Forward compatability!
Have you noticed? No? Well, Rainy Day is enjoying a bit of a makeover. Tweaking will continue for another day or two, so, refresh now and again. The rebuild uses XHTML and CSS, and that means goodbye forever to nested tables, spacer gifs and pandering to the faults of bad browsers. The goal of the redesign is to save visitor and server bandwidth by avoiding the kind of coding that makes so many CSS/table sites as ugly as the rubbish they're supposed to replace. The next step on this journey will be a full CSS layout in summer. Forward compatability! That's the idea.
Glogger?
So Google has bought Pyra Labs, the company that developed the Blogger software. It's certainly an exciting development for blogs in general, and it's bound to raise their level of exposure, but is it a good fit, especially for a company that focuses on finding content, not on creating it? Too soon to say but those clever Google-persons wouldn't be acquiring part of the blogosphere if they didn't have something up their sleeves. Right? It might be an R&D move and Blogger will enable them to tinker with nanopublishing and its associated technologies: commenting, trackbacking and so on. When the time comes, Google will then offer these tools publicly. For information to be accessible for Google's users, it has to be on the Internet in the first place, so by distributing blogging tools, which can be used to make more content, Google's services would become even more valuable.
And as Dan Gillmor, who broke the story, wrote "The buyout is a huge boost to an enormously diverse genre of online publishing that has begun to change the equations of online news and information." Next Google purchase? Moveable Type?
UPDATE: "Google gets Blogger and better" is the headline on this fine article by Neil McIntosh in The Guardian today: "The fact that the world's favourite search engine has bought one of the pioneers of the online diary is probably good news for most net users," he says.
War
WAR consisteth not in Battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time, wherein the Will to contend by Battle is sufficiently known: and therefore the notion of time is to be considered in the nature of War, as it is in the nature of Weather. For as the nature of Foul weather lieth not in a shower or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many days together: so the nature of War consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is Peace.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan XIII
Diarist of the day: Rev. James Woodforde, 17 February 1763"I dined at the Chaplain's tale upon a roasted Tongue and Udder. N.B. I shall not dine on a roasted Tongue and Udder again very soon. "
