Status-Q

[Original Link] I’m a bit late in linking to Ben Hammersley’s article about weblogs. It’s a couple of weeks old, but still good despite being so outdated!

[Original Link] In another interesting move, Apple have made the eMac available to everybody. This is an updated version of the old iMac, and is the cheapest Mac with a G4 processor.

I was talking on Saturday about WebDAV and how Mac OS X could mount WebDAV shares as a native filesystem, albeit rather slowly.

Well, you can ignore that qualifier now; Apple have just released the 10.1.5 update to OS X and the most dramatic improvement is in the speed of WebDAV. Apple’s free online personal disk space, which they call iDisk, now runs at a usable speed.
Lots of other small but sweet improvements, too.

[Original Link] Two-thirds of UK homes now have the option of ADSL, according to this Register article. BT should drop the price of ISDN calls to compensate those who aren’t, and won’t be, in range of an ADSL-equipped exchange.

[Original Link] I added the appropriate tags yesterday, so anyone using Radio to read this site could have subscribed simply by pointing at http://www.statusq.org, rather than having to find the RSS feed.

Dave W explains that there are many limitations in the current implementation because “Writing an HTML parser is a big job”. But writing an XHTML parser is a much simpler one, and many of us would joyfully produce XHTML-formatted weblogs if only Radio would let us. 🙂

Radio is fun because things move so fast, so it’s a pity that this standard, which has been the W3C-recommended form of HTML for some time, is not supported.

[Original Link] From BusinessWeek:

“Those of us who have been working with computers for 20 years or more remember a time when getting PCs to communicate was a black art. I took an unwelcome trip back to those bad old days recently when I tested a flock of new devices that use Bluetooth…”

[Original Link] I’m adding this to Status-Q, using Dave Winer’s new macro. Mozilla now displays an extra toolbar with a link to the XML (RSS) version of this page. The next logical step will be for the archived pages to include “previous” and “next” links. This is what the <link> tags are often used for. I may have a look at this, but, much as I love Radio, I do find it one of the most counter-intuitive environments to program, chiefly because of the lack of organised documentation.

I’d been having some troubles uploading this site recently – the FTP driver in Radio Userland was having difficulties getting through my router/firewall/cable modem and I’d often end up with just a blank page here.

But I’ve been thinking a lot about WebDAV over the last few days. It’s a protocol which allows web servers to act much more like file servers, and it’s been around for a while. However, it’s now built in to most of the Adobe applications, it comes as standard with Apache 2.0, and Mac OS X can mount WebDAV shares just like any other network file system (albeit rather slowly). It’s still not trivial to set up on an Apache server, because you have to think rather more about permissions and authentication, but once it’s up and running, it’s rather cute.

Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought, if I could abandon this troublesome FTP protocol, which was never really designed for this world of proxies and firewalls, and upload my Radio-generated pages using WebDAV instead? And sure enough, Nicholas Riley has created a WebDAV upstreamer for Radio. If you can read this, it works! Many thanks, Nicholas.