A couple of recent weblog posts, at Microdoc News and Virtuelvis, have echoed something I've been meaning to write about for a while – that Google makes such heavy use of a page's contents when indexing a site.

For a long time this site had a PageRank of zero, although for a few days now, it's been four. What I noticed was that, despite have a PR of zero, and being linked from a vanishingly small number of other places, my articles were often turning up in the first page of Google results for two-word queries containing words from my article titles. Since my posts appear on pages of their own, the post titles are part of the page titles (along with my name). Only rarely do I get visitors that haven't been referred by searches containing words from my page titles.

Recently, a bright orange book, with a beanied man on the front cover, arrived on my front verandah. I'm referring, of course, to Jeffrey Zeldman's new book, Designing With Web Standards, and the beanied man is none other than Zeldman himself. Forthwith, my mini-review of his book:

I wasn't quite sure what to expect from this book – all I knew was that it had sold out it's first printing, before I could get my hands on a copy. Having now read it from orange cover to orange cover, I feel slightly more qualified to comment.

I've recently been playing around with RSS – first by trying a few readers, then by setting up my own feed. I wasn't entirely happy with any of the readers I tried, so I've been building my own to more closely match my own needs, and to learn about RSS issues along the way.

It's pretty clear that everybody has a different idea about the semantics of any given version of RSS. Every reader has to have lots of special cases and heuristics to cope with different ways of doing things.

In putting the finishing touches on an RSS 2.0 feed for martinkenny.com, I’ve come up against a couple of issues surrounding the contents of the individual posts’ <description> elements.

It seems to be pretty common practice to include entity-encoded HTML in the description. Not everyone likes this. So far, in trying out various desktop and web-based readers, I’ve enjoyed the HTML, although Mark Pilgrim’s recent highlighting of security issues has me thinking a bit. On the other hand, I haven’t tried reading RSS on my Pocket PC yet.

Now that I have a camera I carry everywhere, I'm more likely to catch a photo of something incidental. Here's a photo of raindrops on a small iris outside the front door. Click it for the original high-resolution image (my current desktop image).

OK, there, I've said it. O'Reilly's Safari Bookshelf is great.

I'd been thinking about giving Safari a go for a while, but it wasn't until Slashdot ran a review of it that I gave in and signed up for a 14-day trial.

I had some intial misgivings. I'm an avid technical book reader; I have a large library that dates back to the days of 8-bit microprocessors. I read myself to sleep every night with a book, often an O'Reilly one. How would the feeling of reading books on a computer compare to reading a paper book?

On Easter Monday, we went for a picnic in the Beechwood Heritage Garden.

Beechwood was a private garden that is now managed by the Mount Lofty Botanic Gardens, and is only open to the public for six weeks in spring and again in autumn. It's well worth a trip in both seasons, and is definitely an excuse for a few photos.

Last weekend we went to the Adelaide Zoo for the closing event of the children’s festival known as “Come Out”. We watched a number of musical events with an environmental or animal theme, put on by primary school children, but the highlight of the visit was an appearance by the “KneeHIGH Puppets”.

From their name we imagined these would be puppets that were, well, knee-high. We couldn’t have been more wrong. These guys are enormous! A family of three – two adults and a child came sauntering into view. The child was probably a normal sized adult, but the two parents were at least three metres (about 10 feet) high.

It seems nearly every day brings news of some new software patent that is pretty damn obvious and for which there should be easily locatable prior art. Today it's browser cookies, a few days ago it was web advertising. It's so common that Slashdot has a whole category for it !

As someone who, as a youth, applied for a patent with a friend (for a non-software idea), I can sort of relate to patents, but as a software developer I'm just plain scared and annoyed by most (all) software patents. The thought that every bit of code I write, or every system/file-format that I need to interoperate with, is patent encumbered is quite alarming.

I was reminded, yesterday, of an old rule of mine; “don't do important things when you're feeling sick or tired”.

My rule dates back to some time in my mid-teens when I spent an evening soldering up a kit for what was then known as a VDU (in this case a single board that acted as the display part of a dumb terminal). Unfortunately I was already tired and excited (I'd been waiting for this thing for a couple of months). After a couple of hours of work, and having already soldered in about half of the 40 or so 14 and 16 pin I.C.s, I realized that I'd put them all in backwards! Needless to say I spent the next few days de-soldering–a much more tedious process.