Yabfog

I guess I missed it, but at some point in the past few months OPML Workstation relaunched or rebranded itself IntelligentTeams. Maybe it was a soft launch? I don't know. Maybe I'm just not as tuned in anymore.

IntelligentTeams looks like a LAMP-based OPML Community Server (but I have no idea what the underlying technology is). It's pretty rough around the edges -- a lot of new windows opening, jarring full page refreshes, links to external site to provide certain functionality -- but it's workable. Check out this page from John Palfrey.

After deciding that we are too stupid to be permitted to receive certain kinds of attachments in Outlook, Microsoft has also decided that one the most important features offered by Outlook, saved searches, are too dangerous to be permitted.

Welcome back to 1995!

tecosystems Redesign | alexking.org: Another good post by Alex King, this one about developing a new theme (and also about mixing business and friendship).

I've always loved the Bugs Bunny cartoon Rhapsody Rabbit and wished I had a recording of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 performed by the pianist who performed it for that cartoon. Well, today I went down the rabbit hole searching for an answer.... And I found it. The pianist was Jakob Gimpel. I also found this fascinating story by Gimpel's son in which he hypothesizes that the pianist in "The Cat Concerto" (the Tom and Jerry version of Rhapsody Rabbit that won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film for 1946) was Shura Cherkassky. (See: The Cat Concerto Controversy (Mystery Solved?).) Now, to find a recording....

Mike Arrington recently reignited some discussion about the definition of a blog.

I have a related question: What is a podcast?

I'm really only concerned with two technical questions:

1. Does each feed item need an enclosure? If not, what ratio of items with enclosures to total items makes a feed a podcast?
2. Does the enclosure need to be in a dedicated feed element, or is it okay to just put a link to the enclosure somewhere in the feed description? For example, is this a podcast? The publisher, a big RSS technology company, seems to think so.

There are other debatable points, too, such as whether Public Radio feeds are really podcasts, but I'm more interested in the technical points.

As seen on Scripting News and TechCrunch (among other places)...

Your results:
You are Hulk

Hulk 80% Superman 65% Spider-Man 60% Green Lantern 60% The Flash 55% Iron Man 50% Robin 45% Catwoman 45% Supergirl 35% Wonder Woman 30% Batman 25%

You are a wanderer with amazing strength.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality
Test

Without an analysis of why I was characterized as Hulk, I think this gimmick lacks social punch. Of course, I know what the questions were and what my answers were. So, I can understand being Hulk, but unless you take the Superhero Personality Test yourself, you'll have no idea why this post is at all interesting.

Not that I'll ever use it, but it looks like Microsoft is supporting the use of OPML subscription lists in Outlook 2007. I tried NewsGator's Outlook extension, and I think Outlook is the worst conceivable way to consume the large volume of information I have in my modestly sized subscription list. But at least Microsoft is going to let Outlook users get their subscription lists out of Outlook (and into a better aggregator). They even have a step-by-step guide for exporting your RSS feeds from Outlook.

Alex King, a WordPress über-hacker (and formerly a b2/b2evolution hacker), is writing a series of posts about his recent redesign of alexking.org. His latest post describes the numerous WordPress plugins he's using, many of which he wrote.

I'm not using any of these right now, but I steal Alex's ideas and code all the time for my own hacking.

P.S. Oh yeah, I'm using WP Grins. Thanks, Jeff.

FYI: My BlackBerry's Web browser identifies itself (i.e., "User Agent") as: BlackBerry8700/4.1.0 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1

So in PHP, an inexpensive check would be something like:

if ( 0 === stripos($useragent, 'blackberry') ) {
    echo "True";
}

After about two weeks of unresponsiveness, I finally found yet another way to contact the Washington Post to complain about their broken website (see my previous post for more info). This time, they promptly responded to my complaint, and within three or four days, the website was fixed.

My contact person, Sarah Lumbard, was courteous and helpful. Thank you, Sarah.