Via Daring Fireball, word of a new Mac app. An insanely cute new Mac app. Cha-Ching—a simple personal finance manager. With a cute icon. I paused about 20 seconds before buying it as a discounted beta-type app. I am a sucker for the pretty. Somebody help me.

I’m beta-testing VOX, 6Apart’s new move into the MySpace, er, space. It’s prettier than MySpace (which wouldn’t be hard, as MySpace is ugly like a billion cat eyeballs rotting on your living room carpet) and it’s better organised and structured than Livejournal (the community blogging tool recently purchased by 6Apart) but it has some work to do on the basics. The rich-text editor is hideously hard to use, and it seems to do some kind of predictive insertion of text as you write. Or that’s just a bug. I found myself taking 5 minutes to write a short paragraph, as random characters kept disappearing and writing themselves over complete words. Basically, I was just longing for a simple text-edit box with Textile functionality.

I want to quickly jot down here an idea I’ve had for the basic html structure of an individual weblog entry post. I’ve never been happy with the standard design patterns: the extant naming conventions have never really worked for me as I don’t think that they adequately capture the semantics of the actual content structure of a weblog post. Then it hit me that a weblog entry is like a complete, miniature page in its own right! It has a header for the title of the entry and a by-line, a contents area, and a footer with additional meta-data and contact details (in other words, a comments invitation):

<div class="entry">

    <div class="header">

        <h2>Entry Title</h2>

        <p>Written by Joe Blogs</p>

    </div>

    <div class="content">

        <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod
        tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis
        nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis
        aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat
        nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui
        officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.</p>


    </div>

    <div class="footer">

    <p>Posted on the 21st of Month, under <a href="tag">Category</a>. <a>Comment?</a></p>


    </div>

</div>

The nice thing that this convention exposes is that it’s easy to see other content blocks in a page as having a similar structure. Therefore, you can mark up many things with this pattern and then use an encapsulating div with a specific "id", like “contents”, or “page-header” to provide the context.

Design By Fire’s Andrei Herasimchuk writes an open letter to Adobe to request the release of a set of core fonts to the general public for use in web browsers. I’d love to be able to specify Helvetica Neue for headlines and have a reasonable expectation that most users would see it, rather than a dingy knock-off like Arial.

On the wiki for Apple’s Open Source release of iCal Server, a list of apps that will work with the Server:

http://trac.macosforge.org/projects/collaboration/wiki/CalendarClients

Notably, “Teams”. Now what is that, I wonder?

Update

Looks like it’s a Wiki-based collaboration tool. Very swish. Can we kill Lotus Notes now, please?

Every single day, start-up businesses release innovative and useful small web applications. Following 37signals’s successful model, so-called web 2.0 applications try to do one thing well, and usually offer an API to allow third-party developers to extend their services.

So far, so good. But I want to have a moan, all the same. While most of these web applications offer a free version, you’ll soon need the paying version to get anything useful done. And that’s fine. I’m not complaining about that. But what if you need half a dozen of these things? Invoicing via one; groupware and communications through another? How many services do you want to track down and update everytime your credit card expires? How many logins do you want to manage?

I think one answer is an aggregation/reseller service. You pay a monthly fee with a single broker who allows you to mix and match bundles from a range of companies’s products. Volume discounts could mean that the overall cost for the buyer goes down. I’m sure a neat US $50 for a large bundle of web applications isn’t going to be a huge problem for a small web-based business. It could also act as a nice launching pad for new products from first-time developers.

A quick note for others who might have the same problem. I’ve been having trouble with the output of search on Retrorocket. I’ve defined a specific section to take the output, but there’d be no results after executing a query.

I turned on Textpattern’s debugging option, and found this error message:

Can’t find FULLTEXT index matching the column list

After a bit of digging around online, I found that there needs to be a fulltext index in the MySQL database. I did a quick trip to my new best friend, PHPMyadmin, and added full text to the main contents table on my textpattern database. So now search works again! W00t!

Warning: I am not a database expert by any stretch. Do not take advice internally. I think I’m probably a little bit better than a cargo cultist at this kind of thing. But you never know.

XML syndication feeds—whether they be RSS or Atom—are a brilliant idea with an unwieldly implementation. Whether it’s done manually or through one’s own authoring tool, putting the syndicatable content into a separate file for parsing by a feed-reading tool is an overly complicated extra step in the publishing process. Why not have all the necessary data and meta-data embedded in the single definitive source for a document—the HTML page itself?

The problem is that HTML and XHTML as of version 1.1 lack the native elements to describe a syndication feed. XHTML 2.0 should have the elements and attributes to do it easily. But XHTML 2.0 is a long way off yet. Once again, a microformat has stepped into the breach.

The hAtom microformat embeds Atom metadata into existing, well-worn XHTML constructs. It’s modeled on the ad hoc design patterns used by many existing blogs.

One area where it might have a lot of potential is in the creation of static XHTML pages. Currently, attempting to create a syndication feed for static content is a nightmare of hand-editing and duplication of effort. With hAtom, an author can write and mark-up once, and publish in a format that is semantically rich and very readily transformable.

Update:

I reproduce below the comments that were lost when the database went ka-boom!

Colin Morris wrote:

I have to say I’m not that sure about the microformat for syndication as part of the usefulness of the external-file format is that you don’t have to download all the guff from the page and then parse it. Navigation, titles, etc. are wasted bandwidth for that application. You don’t really need microformats to syndicate a blog page as you can have a computer make best guesses about page structure (assuming you’ve used semantic markup of course, but if you’re going to microformat a page I’d assume you’re also able to semanticise the page). Atom/ RSS as external files have only the data you want/ need to download.

Nick Caldwell wrote:

Hi, Colin! I’ll try and take your points in turn.

part of the usefulness of the external-file format is that you don’t have to download all the guff from the page and then parse it [...]

I’d assume that an hAtom feed reader would simply grab the xhtml structure itself and parse that, ignoring css links and so forth.

Navigation, titles, etc. are wasted bandwidth for that application.

How much wasted bandwith are we talking here, though? A few bytes? Compared to the work that feed readers do to parse and format busted RSS feeds (the majority), it’s surely trivial.

assuming you’ve used semantic markup of course, but if you’re going to microformat a page I’d assume you’re also able to semanticise the page

I think hAtom has the nice effect of enriching the semantics of an already well-marked-up document. And adopting it as a markup format should enhance the semantics of an otherwise poorly marked-up page.

Atom/ RSS as external files have only the data you want/ need to download.

Hmmm… My feeling is that you already have separation of presentation, content/structure, and behaviour with CSS, XHTML, and ECMAScript. Why split off content/structure into two separate content/structure containers?

Bob DuCharme has a thoughtful overview of the benefits of Ruby on Rails at what might be termed the consumer end of programming.

Most discussions of Rails focus on its inroads into the high-end web development that many are doing with large, complex Java libraries. I can picture it also playing an increasing role in low-end database development. For example, picture someone whose computer knowledge is limited to basic Microsoft Office usage. I’ll call her Brenda. Brenda needs to develop some sort of multi-table (and perhaps multi-user) database for her office. The obvious answer in the last few years would have been Microsoft Access; other choices over the years include dBase, FoxPro, Paradox, FileMaker, and other products that commanded portions of the PC database manager market before Microsoft steamrolled in. Now, Brenda has a free alternative that works equally well on Windows, the Mac, and Linux: Ruby on Rails.

“Rails: Access killer” isn’t the world’s sexiest marketing message. But it’s one that might make a real difference.

For the first in what might be an occasional series highlighting poor web design usability and accessibility choices, I give you this error message, which I just received from the Commonwealth Bank’s online service:

You must not use the ‘Back’ and ‘Forward’ browser buttons for navigation in NetBank.
(Error Message No. 200137)

No. Of course not. That’s not irritating at all.

(The date of this entry is faked due to database collapse. Sorry for any inconvenience)

I’m putting the final touches on the Retrorocket entry in the Shopify Vision theme competition, with a design I’m calling “Rebound” (after an intial design attempt, which I called “Unbound” proved, um, less than awesome).

Shopify is a hosted electronic commerce solution. It’s basically a shopping cart solution, but with several nice features, the most important and innovative being a well-designed, logical, elegant administration interface.

Vision is a brilliant marketing and awareness-raising strategy. The long-term success of a web application like Shopify is going to depend on both the ecosystem of secondary services that grow around it, and the buzz and word-of-mouth that it generates; Vision serves both needs by giving web designers the chance to trial the application and become comfortable with customising it, and by targeting web designers, jadedPixel, the creators of Shopify get the ear of some of the web’s most influential trend-setters. Never mind that they’ve already earned massive brownie-points with open-source enthusiasts by making their templating engine, Liquid, freely available, but the whole thing has been built with Ruby on Rails, the world’s trendiest—and let’s face it, not without good cause—web application development framework. I’m just in awe.

I’m pretty confident that Shopify will be a success—I think it’ll be a no-brainer for web designers to point their small-business clients to it as a simple, easy-to-use e-commerce solution. I’ll certainly be doing so, and I expect that Shopify template design will become a central component of Retrorocket Design’s range of services.

Well, almost. I’ve learned more about PHPMyadmin in the last 2 hours than I really wanted to, that’s for sure. But the archives have mostly been restored. Unfortunately, almost everything I’ve written this year is lost. Lost, I say. Sigh. Off to Google’s cache, for me.

Turns out the database backup plugin that I’ve been using for Retrorocket doesn’t actually back-up the actual article content of the site. I found this out after doing a test restore of the database dump. OK. I’ve got a backup from PHPmyadmin. From January.

I’m going to look on the bright side, though. It’s time for a real spring-clean of this site’s underlying architecture. I’m finally mostly happy with the actual design, so don’t expect it to change too much. Maybe. Sigh. I’m still a bit gutted, though.

Breathtaking photoshopped imaginary city-scapes in The City of Galvez.

via Clive Thompson

Wow, am I in touch with the zeitgeist or what? 37Signals has just made the lowest-level paying Basecamp account free for teachers at university, k-12 schools, and in special education. Impressive.

For over a year now I’ve been quietly working towards the inception of an academic cultural studies weblog—a joint-authored publication that could function as a valuable forum for public intellectualism, and friendly and productive debate. It’s now ready to be revealed: The Memes of Production.