little earlier: if the latest entry has any Related Links, they now appear on the front page with it, instead of the Perpetual Links - they get boring after a while).

By the way, my use of the term “Recent Entries” in the blurb about the Mooquackwhatnotbot was just a cockup on my part - not a prophecy, nor a conspiracy.

I've Got A Brand New Content Management System And I'll Give You The Key

2004-07-19T02:15:00+00:00

...if you ask nicely. Mooquackwooftweetmeow is now, like The Twaddle, generated from arbitrary XML using batch XSLT. If that's completely foreign to you, the rest probably will be (but I'll try my best).

At El Twad, everything is done in nice, distinct articles - there are no piddly little entries like here. So for The Twaddle, each article can be kept in its own file. These files are then each passed through the same XSLT template/filter, resulting in similarly structured pages, each with different content. The filter uses a little class- and id-based trickery to implement the differences between the front page, the Articles page, the other admin pages and the articles; these amount to a different set of meta-blurb around the outside of the main content.

Here, however, it'd be hopelessly impractical - or rather, inconvenient - to have a separate file for each entry. Especially when an entry may be no more that a couple of lines. So everything must live in one big file - mqwtm.xml, The Big, Bad Source File. If I have one source file and want to create many pages (which would be nice), I need many XSLT filters.

The problem then becomes “How do I generate many filters, one for each entry?”. The only difference there needs to be between these filters is the id of the entry it will apply to - the layout will not differ between entries.

XSL allows one to define variables which can be used later in the XSLT template. So, the entry's id, i.e. the entryid is defined as an XSL variable which, surprisingly enough, I label entryid.

Later on in the template then, I can instruct the XSL transformer to concern itself with “the entry whose id value is the entry with which we are currently dealing”. This means I can instruct it to display “the current entry's title”, “the current entry's body text”, etc.

So, the only difference between each entry's XSL stylesheet/template (henceforth referred to as an “entrysheet”) need be one string of text, once. But how does one go about that?

To perform the batch XSL transformation, I'm using Xalan-C, the precompiled C++ version of Xalan; I was using Xalan-J, the Java version, for the Twaddlebot, as I had correctly assumed that a Java program would “run anywhere”. I'd also incorrectly assumed that I'd need some special software developers' tools to run the C++ version. In fact, the C++ version is simpler to use, in my (intentionally limited) experience, and much quicker - which is handy, as a lot of XSL transformations are required to pull this off.

Unfortunately, I know of no way to pass a variable to Xalan - to say, for example, “Transform mqwtm.xml using bigbadxsltemplate.xsl, with the keyword ‘cheese’.”. But I do know how to pass a variable to an MS-DOS batch program. Yup - those things.

The end result is incredibly hacky. The XSL stylesheet to be applied to all entries, to transform them from arbitrary, homebrew XML into world-famous XHTML, is kept in two chunks - the bit before the entryid needs to be inserted, and the bit after. I then have an MS-DOS batch file which copies the start of the template to a file, appends the name of the current entry (passed to it as a variable), then appends the remainder of the template. Hacktastic.

Next problem: I must pass the name of each entry, in turn, to the aforementioned batch program (entrysheetcompiler.bat). Solution: createentrysheetcompiler.xsl. Yes, XSLT can be used to rustle up text documents as well as XML documents. And those text documents can happen to form batch commands when read by MS-DOS. And they do. This XSL template, when run on The Big, Bad Source File, transforms each entry into a command which says “run entrysheetcompiler.bat with the variable [the entry's title]”. This is done using the magic of <xsl:for-each/> - go on, look it up - you know you want to.

Applying this transformation to The Big, Bad Source File creates an MS-DOS batch program which runs entrysheetcompiler.bat on said Big, Bad Source File, using each entry's title in turn as a keyword/variable/parameter.

Now, I have a stylesheet for each entry; each one will transform The Big, Bad Source File into a page displaying that entry. Let's do that then. I use the method I used to create entrysheetcompiler.bat, to create a batch that will transform each entry, using its template, into a page; I entitle that batch “entrytransformer.bat”.

createentrytransformer.xsl, the template used to make entrytransformer.bat, also contains a few lines to transform the Front Page, the Archive and the Atom feed. They are transformed using separate, hand-made XSL templates for each, designed to be run on - you guessed it - The Big, Bad Source File. The Front Page's template, the Archive's template, and the master template for entries, are all fairly similar (hence the consistent visual style); I could use another level of back-end automation to generate all three from a common source, but at the moment I maintain them separately and manually.

The XHTML which is cacked out by entrytransformer.bat isn't the cleanest it might be, so I need to run HTML Tidy on every file. Same process - use <xsl:for-each/> (have you looked it up yet? it's very useful) to, for each entry in the source, write a batch command which performs a set action on many files, whose filenames differ only by containing a different entry's id and published date (all of which can be readily extracted from TBBSF).

And that's basically it. All that's needed now is to run each of those components in order. I have a master batch file to do that, the Mooquackwhatnotbot.

First it runs createentrysheetcompiler.xsl, createentrytransformer.xsl and createxhtmlcleaner.xsl on TBBSF. This results in three new batch programs, entrysheetcompiler.bat, entrytransformer.bat and xhtmlcleaner.bat. These are then run in turn: entrysheetcompiler.bat generates a template for each entry, entrytransformer.bat transforms TBBSF using each of those templates in turn (that's what takes most of the time), then xhtmlcleaner.bat tidies up the output. The entrysheets and the three generated batch programs are then no longer needed - they'll be generated anew next time - so they are deleted.

I also back up The Big, Bad Source File at the start of each Mooquackwhatnotbot-ing session, in case I accidentally do something daft that erases it. This is done by another batch program, which simply copies mqwtm.xml to a location given by the last time TBBSF was updated; this batch program is generated from another (comparitively simple) XSLT template.

The whole process takes around five minutes on a good day, most of the time being taken up transforming the entries into pages. Xalan must be “phoning home” to check that the markup I've used is actually the valid XHTML is says it is - the process takes longer when my connection is clogged, and the text-mode transformation used to make the batch files is relatively instantaneous.

Static, manually-updated stuff like the CSS stylesheets (they're applied by your web browser when you view a page and are uploaded with the page to the web - not to be confused with XSL stylesheets, which I apply before uploading) and images used in entries and throughout the site, is kept separately from auto-generated stuff on my computer. This way I know what I can delete safe in the knowledge that it'll be regenerated next time I run the Whatnotbot. When uploaded, everything intersperses, keeping the images and other gubbins with the appropriate pages.

Over at El Twad, I need to maintain separately a central list of articles, in order to tell the Twaddlebot what to transform - this is the drawback of using a decentralised storage system (read: “separate files”) for articles. I also need to manually maintain the list of articles to put on the main menu; I've managed to combine that list with the Articles page's, but it's not ideal and it's certainly not automatic. That's not too much of a problem, as articles at El Twad are much more of an event than entries are here. It just adds a little more work per item. The beauty of this system is that I just add the entry to The Big, Bad Source File, push the button, wait for the Whatnotbot to work its magic, then upload.

Incidentally, I use FileZilla to FTP everything up to my mum's ntl webspace - that, and the fact that I'm already well over FreeWebs' 50-file limit, is why Mooquackwhatnot is no longer at FreeWebs. Besides, FTP is just faster and cooler.

The benefits of keeping everything in one file are quite cool; for example, those Recent Entries there, in an intentionally vague relative position due to multiple-stylability, are made possible because of it. I think it's possible to draw in content from other XML documents, but it's easier to (i.e. I know how to) draw in content from the same document. Those Recent Entries use logic like: “for each entry, sorted by the date it was updated, in reverse chronological order, if an entry is within the first five, show its title, last updated date, etc.; if it's also the first one, show the first paragraph as well.”.

This definitely couldn't be done without a central list of entries, and is much, much easier if all the entries are actually kept in the same document so Xalan, the XSL transformer, can look at them all at the same time. Those Featured and Perpetual Links only exist once in The Big, Bad Source File, but are propogated to every page (where they're needed).

If I want to completely overhaul the structure of the site (which I shouldn't need to - I've tried to use the most semantic structure possible) I'd only have to change three files - one for entries, one for the Front Page, and one for the Archive. It's not one file, but it could be a lot worse. I can change small details of every page quite easily.

This method is quite portable - I'm sure the batch programs could be ported to a Unix format. But more importantly, the end result requires absolutely no browser-side XSL (bloody Opera), no PHP, no SQL, no ASP, no Perl, definitely no .NET, and not even any JavaScript. This would work on GeoCities (if they didn't insist on attaching an HTML-invalid advert).

I haven't uploaded any samples of the Mooquackwhatnotbot, not out of principle or anything, but because you'd probably struggle to make sense of even the complete thing (I know I do). If you fancy a peek, I can send you all the gubbins and a sample Smaller, Not-Quite-As-Bad Source File - just email me.

I haven't made any mention of the actual resultant site, except to demonstrate its method of construction. This is intentional - I'll discuss the site's structure and styling (i.e. XHTML and CSS) in a forthcoming entry.

Proper Multiple Styleage

2004-07-11T23:30:00+00:00

After several days' absence due to various combinations of inarsibility and drunkenness, I've returned, and finished up the site's restylifier. Observe hither.

Update: The Style Switcher is Dead; Long Live CSS

In partially-related news, I've also hooked up a meta-link for the site's Atom feed, for the purpose of playing nice with the Live Bookmarks feature in new Firefoxen.

Style Switcher

2004-07-11T22:50:00+00:00

Update: The Style Switcher is Dead; Long Live CSS

Print Away

2004-07-04T22:06:00+00:00

In a half-arsed attempt to provide some sort of styling for printed copies of Mooquackwooftweetmeow, I've tried to use Toliman when printing, even if you're viewing Arcturus.

I couldn't figure out how to make this work so, reluctantly, I've now spent the half hour necessary to add proper print styling, to both Arcturus and Toliman.

In fact, I've added an extra stylesheet, only used when printing, to do things such as appending URIs to links and removing useless sections (the recent entries list, for example). This stylesheet is called no matter what style you use, to avoid my having to repeat myself for each style.

The layout for Toliman is just left as is - it's already very plain (that's the point) and is thus already suited to printing. Arcturus is tweaked a little for printing. The content column is wider; conversely the blurb is thinner. The link boxes are forced below both the content and the blurb, so they can both be made wider, to accommodate the appended URIs.

See for yourself - print stuff out; report any deliberate mistakes to printaway@gkn.me.uk.

And finally, Toliman is no longer labelled “(beta)”. Although I think I might want to tweak a bit of the spacing at some point, it's good enough. Having said that, Google News is still labelled “beta”. Crazy Americans.

Toliman

2004-07-03T23:26:00+00:00

I've just uploaded a second stylesheet for Mooquackwooftweetmeow. As promised, it's a vanilla, lightly-styled, use-your-browser's-default-settings-fest.

It's not finished yet, but it's not too far from. I haven't written (by which I mean imported and modified) a style switcher yet - I probably will soon. Until then, just use your browser's built-in style switcher, which will generally only stick until you leave the page.

Ironically enough, the only mainstream graphical browser that really needs to use Toliman cos it can't handle Arcturus - IE for Windows - is one of few without a built-in style-switcher. Good, eh?

I'd appreciate any Toliman-related suggestions - for example, cases where I've inadvertently modified a default, to adverse effect. You can send them to me at toliman@gkn.me.uk.

Slight Change of Plan

2004-07-03T15:45:00+00:00

One-paragraph entries use their entry in the archive as a permanent link. This is because the first paragraph is displayed there; if there's only one paragraph then that's the entirety of the entry.

But if I update a one-paragraph entry, especially significantly, its permanent link should be its own page. For this reason, and for the craic, every entry will now have its own page. My apologies for duplicated items in the Atom feed.

Note that the “old” links haven't been broken - they still lead to the archive.

Welcome to Mooquackwooftweetmeow version 3.1

2004-07-01T01:15:00+00:00

Welcome to Mooquackwooftweetmeow version 3.1 “for Workgroups”.

Version 3.0's Weblog was set up so I could easily and quickly add new content to Mooquackwooftweetmeow - it was simply too much effort to manually create a new page for every entry.

The trouble was that I couldn't really make substantial entries in the weblog as it was sort of tucked away - anything “big” should, I felt, have its own page, and be a proper article.

So I ended up not writing about things I wanted to because I wanted to do it “properly”… which isn't good.

The idea behind version 3.1 was to merge the articles and the weblog so that significant entries would have their own page and short ones would only be part of an archive list. I've managed to do it. Version 3.1 is a complete overhaul of version 3.0. Some of the content remains, however, hence the “.1” version number.

Mooquackwooftweetmeow, like The Twaddle, is now driven by an XML+XSL-based offline page generation system… sounds complicated - and it is.

The most notable improvement this has allowed, in my opinion anyway, is the Recent Entries list to the left, which appears on every page. I'll write up a more detailed description of the Mooquackwhatnotbot some time soon.

The site's new design is entitled Arcturus; the old design, Shades of Grey has simply disappeared. Arcturus is designed to be a significant evolution - I certainly haven't tried to imitate the old style - but which still maintains much of the character of Shades of Grey.

Unlike version 3.0, there's no print stylesheet and no ever-so-slightly styled version - yet. Again, I'll write more details of the CSS in a separate entry in the near future.

There's also no RSS feed. RSS 2.0 uses a ridiculous date format (i.e. not numbers) so it'd take a bit of extra work to generate such a feed. It's probably possible though. RSS/RDF 1.0 is equally manky with its modules and whatnot.

Anyway, we've got a perfectly good syndication format in Atom; the Atom feed lives at http://gkn.me.uk/atom. If your RSS reader doesn't also support Atom, it's probably crap. Or you could use 2RSS to convert the Atom feed to RSS - subscribe hither.

Prototastic

2004-06-23T00:36:00+00:00

I've just got the backbone of the next version of Mooquackwooftweetmeow working.

Its big toe just wiggled.

Don't hash those numbers!

2004-06-21T21:30:00+00:00

I just remembered XHTML ids aren't allowed to begin with numbers, so it's probably not a good idea to give weblog entries permalinks like mine.

Never mind - they'll all be breaking soon anyway (I know - Atom sacrilege, but until URNs work better it's sometimes gonna be unavoidable).

Hash those hs!

2004-06-21T13:55:00+00:00

A quick request of everyone who writes web pages, especially weblogs, or who designs web page templates:

Give every heading an id, so that other folks (and you) can link to sections of an article or entry.

It's not quite Purple Numbers but it does the job more than effectively (and it's not half as overkilly). I reckon it's fair to assume that if someone wants to link to a part of your page in another page, they'll have the ability to view your page's source and find the ids. And if they can't, purple numbers would probably befuddle them anyway.

I do it automatically - it really takes little effort. Another point is to use proper titles, not #title4, so that if you add a chunk, nothing will break (and referring urls look much friendlier).

Watch out - here comes the “link to other weblogs” trick!

2004-06-07T19:10:00+00:00

Redesigns, anyone? Looks like fun.

The Twaddlebot has been unleashed

2004-06-07T18:40:00+00:00

Last night version 1.0 of The Twaddle went live. It uses arbitrary XML and XSLT to generate valid XHTML pages... offline.

The idea of uploading bare-bones articles and an XSLT template, allowing the browser to generate pages as they're required, was a no-go. But I managed to rig up the transformation offline, to be run as a batch.

Following the tradition of giving XML languages names that are barely-logical acronyms beginning with X, I call the language XTw, which stands for XML... Twaddle... something.

Here's how I worked the magic (borrowing liberally from a newsgroup posting I made on the subject):

This assumes: no programming experience, but enough computer savvy to create XML and XSL files to need transforming in the first place; and a Windows (XP) machine)

First off, you'll need Xalan, available from http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j/ (and the requisite Java runtime, which you probably already have)

The actual file I downloaded was http://apache.rmplc.co.uk/dist/xml/xalan-j/xalan-j-current-bin.tar.gz

There's also http://apache.rmplc.co.uk/dist/xml/xalan-j/xalan-j-current-bin.zip if you prefer a zip.

The version I got was 2.6.0 (the Java version).

Unzip Xalan into a folder. I used C:\Program Files\xalan-j_2_6_0

Now the code from http://evc-cit.info/cit041x/batchfiles.html#transform:

echo off java -cp h:\java\xmljar\xalan-j_2_5_1\bin\xml-apis.jar;h:\java\xmljar\xalan-j_2_5_1\bin\xercesImpl.jar;h:\java\xmljar\xalan-j_2_5_1\bin\xalan.jar;. org.apache.xalan.xslt.Process -IN %1 -XSL %2 -OUT %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9

The only line break should be after echo off.

Copy this into a plain text editor (e.g. Notepad), and save it as filename.bat (I used ANSI encoding, if it matters)

You should now have an MS-DOS Batch File.

(Apparently some versions of Notepad append .txt to filenames, even if they contain a file extension. In these cases, quoting the filename - e.g. “filename.bat” - allegedly solves the problem)

You'll most likely have to modify the code to point to the actual locations of your Xalan installation and files.

I only plan on using one XSL stylesheet with multiple files; the input files will be filename.xml. The output files will be filename.htm and will be kept in the folder above the one where the input and XSL files are kept. So, I modified the code a little:

java -cp "c:\program files\xalan-j_2_6_0\bin\xml-apis.jar";"c:\program files\xalan-j_2_6_0\bin\xercesImpl.jar";"c:\program files\xalan-j_2_6_0\bin\xalan.jar";. org.apache.xalan.xslt.Process -IN %1.xml -XSL "c:\path\to\an\xsl\file\xsl.xml" -OUT ..\%1.htm

This should all be on one line. %1 in the code will be replaced by the first argument passed to the batch file, %2 by the second argument, etc. ..\ means up one folder. The quotation marks around the filenames cause them to be treated as one item, despite their containing spaces.

You can add @echo off (without quotes) in an empty line above, if you prefer not to have masses of textual output in the command console. e.g.:

@echo off java -cp "c:\...

echo off turns off the display of subsequent commands; @ hides the echo off command.

To perform the transformation, open a command console (Start > Run > "cmd") and navigate to the location of your XML, XSL and batch files, by typing

cd "c:\path\to\files"

(including the quotes)

For simplicity's sake, I've shoved everything in the same folder, and used absolute paths for the programs. You could probably also mess around with relative paths or the path environment variable, but I can't be bothered.

I ended up having to use HTML Tidy to contort the output into valid XHTML. My final batch file reads:

java -cp "c:\program files\xalan-j_2_6_0\bin\xml-apis.jar";"c:\program files\xalan-j_2_6_0\bin\xercesImpl.jar";"c:\program files\xalan-j_2_6_0\bin\xalan.jar";. org.apache.xalan.xslt.Process -IN %1.xtw -XSL "XTw2XHTML.xsl" -OUT ..\thetwaddle\%1.htm "C:\Program Files\HTMLTidy\tidy.exe" -q -m -c --show-warnings no --output-xml yes --output-xhtml yes -latin1 --doctype strict --tidy-mark no --wrap 0 --ascii-chars no --drop-proprietary-attributes yes --fix-bad-comments no ..\thetwaddle\%1.htm echo Done %1.

(Line breaks have been doubled for clarity.)

The input XML files are all labelled filename.xtw; the XSL stylesheet is XTw2XHTML.xsl, and the output files are cacked into the folder thetwaddle, a sibling of the folder where the batch file lives, and assigned a suffix of .htm.

Those options shown for Tidy are the result of trial and error, or rather, trial and testing and reading Tidy's Quick Reference - no warranty implied. The echo command prints out a message for each finished file.

This batch file is wrapped up in another one, which repeatedly calls the first, thus:

@echo off echo Transforming XTw into XHTML... call xtw2xhtml afile call xtw2xhtml otherfiles echo Done.

The text output is just to make the command console more interesting while the batch program is running. It also helps pinpoint any errors, such as typos, which show up as blobs of text in the command console.

The result of all this fiddling is that I can change pages' contents more easily; I've been able to, fairly easily, implement a few minor changes that would have taken effort before. The final product lives here.

In semi-related news, it turns out that PURLs such as purl.org/mooquackwooftweetmeow, without the trailing slash, are possible - it's just partial redirects that have to end with slashes. The Twaddle's now on PURLs, too - purl.org/thetwaddle - with or without the slash.

While uploading “Unleash The Twaddlebot!” (The Twaddle v1.0), I was reminded that we're approaching the 50-file limit; that's not including styles, which are kept in a separate account. This means we'll probably have to change hosts.

Fortunately, ntl provide 55 megabytes of space, so I'm planning to shift everything there. This shouldn't be too troublesome now that everything's on PURLs.

Adventures in XML

2004-04-27T17:40:00+00:00

I did manage to get the XML+XSL-based jiggery-pokery for The Twaddle working - quite nicely, actually. Getting the entire contents of the content field onto the page took a little bit of effort, as described on the mozillaZine forums.

I won't be implementing this on The Twaddle, though - for a start, Opera and KHTML don't like XSLT. And it's not half as accessible for non-standard browsers (relics, mobile devices, text browsers...) as plain, extraneous-menu-items-and-such-written-into-the-article XHTML is. Nonetheless, a working example is online for the time being.

Update: the real thing's gone live... sort of... so the prototype has been removed. Additional related blurb is contained in a later entry in this weblog.

There's a slight chance that I might implement an XML-driven article system on Mooquackwooftweetmeow, where I'm not too fussed about old and/or buggy browsers. The fact that mobile devices won't render the page is more of a concern.

Perhaps some way of pulling in external XHTML fragments could be handled in CSS3? Then again, why duplicate XSL functionality in CSS - small devices' browsers could just be taught to handle XSL.

One more Twaddle-related thing: thanks to Internet Explorer conditional comments (on which MSDN has an hilarious article), I'm now feeding IE users some nice propaganda in the foot of the front page:

You're using Internet Explorer?! You do realise that it's years out-of-date, and screws up most modern web pages, don't you? In fact it's screwing this one up right now and you don't even know it. Try a proper web browser instead.

Oh, and another tiny little piece of The Twaddle-related trivia: the version number on the front page is now in the title text of the copyright notice - it's tidier and it leaves room for a pointless codename.

Over to the Mooquackwooftweetmeow Weblog now, where, thanks to our old friend XML namespaces, and our newer friend the XSL copy-of element, proper links are now in use. I've gone back through the weblog and updated plain text URLs to be links. The more observant of you will have noticed that there have been a smattering of links throughout this post - that'll be the norm from now on.

The even more observant of you will have noticed line breaks as well. I'd use paragraphs but the XSL stylesheet inserts the content into a paragraph - I don't think the XHTML validator would like paragraphs within paragraphs (not that it'd like this Atom file at all...). And I don't think the site's CSS would like divs to hold the text, in place of paragraphs; it might - I just haven't looked at mqwtm's CSS in ages so I can't remember. Besides, line breaks are lighter on the markup than open-and-close <xhtml:p> tags.

And in a final twist of XMLish loveliness, I've chucked a few XHTML <code> tags in as well.

</epic>

Opera + XSL = Eugh

2004-04-23T14:16:00+00:00

Evidently Opera doesn't like XSL - this weblog shows up as a lot of plain text with the odd URL chucked in. The question is whether I care.

The Twaddle is more of a public offering than this weblog, so it matters a little more if it's inaccessible using Opera... but then how many readers of The Twaddle use Opera? I'd say few to none. (Checking the site stats for The Twaddle will probably show a few Opera hits - most of which are me).

IE + XML + XSL + XHTML + W3C = Get In!

2004-04-23T14:07:00+00:00

As a prelude to some major back-end renovation I'm planning for The Twaddle, I decided to see if I could get Internet Explorer 6 to display this XSL-ified weblog nicely, not accounting for IE-unsupported CSS (which is already taken care of at The Twaddle). Previously, IE displayed the DOCTYPE declaration as plain text at the top of the page; using strategic HTML commenting, I've managed to prevent it from doing so.

Actually, I bet simply removing the DOCTYPE declaration wouldn't affect either Gecko or IE's rendering of the page, as I think XML kicks both of them into standards mode anyway.

The next step is to try this with some of The Twaddle. And I'd probably best check Opera's effort, too.

Hurrah for Ridiculous Quotes!

2004-04-23T02:12:00+00:00

While perusing this weblog at this ridiculous hour, I happened to follow my (text) link to the April Fools' Day thread on The Twaddle Forums, whereupon (oh, yeah!) I saw this most ridiculous quote from my cousin, who likes to call himself bob:

so far 197 posts have been affected by the_word kangaroo

- underscore and all. I think this calls for a colon-dee :D

And while making this post, I remembered that Britain is now on BST, so my last couple of posts may have actually been an hour earlier than they say (this one's about right). I shan't change them for I haven't the arsibility.

And finally, drop by The Twaddle over the next couple of days - it's been St.-George'sed.

Apostrophes

2004-03-15T16:10:00+00:00

I'm now using the aforementioned RSS Reader to read this weblog. So it has to be valid Atom, the content must validate when RSSified, and still validate when XHTMLified. Thus, to save hassle relating to escape characters and other such technicalities, I'm now using straight apostrophes as “quotes”. It's ugly, but it works.

Update: with the advent of the Mooquackwhatnotbot I'm now using proper HTML quotes - <q> and </q>. The usual disclaimer about Internet Explorer's crapness applies, as does one about Atom feed readers - they probably won't show any quotes.

The Twaddle is now printastic, and other web-authoring-related digressions

2004-03-08T19:30:00+00:00

A while ago I added a print stylesheet to Mooquackwooftweetmeow; now, The Twaddle's had the same treatment. On Saturday I also gave The Twaddle a site icon, so the site's now approaching Mooquackwooftweetmeow in completeness. Does this mean v1.0 any time soon? Probably not...maybe.

I've been meaning to overhaul Mooquackwooftweetmeow's underlying XHTML/CSS for a while, mainly due to unnecessary over-id-ing in anticipation of some sort of use in future. My approach to The Twaddle was exactly the reverse - things were added in as and when needed. The Twaddle went from idea to reality in two days, and from blank files to website in one evening, so I didn't really have time to consider what id-s might come in handy later.

The Twaddle was initially based around some content - the website only existed to purvey the content. By contrast, Mooquackwooftweetmeow has only ever existed “for the hell of it”. The approach taken with The Twaddle seems to have worked better. Mooquackwooftweetmeow seems perhaps over-designed now; the Georgia font probably didn't help as it prompted the small-caps for the “UTC” at the foot of each item; this is titled with “Co-ordinated Universal Time”... all of which seems rather over-elaborate.

Another source of much annoyance is the fact that the menu items aren't centred; I might have another bash at centring them nicely...

RSSification

2004-02-24T19:20:00+00:00

2RSS (http://www.2rss.com/) has a nice converteriser which outputs any Atom feed (such as this one - wink, wink) as RSS, available at http://www.2rss.com/software.php?page=atom2rss So now even if your newsreader isn't Atom-enabled you can still read this weblog; now you've got no excuse.

Mooquackwooftweetmeow's Going Nowhere

2004-02-20T23:00:00+00:00

I now have my own PURL top-level domain. “What in the heck is a PURL top-level domain?” PURL stands for Persistant Uniform Resource Locator - an URL is just a normal web address. A PURL is simply a redirect, designed so that it persists indefinitely; I can change what purl.org/mooquackwooftweetmeow/ points to, but the PURL itself never changes. This means that if I ever move to another webhost (which I don't expect to happen very soon), I can point purl.org/mooquackwooftweetmeow/ there instead. This weblog can be found at http://purl.org/mooquackwooftweetmeow/weblog, but unfortunately KlipFolio doesn't understand HTTP redirects. Bugger.

Nonetheless, if and when - :) - you link to Mooquackwooftweetmeow, use http://purl.org/mooquackwooftweetmeow/ for the main site, and http://purl.org/mooquackwooftweetmeow/weblog for this weblog (note the distribution of slashes). Now that I've got my own PURL, I've changed the Atom feed so that the items are IDed using PURLs; items' IDs are never suppose to change, so PURLs are perfect for that. This means you may get duplicate items in this feed now (and only the once), but you never will later.

Update: Yeah, well - I can't always be right. The appropriate URL to link to this weblog is now http://gkn.me.uk/ for the web page, and http://gkn.me.uk/atom for the Atom feed.

Klipfolio + Atom = 1/2

2004-02-20T19:20:00+00:00

OK, I can't embed an Atom feed in a Klip, but you can view Atom feeds using Klipfolio. Its Feed Reader Klip (http://www.klipfarm.com/farm.php?page=info&klip=916) accepts Atom as well as RSS 2.0 and RDF (RSS 1.0).

Isn't XML wonderful?

2004-02-20T19:15:00+00:00

Despite an hour of valiant effort, I've been unable to convince Gecko to render XHTML embedded in an Atom feed. I've tried encoding the arrow brackets, various namespace trickery... to no avail. So you're gonna have to put up with plain text URLs, until someone can show me how it's done... anybody?

Namespaces are fairly fun

2004-02-19T18:30:00+00:00

The Feed Validator (http://feedvalidator.org) gave me a thumbs-down :( Entries' IDs have to be valid URLs, you see, and I'd been using them as arbitrary labels. I'd also been leeching off these arbitrary labels in order to create anchors in the XHTML representation of the feed; those using a web browser can check they work by clicking this item's title; those using a news aggregator can visit the alternate link; in both cases, the item's title should be at the very top of the browser window.

I managed to circumvent Atom's rigidity using XML's flexibility - I invented a new arbitrary label for each item - label, under my own namespace; I now have everything working as before, plus a valid feed. Glory!

I think I'll go and play a bit of pool now...

Wow! Internet Explorer can even mangle XML!

2004-02-19T16:15:00+00:00

Here's me thinking Internet Explorer wouldn't display this feed properly! Obviously, it doesn't... but it at least has a go at mangling it, leaving this text (and this) legible. You do get a nice piece of HTML above the title, however.

So, then - Hello! to all you fools reading this in Internet Explorer! Do yourself a favour and fetch a web browser (http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/).

Actually, on the topic of plain text links and Mozilla Firefox, I've now reinstalled the text/plain extension for Firefox (http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/textplain), so I can now select plain text links, right-click 'em, and do stuff. I suggest you also install it; it'll come in handy for this log.

Freewebs aren't very good at MIME types... part II

2004-02-19T15:40:00+00:00

Sorta got side-tracked there... Anyway, to get around the incorrect MIME type problem (which made Gecko refuse to play ball), I've tagged .xml onto the end of the weblog's files; hopefully that'll satisfy most browsers.

Freewebs aren't very good at MIME types

2004-02-19T15:30:00+00:00

Freewebs is obviously designed to cater for “webmasters” who've never heard of Jeffrey Zeldman... Like most, if not all, free web hosts, Freewebs use filename “extensions” to determine what MIME type to serve for a file; this is OK, until they get it wrong. Granted, Atom and XSL aren't the most commonly used file formats on the web but nonetheless Freewebs could bother serving them with the proper MIME types.

A few months ago, I asked them if they could serve .xhtml files as XHTML rather than plain text. They responded by saying they wanted to comply with web standards; could I please send them the reference to the W3C recommendation. Great! ...except that nothing's happened since (or at least they haven't told me about it if anything has) - a couple of weeks ago I checked and .xhtml files were still being served as plain text.

I'd appeal to Freewebs now, except I suspect they use Internet Explorer, and thus won't be able to read this...

Klipfolio + Atom = 0

2004-02-19T15:25:00+00:00

Well! It seems that one can't (easily) use an atom feed as klipfood :/ By “easily” I mean I can't just point it towards the URL and have it automagically work, like it does for RSS. Eh, well... I'm gonna hold the klip back until I can get it assimilating this feed; at the moment it's just a rehash of the RSS feed, intermingled with The Twaddle's RSS feed.

Copy and paste...

2004-02-19T14:30:00+00:00

By the way, those URLs in the previous post are just plain text; unless your browser parses plain text URLs, you're just gonna have to copy and paste them for now - I'm not an XML expert and the prospect of digging about trying to force Atom and XHTML to work together to produce links, isn't appealing... maybe later.

Hurrah once more!

2004-02-19T14:20:00+00:00

That w3schools (http://www.w3schools.com/) is pretty decent. I've now concocted an XSL stylesheet for this feed, so visiting its URL in a (good) web browser should display it as a nice page.

I managed to cajole XML namespaces into doing what I want with a little help from a random blog entry (http://today.icantfocus.com/blog/archives/entries/000430/) by Christopher H. Laco, and his one-size-fits-all feed stylesheet. Those who are interested can have a gander at my resulting stylesheet (http://purl.org/mooquackwooftweetmeow/weblog.xsl.xml).

Next job: rig up a klip.

Hurrah!

2004-02-19T13:00:00+00:00

Well, then... this is an atom weblog. Why's it only in atom format? Everything on Mooquackwooftweetmeow is done the old-fashioned way - using the human brain, a plain-text editor, and no PHP, ASP, SQL or any other fanciness. And I don't want to have to copy every entry out into an XHTML page. I'm thinking of having a bash at some XSLT, to automatically generate a fancy front for the weblog; I tried it with the RSS feed, but didn't quite manage it satisfactorily; perhaps my standards are just too high (after all, I am using a free web host).

It's Still Not A Tree

2004-02-10T00:15:00+00:00

Mooquackwooftweetmeow's been a bit dead recently, but with good reason. I've been working on The Twaddle, a magazine-style thing I and my most esteemed colleague, Matthew Gardner, set up a couple of months ago.

The site first came about in mid-December, in response to our college (Hartlepool Sixth Form College)'s new newspaper, entitled “I Was Once a Tree”, or “I.W.O.T.”. To put it mildly, we thought it was a bit rubbish, and set about creating an alternative, better, web-based college magazine. The site's original title was “This Wasn't A Tree”, and we used the acronym, too.

The college paper having been released on a Monday, we were rather pleased to have the site going, and our first visitors, on Wednesday night. Then came the Christmas holidays and, for a while, the site was dormant; but in January, we embarked upon a monumental, unauthorised postering spree. (i.e. we printed off some posters and stuck them up about the college.)

Now, it turns out one requires permission to put posters up in the college; we'd assumed one didn't, given the proliferation of “Happy 18th!” posters. And I don't think the fact that our name was written acrostic-style helped.

That Friday, the head of the English Department “had a chat” with us, and it was agreed that our parodytastic name would be changed; and that our (few, passing) references to I.W.O.T. would be removed, on account of their having demoralised the I.W.O.T. writers.

That evening, I decided upon the new name, and relaunched the site, as “The Twaddle”. As a result of the “chat”, we could no longer claim to be the “unofficial” college magazine; evidently “unofficial” wasn't unofficial enough. This actually worked in our favour, as participation in the site was no longer restricted to HSFC's students, as it'd felt before.

Soon after, we launched The Twaddle Forums, which currently comprise over 3800 posts (most non-Twaddle related, it must be said); and we recently launched an RSS feed and klip. Just yesterday I received an email from the organisers of the unofficial college parties (we'll be starting an unofficial college soon), asking us to announce the parties on our site; this has only reaffirmed our ties to the college.

Yet one of the regulars on the forums lives in America, and we're getting page views from all over the world - Israel, Germany, Australia, Canada... OK, so I suppose none of them stayed very long.

I won't bother with a conclusion - just visit The Twaddle.

Moo­quack­woof­tweet­meow · Grey Nicholson