I have been looking for a way to convert the BBC weather feed for my area to iCal, so I can subscribe to it. It's date-based, after all, and RSS never seemed to me to be an appropriate format for subscribing to weather information. iCal always struck me as being "better" for that purpose. Of course, the BBC only have an RSS feed for local weather. What I needed was a converter.

After some hunting, I discovered that Dean Sanvitale had written a PHP script to convert RSS feeds to iCal format. However, his site (codent.com) appears to be long since abandoned and the script is no longer available from there. Fortunately, the Wayback Machine did have a copy. Dean originally released the script under a Creative Commons License which, fortunately, allows me to make the script available to download from this site (note: the script is available from this site under the same license).

So, if you're looking for a way to convert an RSS feed to iCal, this PHP script will do the job. Thanks Dean!

Source: rss2ical.txt

 

One thing you'll notice reading almost any blog (or site running blog-like software) is that articles and posts vanish quickly. For some sites, it is a matter of days - for others months. The end result is the same - after a period of time, good posts vanish into the ubiquitous "site archive" - where posts go to die, often never to be read again.

Some sites have started to use a footer linking to popular posts, or author's choice posts. This is a reasonable solution, however is not ideal. An ideal solution would be to create a system that allowed for easy site navigation - to make it extremely simple for a user to find things they might be interested. I'm not interested in re-inventing site navigation, but I am interested in your opinion as a website user.

What works for you? Date-based archives? Topic-based archives? Tag-based navigation? If so, have you found any sites where these types of navigation made it easy for you to find interesting articles or posts? Are there any other options? Do you use site search engines where available? How do you use them? Are there sites that don't work? Do you ever move beyond the latest post in your feed reader?

There are a million questions I could ask, but I guess if I had to sum them up in one go, I would ask - how do you like to find interesting things to read on a site?

 

I have implemented Good-Looking Tooltips, using the excellent technique by Robert Nyman.

There were a couple of small issues along the way - a bit of code I added to the site's JavaScript when I was experimenting with XHTML was causing some trouble, and < and > were being treated as HTML rather than as characters. Robert kindly helped me work out the kinks though, and now it's all up and running. For an example, hover over this text.

 

A nice tool from Thomas Baekdal - convert your website to DNA art. Here's ILoveJackDaniels.com's DNA and the Flickr group.

 

Use Bloglines? You're not alone. Have a huge list of feeds in your sidebar, and never read anything because it takes too long? Once again, you're very much not alone. Find keeping up with Bloglines is taking up all of your time? You're one of millions. However, all is not lost. A few simple tricks will make your subscriptions easier to manage and less of a burden.

Folders

Bloglines supports folders, into which you can delicately place your various feeds, grouping them together by topic. If when you look at Bloglines all you see is a massive, unmanagable list of feeds, folders should be your first stop. However, when you create your folders, put some thought into how you set them up - once they're set up, changing them later is going to take time, and most people don't want to have to go through the process again. Also, don't name them just "Topic" - name them "01. Topic" instead - give each folder a number at the start and you'll be able to order your folders any way you like, ensuring similar topics are always grouped.

Folders also allow you to spend less time on Bloglines. Keep your personal feeds (yes, including comics) separate from your work ones. You can view the work ones at the office, without being distracted by Dilbert, and keep up to date with friends and pictures of cats when you've got the time. Keep your important folders at the top of your folders list and the task becomes even easier, as you'll avoid having a tempting folder in the middle of the more serious work-related ones.

Re-Name Feeds

Website feeds are listed automatically using the name given by the website owner for the feed. For some this may be a problem. For example, I am subscribed to a feed from an Apache blog, and the default name for this is simply "feather". While that might be what their blog is called, it's no use to me - a few months after I've subscribed, I'm going to have no idea what "feather" actually is, and will end up ignoring it. However, I've renamed it "Apache Feather Blog" - far more helpful to me.

Only Show Updated Feeds

Once you've got all of your feeds organised, you may find that Bloglines loads rather slowly. When you've got several hundred subscriptions, that can be a real problem. Fortunately, Bloglines gives you the option to only show feeds with new items - updated feeds. You can enable this under Feed Options in your Bloglines account settings.

 

Well, I've just about recovered from d.Construct 2006 (a great evening finished up at around 3:30 this morning, when Paul, Chris, William and I finally made our ways home), and what a great day (and evening) it was. Several hundred designers and developers descended on Brighton for the day, and enjoyed excellent talks from the likes of Jeff Barr, Simon Willison, Paul Hammond, Jeremy Keith, Aral Balkan, Derek Featherstone, Thomas Vander Wal and Jeffrey Veen. The follow-up evening involved much drinking, and was a great chance to meet plenty of like-minded people. For more, check out blogs talking about d.Construct 2006 on Technorati and Bloglines, photos on Flickr, the backnetwork or check out the podcast.

 

Twas a day very much like this one - warm and sunny - in August 2003 that I started this site. Three years ago today, in fact. The last year has been rather entertaining. Traffic around here has gone up rather substantially, as a result of the cheat sheets and a few popular articles, which has meant plenty more comments and so on - which is kind of the point.

It's also, as ever, Jack Daniel's birthday this month (the whole of September) ... so stop sitting there reading on the internet, and go and enjoy what's left of the weather!

 

Jason Kottke's mnemonic device contest (in which all and sundry were invited to submit a new mnemonic by which to remember the order of planets) has finished, won (very deservedly) by Josh Mishell. Well done Josh, and great idea for a contest Jason.

My effort, in case you were wondering, was one of three runners up, and was "Many Very Earnest Men Just Snubbed Unfortunate Ninth Planet".

 

While pottering around online this morning, I decided to see what was happening with SMA UK - originally intended to be a search marketing organisation for the UK - as I'd not heard anything from, or about, them for a while. It appears that the last post to their blog was one year ago today, while the last event listed was 9 months ago. Has SMA gone? Does anyone even know what's happening, or has happened?

There's little doubt that the industry needs representative organisations, and SMA looked originally to be one of the better attempts at creating one so far.

If it's still active, why no public news for a year? If it's not, why no news explaining that? For an organisation that was founded in part in response to SEMPO's problems (SEMPO being another search industry association with a heavy bias towards the American market), and especially SEMPO's lack of meaningful and open communication, they have done remarkably poorly on the same front themselves.

 

In case anyone was wondering about the recent inactivity on the site, I am still here, and will be posting again soon. I have been a little busy at work over the last few weeks, as I've started a new job with The Sports Nutrition Company as Group Web Development / E-commerce manager.

(While I'm on the subject of work, I've added a Portfolio / Work page to the site. It's a sort of pseudo-CV, detailing what I've worked on and where for the last few years. I'll be expanding it over time.)

I enjoyed my time with Propellernet as an Internet Marketing Consultant, but agency work has its down sides, and I decided it was time to move back into managing sites directly. Working in-house means a lot more time can be spent on any one site, and you have the added benefits of not having to rely on a separate company to get things done, and being able to directly monitor and respond to the effects of your work.

I've been at SNC for a little over a month now, and things are moving along nicely. It's early days yet, and there's a lot of work to be done, but so far things are very promising indeed.

Among others, I'll have the chance to develop and market sites for brands like Reebok and Gold's Gym over the coming year - including some interesting foreign language projects. New challenges are what keep me motivated, and this job looks to have plenty of them.

So yes, I am very busy at the moment, and am taking a break both from writing here and from freelance work. I'm reclaiming my evenings for a few short weeks, but I'll be back later in the month.

 

Xara Xtreme is my graphics software of choice. It's a vector graphics package designed to make creation of web graphics easy. Almost every image on this site was created with Xtreme.

Xara was, many moons ago, a Corel product. Now, Xara is a company that release Xtreme, and have just recently announced that Linux and OSX users will be getting an open source version of the product soon. Forward thinking from a graphics company? I think so.

Xara turns 25 today, though, and for today only all of their products are half price. Xtreme is US$39.50. Get it while you can!

 

The actions of Dr. Lance Chambers, Scumbag got me thinking about this site, and the way in which content on it can be used. I, like (I imagine) many publishers, face a bit of a dilemma when it comes to licensing content for other people to make use of.

There are some things I mind, and some things I don't. It's difficult sometimes to think clearly about other people using content - when it's my own work being used, I am prone to let emotions affect my judgement.

Ultimately, I'd like to stop people like Lance selling my work, but make it easy for people like Brian Warren, Kim Evgeniy, Diego Eis and Dapuzz, among others, to produce their own work based upon mine (the people I just mentioned are among those who have created dashboard widgets, and translated the cheat sheets and articles).

After some deliberation, I have decided to change the copyright on this site. I am releasing all content under a Creative Commons License. This license allows people to use the content I've created for non-commercial purposes (anyone wanting to use it for commercial purposes, please e-mail me), as long as they give appropriate credit and release derivative works under an identical license.

I think where I have gone wrong in the past is I've looked at these issues on this site from my own perspective. What I should have done is look at things from the perspective of those who actually use and read the site - those people (yourself included, of course!) are the reason this site is here.

It is entirely possible that this decision may backfire. There is an argument that releasing work under a CC license potentially encourages others to use content but ignore the terms of the license. That said, if it encourages more positive uses of the content, then it's the right decision.