It gets even worse once the white-space is accounted for, with two thirds of the screen real-estate dedicated to advertising.

(found via Neil Gaiman’s blog, he found it at El Reg)

Lots of sabots in the works. First and foremost the RSS from The Weather Network is no good (incorrect/invalid/inconsistent date formats, some other brokenness). Twitterfeed offers two ways to detect a new posting – the GUID, or the pubDate. As mentioned, the pubDates used in the feed are just plain wrong, so no help there. The GUID for each post, also not helpful – it’s the static link to the current weather page; long-term forecast is indicated by ref=day1, ref=day2, etc in the URL – so that doesn’t change, even when the content does.

I have meant for a long time to fix it (before today, the last post form Twitterfeed was July 18), but aside from a few quick hacks, never completed it. Lately, the explosion in Kingstonians using Twitter has inspired me to fix it, especially the new followers @KingstonWeather has gained.

After some trial-and-error, I ended up building a php script to write an entirely new RSS feed, based on the one provided by The Weather Network – this one is valid, has proper (unique) IDs for the posts, and appears to work in Twitterfeed.

The original class did most of what I needed, but I made some minor changes. I’ve emailed the original contributor to offer my changes back, but until I hear back, I’ve posted my modified version here:

SimpleOpenID class

Comments/feedback always welcome.

I did notice a strange behaviour in OpenID; I’m not yet certain if I missed it in the spec or if it’s left to one’s judgement (note to self: read the spec again)… Anyway, here’s what happens:

- Say I sign up with “roosenmaallen.com”. This site delegates to my ClaimID page, so the openid.identity response is http://openid.claimid.com/silvermoon82, and this is what I actually use to identify the user.
To my thinking, I should be able to log in using “roosenmaallen.com” (since that delegates to my ClaimID), or claimid.com/silvermoon82, or openid.claimid.com/silvermoon82. These URLs all end up at the same identity, so they should be equivalent — and that’s how I implemented it on Rosebleed.

I’ve noticed other OpenID-enabled sites handle this differently. On the OpenID Directory for instance, I first signed up as “claimid.com/silvermoon82″. I’ve gotten in the habit of logging in using roosenmaallen.com; but when I try that at OpenID Directory, I get an error message that my email address is already registered to my ClaimID URL.

So, barring finding that the spec keeps “equivalent” OpenID URLs separate, I think I’m in the right here; always open to feedback though.

Update [2008-03-19]: I’ve checked the spec, and as it turns out, I’m actually in the wrong:

So, to use www.example.com as their Identifier, but have Consumers actually verify http://exampleuser.livejournal.com/ with the Identity Provider located at http://www.livejournal.com/openid/server.bml, they’d add the following tags to the HEAD section of the HTML document returned when fetching their Identifier URL.

<link rel=”openid.server” href=”http://www.livejournal.com/openid/server.bml”>
<link rel=”openid.delegate” href=”http://exampleuser.livejournal.com/”>

Now, when a Consumer sees that, it’ll talk to http://www.livejournal.com/openid/server.bml and ask if the End User is exampleuser.livejournal.com, never mentioning www.example.com anywhere on the wire.

The main advantage of this is that an End User can keep their Identifier over many years, even as services come and go; they’ll just keep changing who they delegate to.

This is a huge step towards an open, interoperable social web; Google and Facebook are probably the two largest collectors and holders of data (social and otherwise) on the web, and they have been among the most reticient about sharing their data.

• Updated to WordPress 2.3.2, which was entirely painless
• Began work on a new theme, which you may have noticed. Over the next while, I’ll be putting more into it; currently it’s very minimalist, little more than an XHTML skeleton with a couple moving parts.

More to come.

I’ve found other posts dating back to May of this year (The Numbers Guy) on the subject, so it’s really not a new idea.

The largest part of my doubt is the question of technology. In a CRT, it does indeed use more energy to display bright colours than dark (ref. DOE Energy Star Desktop Information). A CRT produces bright colours by directing an energy beam at the front of the screen; more brightness == more energy used.

As pointed out by Graphics Optimization, the technology in an LCD monitor is entirely different – the brightness is provided by a backlight of some description, and colours are produced by filtering that white backlight with liquid crystals. In this scheme the lowest energy consumption is for a white pixel, where nothing is filtered. Turning a pixel black requires filtering pretty much everything, so uses the most energy.

The DOE report mentioned above appears to have been published in 2001 (curl -I http://www.microtech.doe.gov/EnergyStar/info.htm gives a Last-Modified date of November 27, 2001), when CRTs were far more prevalent than they are today. That said, the CRT isn’t dead – just old, heavy, hot and bulky. If you (like me) do still use CRTs heavily, there are things you can do to reduce your impact:

• Blackle is a frontend for Google which displays in white-on-black. As of this writing, their homepage claims to have saved 370,654.618 Watt-Hours of energy, versus searching Google directly. Note that in a side-by-side comparison their search results are not identical to Google’s. This is possibly due to their own customizations (the first result for “bob” is about energy savings) or Google tailoring my results when I search google.com directly.
• User Style Sheets allow you to override the display of some/all pages you visit. The method is different for each browser, but here are a couple starting points:
  • Firefox lets you set these overrides in your userContent.css file.
  • Safari allows you to set your user stylesheet from the Advanced Preferences pane, or you can install SafariStand, which allows you to set specific stylesheets for individual domains (bonus: this allows you to override the nasty serif fonts used on NYTimes.com and a few other newspapers!)
• OS-Level Accessibility Settings often provide options for white-on-black or other high-contrast display modes which will affect your entire system.

If my computer is turned on, there’s generally a web browser open. Google Calculator meets my needs, and it’s faster than opening a local app or taking my boots off (if I need to count past 10).The downside? Apparently it annoys Google if you do it a lot:

Technorati Tags: Google Calculator, Google

From http://pinkforoctober.org/:

Web sites will Go Pink during the month of October to bring attention to Breast Cancer Awareness Month, get people talking about breast cancer, and raise money for research.

But to be clear, raising money isn’t the primary purpose of this web event.
The hope is that you turn your site pink (in whatever way works for your site), go out to that World Wide Web thing and educate yourself about the multiple issues related to Breast Cancer, then take that newfound knowledge and tell someone else what you’ve learned.