Thursday, April 29, 2004

Spring Blog Cleaning (Why this page isn't blue today) This weblog has a new look today, whether you're reading it with a Web browser or with an RSS aggregator site or program. While exploring the world of RSS and XML, I discovered that a few feed readers made mush out of my weblog's first paragraph, apparently because their developers were overwhelmed by the variety of flavors in the feeding-format-frenzied (but not quite atomized), array of mark-up coding systems. Installed a few years ago, my copy of Userland Radio was not set up to code its headlines in a way some of the newer aggregator programs rely on. I've corresponded with developers of several of them, and all said quite politely that they're working on more elegant ways to handle both kinds of blog entries, those that (do or) don't always use a headline that is also identified as a "Title" in the XML code that makes up an RSS feed. However, I do use headlines most of the time, so I decided to find out how to turn on the "Title/Link" headline feature of my blog. Thanks to Rogers Cadenhead's book, that part was easy. But that also meant changing the templates that build my pages. Great! That's something else I've wanted to learn more about. But not today. So... for a first step, I'm greeting springtime with a new look, designer Bryan Bell's "Woodlands" theme. It looks like a lilypad in a woodland pond to me, in a gentle-on-the-eyes gray-green, very refreshing after a couple weeks of squinting at spreadsheet software-feature comparison tables. Most importantly, it already has the "Title/Link" business taken care of. If my blog entry is about one other site in particular, the headline will link to it. If not, it will be a "permalink" to the item itself. My next step will be to build my own theme or modify this one, to get back the "my blue blog" color mentioned in some of my pages that link here. If I don't, people might think those other pages references to "blue" meant that I'd always be writing about sad things... 11:40:23 AM

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