…but I kind of hate HTML.

That is all.

*Blatantly stealing a meme from Tyler Cowen.

I attended the DC2.0 event, a Web 2.0 miniconference in Reston (oh, the mighty whines of those who couldn’t navigate roads not on a grid was euphonious to me). I’m sure I’ll have more to say, but the one application that blew me away was this:

Say you want to do this whole blogging thing, but either a) you don’t have time, or b) you’re just inherently an untalented cretin, but in your defense, you actually are aware of this. Others, like me, produce sophisticated, valuable banter on a regular basis. Demand–Supply–Market. You can join, invite people to supply you with posts, and search for posts to buy with attribution, without attribution, or with exclusivity. Prices are determined by the seller, and the service charges a commission.

I don’t doubt there’s a market for it, and I applaud the guys for finding it and building a medium-slick app to exploit it. But I have to wonder: is technology really a “pain point” (thanks for the new marketroid buzzword) or an excuse for not blogging? Today’s tools are pretty easy, and I have a choice of any number of WYSIKOWYG clients (What You See Is Kind Of What You Get). I think the pain point is trying to do something you have neither the time nor talent to do. If you don’t have time to hone your writing, do you really have time to cull through the vast amount of stuff out there and find quality blog posts to buy and claim as your own?

And if you do, how does this help you? After a while, I figure out that link blogs should tell me who else is worth reading so I can skip the middleman, unless their culling skills are excellent. Sploid is such for me, but they also add value in their writeups. So without clever commentary on the links you provide and some serious thought into which links go into your blog, you don’t have any more compelling content than you did when you posted once a week with something semi-insightful. (Finger pointing at self, here.)

Anyway, it’s an interesting approach, and not badly done, but I doubt it has much of a future. Then again, I hate InstaPundit for much the same reason, so…

Since I catch heat about things going buggy at work (“How could there be an error in the most buggy browser on the planet, just because we asked for thirty last-minute appearance changes and skipped testing!”) I thought I’d put a little bit of perspective. Click below to see a larger size view of Boeing’s 787 promo site–not as high profile as cnn.com, but pretty big. Looks like their fellow Washington State residents let them down (yes, I know Boeing is moving, just shut up):

<Nelson>Ha-ha</Nelson>

The lesson is that a) mistakes happen, and b) Microsoft isn’t the answer, budgeting for and performing acceptance testing is.

Listen, people: Stop panicking about X once it takes place online, as if it’s new or different or scarier. X can be anything, because it has the magic power to make people freak out like it’s 1978 and they’ve lost their Sean Cassidy tickets if you can say that X takes place online.

Case in point: The NSA is in more trouble currently for putting cookies that don’t expire when you leave their site on your computer than they are for violating not only the constitution but US law by eavesdropping on American citizens. Let me put this in perspective.

First off, cookies are just little text files that contain information put there by the site you visit. They could as easily be stored on the site you visit–and in fact, we Web types do just that on a regular basis. The single and only difference is that cookies are stored on your computer, not theirs. They have no special powers, contain no information not available to the site you’re visiting anyway, and just sit there on your computer. And since it’s your computer, you can delete them any time you like. You can’t do that on their computer. In fact, deleting a file on the NSA’s computer is a federal offense that will land you in jail for a very long time. So 99% of the concerns about cookies are either ill-founded, untrue, or irrelevant.

The 1% that is true is that it is a more reliable way to tell who you are when you come back to their site later–though as someone who has clients continually demanding more and more information about the habits of you, the gentle website reader, I can tell you it is so far from foolproof as to make it virtually useless–and it’s completely useless if it’s the only measure you use to track repeat visits. What can someone do with that information? Not bloody much. They might be able to tell that you–or someone else who uses the same computer as you–visit their site every Thursday. I’m scared, are you? Oh, wait. I’m not scared.

They can’t tell anything more about who you are, where you live, or anything else you might be worried about the NSA knowing by using cookies. Not. One. Thing. But listening to your conversations on the phone? They have a record of your voice, what number you called, the voice that answered, what you said, and maybe background noises. They know what number you called from, and where that is in the world much more precisely than they know where your computer is when you visit their site. And unlike cookies, you can’t delete the recording of your call–doing so, were you able to do it, would put you away longer than deleting a record on their webserver.

So if you take one thing away from this, don’t worry about cookies, unless they store your password in plain text. If you are really concerned about cookies, start using Firefox. Go to the preferences, click on the Privacy button, and click on the Cookies tab. Uncheck the box labeled “Allow sites to set cookies.” There, you’re completely safe. Of course, a lot of sites won’t work, but that’s your own fault for being a paranoiac about things that just don’t matter while ignoring the erosion of the Constitution that you used to have.

I was commenting to a friend that “programmer” isn’t the first thing I bring up when chatting with a comely lass, as it has a certain cachet…a really socially awkward one. It’s improving (Sorry, Patti, it still beats accounting in reputation–thank you, Dot Bomb!), but it still exists.

There’s another reason. My degrees are in music and international relations. Though they pay me primarily to program websites to take content and spit it back out again, I’m nearly completely self-taught. So even though I’ve been doing it for a while and have seen other people’s code that was both better and worse than mine, I admit to a little professional insecurity.

No greater validation have I had for a while than being able to reasonably quickly grasp why The Daily WTF? is named as it is. People do some really weird things, and fortunately most of my code wouldn’t qualify (wish I could guarantee nothing of mine will ever show up, but…).

If you’re not a programmer, though, don’t bother. Await my next political rant or perhaps some birdblogging.

More evidence, if you needed it, that the an intergovernmental body is not the organization to replace ICANN as the arbiters of the Internet’s domain name system–which will, like all UN-style organizations, suffer mission creep to cover more and more facets of the system:

Controversy has continued to dog a UN net summit in Tunisia as a head of a France-based media freedom group was blocked from entering the country.

Reporters Without Frontiers (RSF) head Robert Menard said Tunisian security officials had not allowed him to leave the plane after his arrival from Paris.

My suggestion? A privately-funded foundation entirely outside of government control, with a strictly limited mission. If they get out of line, you can always replace their root servers with others. The government of Tunisia won’t like that, but that’s probably a good thing.

Jason notes the release of Firefox 1.5 RC 1. Turns out the Safari team has been busy, too, and included in this week’s OS X 10.4.3 release is a version of Safari (and any application that uses WebKit for rendering) that passes the Acid 2 Test.

I confirmed it, and it’s pretty cool.

(Not shown: the nose turns blue when you hover over it.)

Also of note for the future of such advances in esoteric CSS, Eric Meyer notes the holy grail of table-free design: effortless, semantic, order-agnostic equal-height columns, created by Alex Robinson. Do I dare hope it supports flexible widths? He also has a table-free grid layout, too. And apparently this works in all current browsers.

That would be great–I would love to finally separate design from code. My criticisms to date have been for those who have made George Bush-like claims about turning the corner in the development of table-free designs. All of them were severely limited and they brushed over the real difficulties involved for real-world application.

Given their history, I’m going to wait and see before going out and adopting this. Unlike many of the evangelists, I have paying clients that only care that their website works in whatever browser they’re currently using and that their bosses are currently using. Or whatever browser a complaining user is using. I prefer elegance, but they pay only for results, elegant or no.

But it would be quite a relief if true. Since I’ve been working with HTML emails I have felt anew the pain of development pre-CSS. I was actually an early adopter, because it meant never having to search and replace font tags again. That CSS works all the way back to Netscape 4.x. But it doesn’t work in *^%!$*&@ Lotus Notes.

Tweak

A feature requested that is out of the scope of the current contract, but that the project manager doesn’t want to push back on the client to pay for or drop.

Usage example: “I have just a little tweak to the site: add on a report that we don’t currently collect data for, and whatever other functionality we need to support that. By the way, why are there more development hours than you estimated?”

In my inbox this evening:

As of today, all Onion Premium accounts have been terminated, and the service itself has been deleted from the Internet.

As of Wednesday morning, a new ad-enriched web site will debut, delighting readers like yourself with its winning combination of hard-hitting news and cutting-edge corporate sponsorship.

Current subscribers will apparently get refunds for the unused portion.

Dropping subscriptions for ads? That’s one you don’t see everyday. Beginning of a trend?

So today is July 20, on which date in 1969, shortly after the six-month anniversary of my birth, Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon. To celebrate, Google has launched the extremely cool Google Moon, basically Google Maps for the Moon. It includes locations for each of the Apollo landings.

My favorite bit? When you zoom in past the limit of the data NASA have for surface features on the moon, it shows you the terrible secret of space: it’s really cheddar cheese.

(Hat tip: Liberty Belles)