Status-Q

Does anyone else think it's amusing that when Internet Explorer 6 connects to a web server it still announces itself primarily as "Mozilla 4.0 (compatible...)"?

A year ago today: "Yes, XML can be used to represent web pages, but assuming that it's limited to that is like assuming that ASCII is limited to email." (Expanded this later in The Importance of XML). Sorry - today's entries are a bit self-referential. If there's one thing worse than a blog which only talks about other blogs, it's a blog which talks about itself. Forgive me - I've been waiting eagerly for the site to be old enough to have a 'one year ago today' link so I'm posting it anyway!

Just under a year ago, my name was on the front pages of both the London Times and the Washington Post within a week, when it was announced that the Trojan Room Coffepot was being closed down. If you're anything like me, when you read newspaper articles, the names quoted in passing go in one eye and out of the other, but it's sad to think that I'm unlikely to be involved in anything which gets such media coverage again.

Still, having my blog mentioned on Dave Winer's Scripting News three times in quick succession must come a close second :-) The first thing you notice is the number of hits that your website gets. The next is that a little army of search engine robots follow closely behind. John Hiler is quite right.

Dave has always been influential because of his writing, but that may be secondary compared to his power to influence weblogs. Many people would pay a lot of money for that. Will this power eventually corrupt? We're watching you carefully, Dave... (and, by the way, what's your favourite bottle of wine?)

For Radio hackers: Mmm. My cunning scheme which showed the number of comments attached to each posting here was causing a few complications in my Radio setup. The PHP/MySQL back end ran perfectly and was a fun experiment but as I had suspected, nobody, including me, really wanted to leave comments here, so I've decided to discard the facility for now in the interests of simplicity. You can always email me...