John August

Archives for 2004

New look, new engine

News

It’s been a while in coming, but I finally converted johnaugust.com over from [Movable Type](http://movabletype.org) to [WordPress](http://wordpress.org), and redesigned a few things along the way. Well, okay; I redesigned pretty much everything. For people who are used to the old tabs-across-the-top layout, it may take a little while to get used to, but trust me, everything people actually used at the old site is now here, or will be shortly.

A few helpful hints on the new structure:

  1. Clicking anywhere on the header, or the big brass brad, will always take you back to the front page.
  2. Try the Archives. It creates a list of all entries, sorted by date, name or category. Very useful.
  3. The search now actually works. It will pull up full entries, combining them into pages of up to seven items.
  4. Instead of distinct sections for “Projects,” “Resources,” and “First Person,” these articles will be folded into the main content. If you want to see just the Projects, click on the button in the “Show by Category” section.
  5. Depending on how hard I get hit with comment spam, I may decide to turn on comment moderation. If so, comments on articles won’t show up until I approve them. I’ll warn you if I have to do this.

The old site was held together with duct tape and prayer, so the switch was necessary if a bit painful. Most things should be working now, but expect a few broken links and missing images. There’s a customized 404 page (“Sorry, I couldn’t find that.”). If you come across it while going through the site, I’d appreciate a note (you can leave a comment on this post) letting me know what took you there.

More about the RSS feeds

Geek Alert

A few readers wrote in asking about the RSS feeds for the site. Some wondered why clicking on the links just brought up a page of gibberish, or asked for recommendations about which applications worked best with them.

Although the addresses look the same (starting with the ‘http://’), RSS and Atom aren’t web pages like you traditionally think of them. Rather, they’re **feeds**. Think of them like magazine subscriptions. You subscribe to National Geographic, and every month you get an issue. RSS works the same way, except that rather than getting a whole “issue,” you get each article as soon as it’s posted. This means that rather than having to visit johnaugust.com every day to see if there’s anything new, you can sit back and let the articles come to you.

netnewswireClicking on [the image](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/netnewswire.jpg) to the left should probably make this a little more clear. This is a screenshot from the newsreader program I use, [NetNewsWire](http://ranchero.com/). In the left-hand column, you see my subscriptions. (Subscriptions, by the way, are almost always free.)

Right now, the one highlighted is “ja with comments.” In the center column you see the titles for 15 most recent entries in the ‘ja with comments’ feed. Clicking on any one of these headlines brings up the text for that entry.

As you can see, I use a completely separate program to handle my RSS feeds. That’s because most browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox aren’t set up to handle them well, although the forthcoming version of [Safari](http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/safari.html) is supposed to use them extensively. Also, notice that the RSS feed is pretty basic, with no fancy formatting or graphics. It’s just the content, none of the bells and whistles. This is part of what makes it so fast.

Why would you want to subscribe to a site, rather than just visit it? In a word, efficiency. I’m sure every reader out there has sites sitting in his bookmarks that he only visits every once in a while. Sure, you could stop by every day, but what if there’s nothing new? As you can you can see in the screenshot, I’m subscribed to 54 feeds. There’s no way I could or would visit those 54 sites every day, but with RSS, I’m getting the same information I would if I did.

Hopefully, readers will be able to recommend good newsreaders for Windows or Linux.

Fatter RSS feed now available

Geek Alert

If you’re subscribing to this site via RSS, there’s now an RSS 2.0 feed that includes the full text of articles, along with any comments posted images and some formatting.

I’m in the process of revamping a lot of things on the site. Pretty soon you should be able to subscribe to a variety of new feeds, including just the comments on a particular entry. And if you’re not using RSS yet, try Googling it to find a good newsreader for your computer. It’s the closest thing yet to an IV drip for information.

UPDATE: The [Feeds](http://johnaugust.com/site/feeds) section is now working.

Digital cinema gets a little closer

Geek Alert

A while back, Sylvain from Quebec wrote in to ask, “[Will digital ever replace film?](http://johnaugust.com/news/000039.html)” My response (“yes, eventually”) drew a fair amount of discussion and disagreement, particularly in terms of distribution, with some readers trumpeting film-based technologies such as Maxivision.

An [article on CNET today](http://news.com.com/Digitizing+the+multiplex/2100-1025_3-5330706.html?part=rss&tag=5330706&subj=news.1025.5) does a nice job explaining how the studios are working to pick a standard for digital video distribution, with the hopes of saving themselves $800 million a year:

>A technology consortium called the Digital Cinemas Initiatives (DCI), created by the major Hollywood studios in early 2002, is finally nearing completion on a set of technical recommendations that is intended to rally the industry around a single technological standard […] based on the JPEG 2000 video format.

I think it’s encouraging that they chose the relatively open JPEG 2000 standard, rather than Microsoft’s Windows Media 9.