I also permanently moved from my subdomain (blog) to www.codedread.com/blog/ so feel free to update your links (though old links should still work).

Anyway does anyone have any suggestions on how to get these patches moving? Someone I need to email? kthxbai

In the meantime, if anyone wants to try and break my WordPress install by injecting funky XHTML, please be my guest on this page. Currently Sam is in the lead with two breakages (now fixed). Oh, and your name doesn’t have to be Philip, Jacques, Mark or Shelley either.

Since the majority of my images are right-floated, for now I don’t mind the occasional one in which I switch float:left for float:right and margin-right for margin-left…

What I was wondering was if there was a way to link each post in the feed to the comments feed of that story. This would allow a good feed reader to let people easily subscribe from the main feed to the conversation feed of a particular story where they have left a comment. Turns out it was fairly straightforward.

Doing a quick dig around the web turned up RFC 4685, which is an extension to the Atom format to support “threading”. It’s been around since 2006. Apparently there was a similar effort on the RSS side called commentsRss.

Anyway, the spec addresses much more than I need at the moment. All I want to do is, for each <entry> element, to include a link to the comments feed for that post. I do this by adding the following element inside each <entry> element in the feed:

To do this, I updated my feed-atom.php file to:

Ta da. Then I thought I’d track this down in WordPress and see if there was a bug/patch. Guess what… Sam has already submitted a patch for this. Two months ago. It will be in WordPress 2.5. Weird… Cool…

But the real question is why haven’t feed readers (like Google Reader) made more use of this? I think this is the biggest problem with having conversations in the blogosphere. You may subscribe to a feed that you enjoy. You may read a good story that someone publishes. You want to contribute to the discussion so you post a comment. Now if you want to keep following that story you either have to search for that story’s comment feed or (more often than not) you have to continue visiting the web page to see if anyone posts a new comment. Wouldn’t it be great if your feed reader provided you with a button next to that story you can click to automatically subscribe to that conversation (i.e. the comments feed for that story). After a while the conversation may dry up, upon which you can unsubscribe by unchecking a box in the UI or something.

Hey, this may already be out there and I might get laughed off the face of the blogosphere for still re-visiting web pages throughout the day. Feel free to leave your laughter below…

• 3833 – Extra </p> inside blockquote
• 3914, 4746 – Two feeds on Dashboard don’t work with application/xhtml+xml
• 4466 – Serve application/xhtml+xml if browser compliant
• 4857 – More issues with wpautop()
• 5144 – Paragraph end-tag wrongly inserted after object tag
• 5250 – wpautop() issue with nested lists
• 5998 – Invalid Unicode characters

I know there are a heap more. I know more will be submitted. This is just what I found when scanning the first few pages of a search for “xhtml”.

I’ve encountered 5144 directly on this blog with my clip art. I’ve found that I have to start the paragraph right after the <object> tag without a newline. A little annoying, but workaround-able.

Shelley just created Bug 5998 right now. This is a bug for WP accepting illegal Unicode code points like U+FFFE, which Jacques so kindly demonstrated.

Sad/Funny sidenote: When he did this, I ran into the very problem that Mark mentioned years ago and I had to poke my WordPress database option to switch back to text/html for the WordPress admin panel so I could correct Jacques’ invalid character. Tail now less bushy…

• I Want To Listen For News

  I subscribe to hundreds of feeds. If I see an interesting story from a blog, more often than not, I’ll read it directly in the feed reader. If the entire text is not present or some other resource doesn’t come through the feed reader, then I’ll click through to the site. To me this is the main use case. I’m currently covered here – “stream of entries plus feed”. Check.

• I Want Filtered Stories

  With some feeds, I might selectively filter in or out stories that fall into one or more categories. I may not want to know when Mark posts the “Warts of Flickr”, but maybe I’d like to read some of his thoughts on HTML. As a blogger, I should give readers a means of a) browsing the categories/tags and b) seeing a list of stories in a certain category.

• I Want To Re-Read A Specific Story

  Sometimes I’ll remember things like: Sam wrote a great article on OpenID that I didn’t have time to fully digest when he first published it. In cases like this, I could go to Sam’s site and do a search.

  Now truth be told, I usually just end up going to google and searching using “site:” because typically these results are so much better than these. But I will acknowledge that not everyone can be expected to use “site:” with their searches. So it seems that I should provide a search mechanism on my blog.

• I Want To Understand Where You Are Coming From

  … or I might want to cyber-stalk you jus’ a lil bit. Sometimes, to place a blogger’s comments today in context, I might want to go back to the beginning and start reading entries chronologically. Seems like I should provide a mechanism to browse entries from a particular time period.

• I Want To Read Some Things You Read

  Sometimes I might be curious what blogs a particular blogger finds interesting. Having a list of links (a blogroll) within reach is a good idea. And it’s nice to share a little link-love with your friends and colleagues.

• I Want To Contact You

  Leaving comments or sending email. I’ve got both, so I’m good.

Ok, I’ve listed the obvious ones – the ones that come by default in WordPress… Now what are some of the other blog user patterns as social aspects of the web increase? Dave seems to think that the near-live micro-blogging of Twitter is becoming very important these days. I haven’t hopped on board that train yet. I do like the idea of a Facebook-style “status” on my blog – but I don’t think it’s a killer feature.

I like the idea of having a seamless transition between my blog and website. so this evening I decided to flip the switch on the blog, even though the WordPress theme is very much a work-in-progress. I still need to figure out what to do with the sidebar, but I can always hack away on the theme on my old blog installation internally and publish updates once they have been verified on a set of decent browsers (Firefox 2+, Opera 9+, Safari 3+).

I use SVG in a bunch of different places: inline as decoration around the page (the blue gradient and the title) and referenced (via <object>) for the icon menu (at the top) and W3C validation badges (at the bottom). Once I nail down all the particulars, I’ll compress menu.svg and serve only menu.svgz so it can be neatly cached (at roughly 15kb). But I’ll keep menu.svg around for web developers to look at if they’re curious.

Work on this led to a few bugs reported at Mozilla, WebKit and Opera – but no show stoppers. The best user experience is in Opera 9.5. For the first time, I’m using declarative animation (in a simple way) for icon mouse-hovering. Firefox and Safari users miss out for now, unfortunately.

It turns out, as Shelley has mentioned, that the best developer experience to work on XHTML is also (by far) Opera. Instead of Firefox’s “yellow screen of death” we’re greeted with Opera’s “light grey screen of mild achiness”. Instead of cryptic messages about unexpected tags, the element which failed to be terminated and the tag that broke the XML parsing are highlighted for you.

I encountered some funniness when I tried to validate my pages on the W3C Validator. Apparently it thought they were text/html pages. So I had to add a little catch in my PHP content negotiation code to force application/xhtml+xml when I want to. Anyway, the PHP content negotiation code looks like this:

You might find some of my old site themes amusing, sad, or boring:

• 2004-04 – Early static HTML, table-based layout, no CSS.
• 2005-04 – Reworked into a templated PHP site. Eventually I turned it from table-based to CSS layout-based (snapshot is table-based).
• 2006-01 – Theme from 2006. Using CSS for layout. Embedded SVG aqua buttons for navigation menus. All modern browsers now support the features I was using on this page.