I've been looking for a new book series to read. I'm heading to Borders to look this up:

I've just finished reading Philip Pullman's Northern Lights, the first volume in a British kids' fantasy trilogy. I'm over the moon with delight. This is a brilliant novel: gripping, funny, dark, heartwarming and vivid. I haven't been so glad of a BritLit book since The Borribles Trilogy — up until now my absolute favorite kids' fantasy books, not least because of their unflinching grimness and refusal to be even slightly twee. Northern Lights rivals Borribles, outstrips the Hobbit, and leaves Harry Potter in the dust.

The book revolves around the quest of a little girl to uncover the nature of the universes parallel to her own — beginning in an alternate, steampunky Oxford University and ranging through London, the fens, and Lappland. The fantastic creatures and the magic that fuels them is utterly captivating and brilliantly executed. The book reveals its oddities and back-story in tiny sips, interspersed masterfully through the fast-paced action. I've just contacted my corner bookstore to see if they have volumes two and three in stock: I plan on devouring them.

I'm intrigued to see that there's an audio edition with Pullman reading: sounds wonderful.

LinkDiscuss

(Thanks, Cait!) [Boing Boing Blog]

Dewayne dug up this old Bryan Bell post about CSS and Radio:

If you would like to centralize your Radio CSS you can simple save your Style sheet as “#cascadingStyleSheet.txt” then place it in your “www” folder. Then simply add the macro to your template. Your CSS will be included where you included your macro.

This method will work even if you create a theme out of your design.

Spaces in the CSS macro tag added by me to prevent Radio from being confused…

I'm glad I found this. I'm working on my test install of Frontier/Manila and need this info to build the “surprise”.

From this “a klog apart” post:

Tim Bray measured the RSS traffic to his personal weblog. He came up with these numbers for a day with one change:

• 11,526 GET requests (about 8 per minute)
• 8,901 returned the no-change (code 304) 77%
• 2,625 returned the data (code 200). 23%
• 359 HEAD requests.
• 1,374 unique IP addresses.

Tim's work with Antarctica.net touches thousands of people. His professional network will be early adopters, so tracking Tim's blog would be natural.

Of note, Tim made a change. “The code that changes the picture-of-the-day every ten minutes or so was also as a side-effect re-writing the RSS. So I fixed it.” It's probably saving him 1.5 GB/month in downloads. Who's going to write the book on RSS optimization?

[a klog apart]

Sean Gallagher says:

After following the drama of personalities that is the debate over weblog syndication strategies old and new (RSS 2.0 vs. RSS 1.0 vs. Atom/Pie/Echo/Whatever the hell they've decided to call it this week), I've decided that it's time for someone to launch a truly open and unfettered syndication standard. I've decided to call my, oops, our new effort in openness and semantic web goodness RASH (Really Awful Syndication, with Hypertext).

The great part about RASH will be that you can get a RASH feed without even subscribing to it. All you have to do is visit a RASH-inducing weblog, and you'll instantly “catch” its RASH content. In fact, anyone visiting the weblog of anyone who's visited a RASH-enabled weblog–or is just in their FOAF file– will probably catch it too.

That's right–rather than being opt-in subscription-based syndication, RASH is opt-out syndication–you have to do something to get rid of it.

The result will be a boon to bloggers' log files–the hits to weblog.rash files will make any site's logfile look like Instapundit's. Inverviews with Chris Lydon, instant Internet fame, and power over the fate of nations will immediately follow launching syndication in the RASH format.

To opt out of a RASH feed, users will have to use a file similar to robots.txt, called “ointment.rash”, with explicit refusals for each feed they do not want to receive–much as they must currently do with unsolicited e-mails. While this may seem to put an inordinate burden on those on the receiving end of a RASH, it guarantees the RASH source a rapid growth in readership–even if readers are only trying to figure out how the hell they caught the RASH in the first place.

Soon, the whole Web will break out in RASH. [Sean Gallagher: the dot.communist]

Check out this old Dave post about Microsoft killing the browser. With IE rolled into XP, Apple's Safari installed on new machines and Mozilla cut loose, did this come true?

I read this on Chris Pirillo's RSS resource site. Clipped from this post, it makes a point that I agree with: summaries don't entice me to regularly read the content from that site.

If I read a summary, I have the extra step of opening the site in a browser and reading the article there, complete with ads and graphics. Two sites, TidBITS and MacInTouch do this to a frustrating end. The summaries are either inconsistently used, in the case of TidBITS or vague and of no value, in the case of MacInTouch. I still read both publications regularly, just as I did before they had an RSS feed because the content is so good. It's written and edited well and their journalistic reputation is of the highest quality.

Tim writes that getting past skeptics is hard for new business owners. I have to agree. I've tried to start a business myself, but never followed through, due to the nagging skeptics in my life. Sometimes, though, I think it's been for the best. Most of the skeptics have pointed out large flaws in my business plans, preventing me from doing something very stupid.

Technorati test ping post

I was reading AndrÈ Venter's post about Technorati, linked from This archive post has the details about the Technorati pinger. I read through the second post, found the wiki link and read through the Radio Userland posts (all two of them). I wondered if, with the new implementation of Trackback in Radio, the code exists to ping Technorati, too. I started perusing Radio.root and I think I found the right place:

system.verbs.apps.weblogsCom

Maybe if Jake Savin is reading this… :>

…he can look at this and see if this can be added as a user pref, something like “Ping Technorati?” with a checkbox.

As for now, people who use the web interface of Radio, just add this:

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

to the “URLs to Ping:” box on the Radio home page. If your Radio subscription has run out, re-up now to get Trackback. It's worth it!

P.S.> Why not be able to ping a person? I know that's Trackback, but I want “Track-before”. I guess that's email. I read a post this morning about that, but now I can't remember where it came from.

Adam's written a short post about his recent Trackback experience.  Adam, I feel the same way.  I now can write a post as a comment, especially handy for when I get wordy.