newscloud's blog

Watch Eben Moglen's keynote to the 2006 Plone Conference which my friend Jon has been raving about to me for the past few weeks. Well, he was right to rave.

In this inspiring lecture, Professor Moglen weaves together the
industrial revolution, the knowledge economy, the free software
movement, the One Laptop Per Child project and the long struggle for human dignity and equality.

 Excerpts quoted here and here.
 

From Idealog:

At NewsCloud this past week, 36.33% of Firefox users are using 2.0 vs. 54.57% on 1.5x versions. Whereas, only 10.37% of Internet Explorer users are on 7.0 vs. 88.46% on 6.0.

It seems to me this indicates that Firefox users are upgrading far more quickly than Internet Explorer users. In fact, while last week, IE usage on NewsCloud was 44.30% vs. 44.12% for Firefox, whereas in the month of October there had been more Firefox users on our site (47.75% Firefox vs. 39.44% IE).

So, essentially, even as our site has more IE users as a percentage of visitors, more Firefox users are on 2.0 than IE users on 7.0.

And by the way, when are they going to fix the roll call list? It's been down since the 2.0 launch. It's not updating.

Today we're announcing the release of the NewsCloud Web Service and APIs as part of our effort to make NewsCloud
into a fully open platform for media distribution. Our goal is to
expand the potential for citizen journalism by helping developers
embrace and extend our work. The NewsCloud web services will allow
other community developers to easily interact and expand the stories
and features at NewsCloud.com. We hope the result will be a variety of
cool mashups, customized Web sites with media content and a better
NewsCloud.

NewsCloud's Web Services consist of more than 50 interfaces (APIs)
for interacting with our Web site. Nearly everything you can do as a
user on the NewsCloud site can be done via our APIs from your own Web
site. If you want to, you can even create your own news site - or
design your own front page.

We've tried to make it easy for Web developers to make use of our APIs
with a simple PHP class. By using our NewsCloud PHP class with your
code, interacting with data from our site becomes as easy as
manipulating any PHP array data.

We've also built a number of examples for which we're sharing the source code available - including some AJAX examples.

 So is anyone interested in building a Firefox extension using some of these APIs?
 

I'm encouraging NewsCloud users to drag bookmarks to their Firefox browser bar - but often Firefox doesn't use the link text (inside the <a>linktexttitle</a>) it parses the href ulr of the anchor tag and displays an incorrect title in the browser bar. Safari corrects for this each time by prompting users to set the name of the link.

Is there a proper way to code a link so that Firefox will title it the way you want?

Sorry for posting here. Let me know if there is a more appropriate place to post.

I wrote up a brief how to for setting up a conditional header to spread firefox when users visit your Web site: 

PHP Browser Detection for Conditional Firefox Banner 

Just what has Microsoft been doing for IE 7? (discuss on NewsCloud)

(direct to Slashdot) 

 The article shares our experience trying to decide how to best balance browser support between Firefox and IE...and hopefully will lead to more discussion about whether Web developers should more aggressively support  standards-compliance browsers.
 

Windows columnist Paul Thurrot rips into Microsoft for its lack of IE 7 CSS standards compliance:
 

Furthermore, by halting all IE development for several years before reconstituting the IE team to create IE 7.0, Microsoft has set back Web development by an immeasurable amount of time.

My advice is simple: Boycott IE. It's a cancer on the Web that must be stopped. IE isn't secure and isn't standards-compliant, which makes it unworkable both for end users and Web content creators.

After getting some great comments from readers here - I posted more at length about my experience with NewsCloud's IE problems and Microsoft's deliberate neglect of CSS standards.

 Read the full post here