Rubenerd

When I first started blogging in the early 2000s, the web was alive with discussion about the RSS version wars. Dave Winer’s RSS 2.0 broke from RDF in its acronym and implementation. Various other versions derived from Netscape’s earlier work were also still pushing posts.

For a web developer, you had to decide which flavour of RSS you were going to make available. For software developers, it meant detecting a veritable smorgasbord of differing, incompatible RSS versions all with their own features and undocumented quirks. Do description attributes contain HTML, or escaped HTML? It was the wild, wild west.

Indecisive people like me exposed RSS 2.0 and RDF/RSS 1.0 in our weblog HTML headers. More still would expose one, then change.

Into this world, Atom was born

As a stickler for metadata and document formats, Atom appealed to my perfectionist side with its strict XML syntax and mandatory GUIDs. Still, the more I saw the ecosystem around it evolve, the less impessed my inner pragmatist was.

Marco Arment’s recent blog post about Google Reader’s closure summarised some my thoughts at the time:

Then you spend twice as much time figuring out how to deal with poorly crafted feeds, ambiguities, and edge cases — especially for Atom, which is a huge, overengineered pain in the ass that, as far as I can tell, exists mostly because people always argue with Dave Winer and do their own contrarian things even when he’s right, because they can’t stand when he’s right.

As Atom predictably failed to supplant RSS, we were left with the cruel irony of having to support and parse yet another incompatible feed format. Worse still, for a period of time in the early 2000s, those of us in WordPress and other CMSs were even exporting Atom 0.3 and 1.0. Appreciate the irony of that for a moment.

For all the proported benefits and noble aspirations for the standard, Atom was another example of not being able to live in good intentions, to abuse a quote from Ned Flanders. For my blog, I stuck with exporting RSS 2.0 and RDF/RSS 1.0, and left it at that.

Why Rubenerd.com won’t have Atom

Today in 2013, I find myself writing template files for the Jekyll iteration of Rubenerd.com. Unlike full-featured CMSs, Jekyll is a wonderful LEGO set that requires you to code the templates for even the web feeds yourself. Its been quite a learning experience, rediscovering all the syntax and attribute information that go into creating RSS feeds.

Once again, I considered implementing Atom. Octopress—perhaps the most common way Jekyll is used today—includes an Atom template by default. All the Jekyll tutorials I’ve come across include Atom in their examples. Atom is what all the cool people use; so I’ve been told repeatedly.

And yet, I’m sticking with RSS. It’s parsed (hah) the test of time. The toolchain I’ve developed over 10 years in Perl and Ruby still sing with it. A decade of blog reading with RSS feeds has shown its versatility.

For my Jekyll site, I created an RSS 2.0 template using pretty much the same metadata the Atom feeds were being created with. Despite not publishing an alternative link to my RDF/RSS 1.0 link for over five years, I still have 15-20 requests an hours for that feed, so I even wrote one for those people too.

If I were really adventurous, I could retire my RSS feeds and point them to a new Atom feed, but I’ve seen far too many parsers choke on data streams in an alternative format to what they were expecting for a subscribed feed. Even if I were on board with Atom, this would give me enough pause to think long and hard about the value it provides, versus losing some of my dear and wonderful readers like you.

This originally appeared on PenguinCoffee, Clara’s and my old shared weblog.

Dat beautiful scenery.

By ArseniXC on Pixiv.

Not content creating, drawing and redressing our beloved mascot with ridiculous amounts of care, love and detail, Clara has crafted a pixelart rendition of Rubi, as well as her Nyancat.

You can read about her design process in detail over at Kirinyan. I’d never heard of the design tools she used, but if you’re halfway talented I’m sure you’d get it ^_^.

Last month, I wrote about an issue I was having with the W3C’s experimental HTML5 validator. While RDFa attributes like “property” are listed as being valid in HTML5 contexts, the validator responded to my meta elements with:

“Element meta is missing required attribute name”

Attributes for element meta: name http-equiv content charset

Fortunately, @sideshowbarker on Twitter was on it:

@Rubenerd please try your examples from [your blog post] again now at http://validator.w3.org/nu/ & if it’s still not working, let me know

Sure enough, I tried out my pages and my previous examples in the linked Nu Markup Validation Service, as well as the W3C Markup Validator 1.3 again. Success!

Thank you to Michael Smith and the team for their feedback and for making their RDFa users happy, I appreciate it ^_^. I will be revising my previous post to indicate the problem is now resolved.

This originally appeared on PenguinCoffee, Clara’s and my old shared weblog.

Azunyan~

By あ on Pixiv.

The Free anime series has broken ground in more ways than one. Once again, my girlfriend Clara beat me to the punch, so you should read her post.

It’s the first Kyoani series to feature a cast of highly attractive young men, quite the course change from the moeblobs we’ve long since got used to. Its title has to have some of the lowest Google Juice ever garnered by a series in recent memory; perhaps they were scared away by names like this. For a Kyoani series, its scenery shots are surprisingly detailed.

Well we have another achievement to add to the list: after just one episode its viewers and fanbase have created and uploaded the biggest trove of genderswapped art for a series I’ve ever seen. For example, erichpcsc’s picture of Haruka below, which you can compare with the first rather fabulous image above.

All online fandoms do this, but anime in particular seems to attract a large amount of fanart with characters reimagined as another gender. Perhaps the most famous example is Kyonko, a female version of Kyon, the male protagonist from the Haruhi Suzumiya franchise. Her disenchanted face is so priceless, I’ve been using her likeness on posts like this for years!

The speed with which the Pixiv community have uploaded genderswapped Free characters speaks to several different phenomena, me thinks.

(Image above by mitsukam on Pixiv).

I suppose it first speaks to Kyoani’s art style. When we saw Tamako Market, we got a glimpse again at what their stylised image of a young man was. Despite their rugged, toned bodies, the boys of Free still have the limpid, expressive eyes usually reserved for female characters. Its not that all their characters look like women, its that they all seem to conform to a roughly similar art style.

In other words, reimagining Kyoani characters as another gender isn’t as great an artistic leap as perhaps we’d think. Contrast this with Western comics, for example. Looking at their facial features, you couldn’t easily confuse male and female characters.

Of course, I could be overanalysing this. Its just as likely male anime fans need their fix of attractive female characters, and draw the fanart to alleviate the lack of them in Free.

This post originally appeared on the Annexe, when it was hosted on Fargo.

ITN, via The Guardian:

The US navy successfully [landed] an unmanned drone on an aircraft carrier at sea for the first time. The defence department said the X-47B drone, nicknamed Salty Dog 502, flew from Maryland and landed on the deck of the USS George HW Bush in the Atlantic on Wednesday.

Oh, goodie.

This post originally appeared on the Annexe, when it was hosted on Fargo.

That would have been infinitely funnier if it rhymed. Sorry Dino.

But I digress. Turns out I misunderstood the CSS tab in the Settings window of Fargo. Changes there are reflected in Fargo itself, NOT in the public reader which you see now.

Guess it’s back to the drawing board!

This post originally appeared on the Annexe, when it was hosted on Fargo.

My bad!

Can’t save because Dropbox reports that this account has made too many requests recently.

With Monday come and gone, I’m now into my third week of recovery for my monstrously swollen, sprained ankle of fun. For those who don’t want the full story, last month I stepped on a utility cover in the street, which proceeded to cave in.

(Okay, its not as swollen as a beach ball, but it gave me an excuse to reuse that image above from five years ago. As far as I can tell, the original vector artist doesn’t have it online any more. That’s a shame, because Yuki looks too cool for school).

But I digress. After seeing the lovely Dr Reilly in Wahroonga last week, we determined that I’d torn some ligaments and muscle, but hadn’t broken the bone. I had a bone fracture in roughly the same place when I was 14, so was relieved beyond belief that I wouldn’t have to repeat all that treatment again!

Unfortunately, sprained ankles are also less than fun, as I’m sure many of you can attest to. The biggest challenges for me aren’t using the crutches or getting used to the cam boot, but with cabin fever and sleep. I’ll spare the cabin fever discussion for another post, because I think its an interesting juxtaposition between the alleged hikkimori people expect quiet nerds to be, and my need (yes, need) to commune with nature and exercise a little each and every day.

(Oh dear, I just used the word juxtaposition. Someone, shoot me in the foot, please).

So anyway, sleep

Yes, sleep. In one word: it’s nigh impossible. Wait a minute.

The bruises wrap around all sides of my foot, so regardless of the position I put my foot when I lie down in bed, within a few minutes I start feeling sharp pain. I can prop it up on cushions to reduce the swelling, but the end result is I spend half the night gritting my teeth and cursing under my breath, before finally succumbing to extreme physical exhaustion and falling asleep. It’s a cruel irony, as most of our healing takes place when we sleep, and it renders me a groggy mess for the rest of the next day!

As I pull myself out of this self pity wallow I’ve so thoroughly constructed for myself though, there is room for hope. While I’m disappointed this has essentially ruined any chance of fun for the winter university break, I’m relieved I’m not having to cart my injured foot around campus for classes. I can take it easy for the next few weeks and recover on my own time, with plenty of Chamomile tea and support from my lovely Clara and my family. It’s also given me an opportunity to sit in front of the computer for extended periods of time and finally get a ton of nagging system and blog maintenance tasks done that I’ve been putting off for far too long.

It’s also given me a chance to reflect on just how lucky I really am, despite living in far more challenging times. Earlier in my 20s I was one of the cynical “life is so hard” people, but the older I get, the more I realise just how much I have to be thankful for. Sometimes I just need to bust up my foot to realise it.