Every once in a while I’ll come across some cool little thing I’ll feel like sharing, but the essay format isn’t really conducive to the “shout out.” As I pondered that problem, the backlog of cool things grew and grew until I observed ruefully that I probably had a full essay’s worth. “Crackerjack!” I exclaimed. (I was at a baseball game at the time.) Then I realized I could commit an entire essay dedicated to talking about some of those cool things.
Twitter
When I started using Twitter, it felt like I was the last person on earth to sign up, but it’s been so long, and the service has grown so much since then, I feel like I practically own stock. For the six of you who don’t know, Twitter is a web service that allows you to post 140-character text messages. People can “follow” you, and everyone you follow is aggregated into something like a public asynchronous chat room where everyone’s experience is a little different, since everyone follows different people.
My typical use case is just as I’ve described. I’ll find a clever link or come up with some bon mot and curse the essay format of my blog. Since I don’t always have the patience to wait for enough of these to accumulate, I’ll relieve the pressure on my attention by “tweeting.” Sometimes I’ll get comments from the people who are following me, and conversation follows.
In addition to the RSS-powered web client, Twitter has an open API, which caught the attention of that most beloved of design houses, Iconfactory. Their Twitterific sits beside iChat as a vital communications tool and constant distraction. It’s social networking and the mundanity of everyday life rolled into one. My Twitter handle is bmf.
VoodooPad
Some time ago, I found myself staring at pages upon pages of XML trying to figure out how on earth iWeb worked. Despite knowing XML like the back of my hand, I couldn’t make any sense out of the schema. For three whole days I did nothing else until I was completely exhausted, a zombie fueled by caffeine, nicotine, and amphetamine. Sanity waned as elements and attributes began to swim around the page. Then, as suddenly as Neo could see the true nature of the Matrix, iWeb made perfect sense to me.
Among the better known of dorm room phenomena is the effect of mental state on recall — the student who comes home drunk from an ill-advised night of partying before a major exam, stays up studying, then sleeps through morning classes, waking up just in time to fail the exam, having forgotten everything. Later, installed in the campus bar, drowning life’s sorrows, the student has perfect recall. In order to remember things learned while drunk, it seems, one has to be drunk.
My theory is that the iWeb team was worked to the breaking point, and it wasn’t until reaching that point myself, entering the same mental state as the creators, that I was able to speak their beautiful, though cryptic, language. What I needed was to leave a message for the other side using a format that would allow me to create a web of interrelated concepts without getting in my way. What I needed was VoodooPad.
There are any number of ways to describe VoodooPad. I think of it as TextEdit with a trick. The trick is that if you create a word in CamelCase, VoodooPad automatically creates a hyperlink to a page with that title. If it doesn’t exist, it will be created automatically. Thus, as you spill your brain onto the page, the web of information grows organically. It is, as near as I can tell, the closest thing to Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s original World Wide Web.
The next day I awoke with a terrible work hangover and I’d forgotten everything. Had the magical insight into iWeb been only a fleeting, wonderful dream? There, on my desktop, a document sat. I double-clicked it, and there it was — documentation on iWeb’s schema. It was like a gift from a mysterious and altruistic stranger from beyond the diaphanous veil of sanity. VoodooPad is available from Gus Mueller’s Flying Meat, and comes in three sizes, including a free “lite” version.
Cocoa is my Girlfriend
CimGF is an exciting new blog by my friend Marcus Zarra and Matt Long. I met Marcus at Macworld. It turns out his company, Zarra Studios, is developing an application called “iWeb Buddy,” a companion to iWeb that picks up where Apple left off. I have a funny story about Marcus. It turns out, before Macworld, he hated me. He read my blog just to get his blood boiling and actually called his wife during Macworld to say “you know that guy I always complain about? Turns out he’s great!”
We decided the problem is in the strength of my tone. A long time ago I learned to eschew phrases like “I think” and “in my opinion.” This is a blog; of course everything in here is what I think. Unless I take pains to convince you that something is fact, you can and should assume it’s my opinion. Qualifiers just weaken the writing. Unfortunately, in our passive-aggressive society, to state something plainly is to come across as pushy.
The lesson here is that the more people know you, the more people hate you. You have to make a concerted effort to win people over. I hope the sample code and charity work give people an insight into my altruistic nature, but I also realize that as my fame grows, so too must my bar tab. Charity is great, but nothing says “love me” like buying a round of drinks.
Notably, the title of the blog is a take on a CSS song. When I hear the phrase “Cocoa is my girlfriend,” I can’t help but add the next line: “Cocoa is my hot, hot sex.” So, that’s awkward.
Side-View Mirrors
My friend Daniel Pasco is enamored of the expression “Captain Obvious Moment,” which is when you have a dawning realization that is so simple you can’t help but suspect everyone on earth has know about it all along. I have these all the time, if my constant wonderment at things like the file system are any indication. So it was that I discovered and fell madly in love with my car’s side-view mirrors.
I’d always found side-view mirrors kind of useless. The rear-view mirror does a much better job of telling me what’s going on around me without many of the side-view’s blind spot and “objects in mirror are closer than they appear” problems. Combined with a quick head turn before changing lanes, I’ve long considered the side-view mirrors to be little more than annoying appendages to be scraped off by walls, pillars, or other cars.
See, I’ve never been very good at driving in reverse. I know to turn the wheel in the direction you want the end of the car to go, but always get messed up by the close quarters and weird angles offered by the rear-view and the “grab the passenger seat and do yoga” methods. Then one day I realized that, using the side-view mirrors, I could get a very good idea what the sides of the car were doing. Am I going to scrape that pillar? Am I lined up with the curb? The side-view mirrors know, and are all too eager to tell.
Since making this discovery, my ability to back into a parking space or parallel park on the left side of the street have improved tremendously. Does that make me an idiot? Maybe, but at least this idiot won’t have any big scrapes on the side of his car.
Syndication
I started using syndication on April 29, 2005. I know, because that’s the day Safari 2, also known as Safari RSS, shipped. Syndication, sometimes called RSS after the dominant family of implementation standards, uses a lightweight XML feed to push content across the web. This has a number of uses, not the least of which is podcasting, but the use most people are familiar with is aggregation, combining content from multiple sites into a single feed.
I no longer use Safari as an aggregator, having moved first to NewsFire then to NetNewsWire. Rarely do I surf the web anymore, as most of what I’m interested in is syndicated. One might say that NetNewsWire has become my primary web browser. Thanks to Web Kit, I can move from an entry in a feed to the page it came from, then to links from that page, other pages that pop into my head, or to commerce sites like Amazon or Audible.
That said, Guy Kawasaki has recently put together a new online aggregator called Alltop. Whereas NetNewsWire is filled with people and companies I’m specifically interested in, Alltop is organized by subject. So, if I want to see what’s going on with the top egos on the web without necessarily following all the usual suspects all the time, I can click over to egos.alltop.com and see at a glance what Dave Winer, Tim O’Reilly and Scott Adams are up to.
Each included site has the latest several headlines, which I then mouse over to get the first paragraph or so. If anything catches my fancy, I can click through, and if I discover some gem, I can considering adding it to NetNewsWire and making it part of my daily read.
The next time I get a chance to work on Alison, I think I’m going to have her use RSS to as her file format so people who are into that sort of thing can have any new comments pop right up in the reader of choice.
I’m also sharing the magic of syndication with my friends in Madagascar, where things like bandwidth — to say nothing of electricity, roads, and food — are not always easy to come by. A syndicated website is a website whose contents can be vetted and sometimes consumed entirely in a relatively lightweight format before dedicating the time and expense to actually loading the page.
Syndication is not so much the future of the web as it is the current state of the web. If you’re not consuming the web through syndication, you’re missing out, and if you’re not syndicating your content, you’ve probably already lost me as a reader.
Mojo the Sock Monkey
To bring it around full circle, even while ending on a lighter note, Gus Mueller recently introduced me to the work of illustrator Kevin Cornell, whose blog frequently features hilarious comics, including said sock monkey. It hasn’t even been a week and I’ve already invested in both Mojo books and a T-shirt for Mary. “But what if Gus and I wear the same shirt at the same time?” Mary protested. It’s like she doesn’t even know me.
My favorite strip is the one where Mojo finds a conch that tells him to master the tuba. The strip wouldn’t be that funny except, in the last panel, as Mojo blats cacophonously to the displeasure of this audience, the conch yells maniacally, “Yes... Yes...!” It’s such a tiny detail, but it makes all the difference and indicates that with Kevin Cornell, we’re dealing with artistic and comedic genius.
Addenda 
Drew Franklin
I agree with your praises of RSS, I only wish iWeb would allow for a complete feed so I could view your entire article from within the reader. Also could you possibly share you iWeb schema knowledge even potentially off-line? I am thinking about developing an extension for better permalinks.
I agree with your praises of RSS, I only wish iWeb would allow for a complete feed so I could view your entire article from within the reader. Also could you possibly share you iWeb schema knowledge even potentially off-line? I am thinking about developing an extension for better permalinks.
Mike Lee
I do plan on trying to publish the iWeb documentation after Delicious Library 2 ships, simply because I think it’s important for this once-open schema to be documented, and because my own documentation work is incomplete. If nothing else, I’d love to see some people add information about the related Keynote, Pages, and Numbers schemas.
I do plan on trying to publish the iWeb documentation after Delicious Library 2 ships, simply because I think it’s important for this once-open schema to be documented, and because my own documentation work is incomplete. If nothing else, I’d love to see some people add information about the related Keynote, Pages, and Numbers schemas.
Paul Oswald
RE: side mirrors - I agree, though I have mine tweaked out to pick up where the rear view leaves off. As far as I know this is the way it's supposed to be. Makes over shoulder glance somewhat easier to do since I only really have to check for something really small like a motorcycle. When checking while backing up, I have to lean over a tad. I know this is not the way most people use them because every time I give my car over to an NYC valet, they readjust them.
If I were in charge of designing cars, I would create a side mirror that rolled off at the edges to make it so you could see both back and sideways. Or a compound eye like thing... I dont know, but there's something better than what we have.
Re: Alison - She just asked me if you've ever embarassingly released your bowels. It's getting harder and harder to pass the Lemur CATTA since I read most of your stuff and my brain is becoming less and less able to tell the difference between something I read today, and something I read last week.
RE: side mirrors - I agree, though I have mine tweaked out to pick up where the rear view leaves off. As far as I know this is the way it's supposed to be. Makes over shoulder glance somewhat easier to do since I only really have to check for something really small like a motorcycle. When checking while backing up, I have to lean over a tad. I know this is not the way most people use them because every time I give my car over to an NYC valet, they readjust them.
If I were in charge of designing cars, I would create a side mirror that rolled off at the edges to make it so you could see both back and sideways. Or a compound eye like thing... I dont know, but there's something better than what we have.
Re: Alison - She just asked me if you've ever embarassingly released your bowels. It's getting harder and harder to pass the Lemur CATTA since I read most of your stuff and my brain is becoming less and less able to tell the difference between something I read today, and something I read last week.
Twitterific sits beside iChat as a vital communications tool and constant distraction.
Monday, February 18, 2008
Favorite Things
