I need a PDA for addresses, scheduling and synchronizing. I looked at the Zire this weekend and it struck me as a bit flimsy. Any advice or suggestions for a good PDA would be greatly welcomed. If you're leaning toward PalmOS, I can't help you... I can't stand Palm. As far as PocketPCs go, I've owned a first-generation iPaq and a first-generation Dell Axim. The iPaq was great at the time, but the expandable sleeve concept proved to be unworkable due to bulk.

AtomAPI interfacing to Wikis, which is an idea I brought up when talking about An Editable Web, is gaining traction. WikiGateway, written by Bayle Shanks is a library of functions to allow you to act as a client to a wiki website. Now, thanks in part to the AtomAPI Perl code from isolani, it is getting AtomAPI support. With all these implementations piling up I wonder if it's time to organize some interop testing.

It appears that Drupal now supports the Atom format and AtomAPI.

Of all the facets of the AtomAPI, the search mechanism has caused the most angst. Indeed there is a whole page dedicated to discussing just this facet on the wiki. The search mechanism has gone through many changes and at this point I would like to re-introduce the search mechanism from the RESTLog API. Actually, to call it a seach mechanism is really the wrong word, it is really a structured mechanism for browsing the archives of a site.

The idea of hard coding a URI, like is done for robots.txt is a bad idea. Let's not continue to make the same mistakes over and over again. Robots.txt is part of the Robot Exclusion Protocol. Part of the protocol is a fixed URI at which a robot can find a robots.txt file to parse. The traditional location of the robots.txt file has been at the root of a domain, though it should be noted that the robot exclusion protocol also defines a META tag that allows HTML authors to indicate to visiting robots if a document may be indexed, or used to harvest more links.

I said I was leaving emacs, and I have. I am now in the process of learning vi, or more precisely VIM. VIM is a quite mature and capable platform, not the same vi I used years ago on Sun stations. It is a rewrite of the vi editor, with Bram Moolenaar as the main author and maintainer. It has all the major features you'd expect from a modern text editor such as syntax highlighting and scriptability.

All other things being equal, avoid empowering lunatics. I have been an emacs user for close to 8 years now. That is about to end. After reading about James Clark's new nXML Emacs XML editing mode I decided to give it a try. Lo and behold it requires emacs 21.X and here I was languishing in a backwater at 20.7.1. So I head off to ftp.gnu.org to get the latest windows binaries for the latest release of emacs.

I admit it. I'm a looper. I will load up a single track on CD or mp3 and put it on infinite loop. The same song. Over and over. For possibly days at a time. I know I'm not the only one, so fess up if you're a looper too. Some of my favorites for looping: Ozzy Osbourne - Crazy Train The President of the United States of America - Feather Pluckin Iron Maiden - Childhood's End Talking Heads - Once In A Lifetime Today's post is brought to you by Warrant's "

After much time, discussion, and frustration the naming decision is complete. It is now called Atom. Now can we begin arguing mercilessly and endlessly about the logo? And finally the textual version: AtØm I like the text idea with the ø People will use different logos for different layouts/colors, but the text idea is excellent and it will be extended. Ah!, it's strange to see the cursor jumping from this textarea to the grey div :-).

I finally remembered to bring the camera to work. Now that I am back in the habit of getting in real early I've been wanting to get a shot of some of the nature around the building. I caught the local Heron basking in the morning light. He’s standing at the top of a decorative waterfall not more than 200 feet (60 meters) away from the building entrance.

"Teach me. Teach me. Teach me.", my nine year old said as he bounced in front of me. "No", I said, "I can teach you woodworking if you want, or maybe some skateboarding tricks?" "No. Teach me that." "How about cooking, or computer programming?" "No", he said resolutely, "I want you teach me how to do that." "No, you are not to learn that from your father", Lynne yelled from the next room.

I will be traveling to Beijing, China in either January or Febraury. If anyone is interested in meeting to talk about the Atom format, AtomAPI or Atom Authentication please leave a comment or drop me an e-mail. Hi Joe, My name is Zhang Yining (Zhang being the surname). Having been participated in Pie/Echo/Atom since begining, I would definitely like to meet you up and talk over about Atom. I am a China citizen currently working in Singapore, and very likely to take a holiday off during new year (both global new year and Chinese new year) and go back to China, maybe we could meet up then in Beijing.

ApacheCon, the official conference of the Apache Software Foundation, will be held in Las Vegas this November 16-19, and you should seriously consider attending. There's an impressive list of speakers for this show and lot's of cool sessions. And, as Ted Leung kindly put it, there will be a "bonus" this year, as I will be presenting on Extending HTTP Authentication and Mark Pilgrim will be presenting on the AtomAPI.

This spider web is pretty cool, but the amazing part is the speed at which it was built. We put the mulch down one evening and I found the web the next morning.

Today was a great day for forward motion in the AtomAPI arena. Ben Trott released a Perl client implementation for the AtomAPI into CPAN. Ok, so this didn't happen today, it happened Sunday, but I only found out about it today, so it counts. Hat tip to Adriaan Tijsseling Today isolani released a server implementation of the AtomAPI in PHP. Yes, you heard correctly, in PHP. And this really did occur today.

Yesterdays idea of applying the AtomAPI to wikis got me thinking about the AtomAPI more generally. The idea of using a link tag on the web page to be edited points to idea that some parts of the AtomAPI could be eliminated. So let't take some time and push that idea to its logical extreme to see how small the AtomAPI could be made. N.B. What follows is a thought experiment.

Today on IRC Sam Ruby challenged some of my preconceived notions of a weblog editing API. In particular he asked the very simple question, "How do you find the entry you want to edit". Having a pre-conceived notion of blogs having a linear structure, I hadn't really thought too hard about that. But both Blosxom and Wikis don't necessarily have that linear structure. Blosxom allows creating entries with a directory structure, with no predetermined concept of order among the individual entries.

In my last article I stated that Content Negotiation should be avoided. Here I give an overview of how content negotiation works, problems I have run into, and pointers to problems other people have had with it. Continue reading Should you use Content Negotiation in your Web Services? on The Well-Formed Web.

Should you use Content Negotiation when building your web service? The short answer is no. There are definite problems with conneg and I can give some examples of problems I have run into and also point to problems other have run into. First let's back up and explain Content Negotiation. Your browser is a generic display program and can take in various kinds of media, such as HTML, JPEGs, CSS, Flash, etc.

Congrats, your new site is redesigned, all shiny and new, and in the redesign you decided to cover accessibility and in the process start using accesskey. Now accesskey is neat, in that it which gives you the power to re-map keys to move the keyboard focus to a control or to follow a link, but with that power comes responsibility. You can add an accesskey attribute to a, area, button, input, label, legend, and textarea.