RSS is great for those of us who are severely design-challenged. Unfortunately I was born without whatever gene that one needs to enjoy spending hours tweaking CSS files or editing PHP templates. And after all, who still visits blog sites in this modern age? That’s what feed readers are for, right? Even among the few sites that I do visit, there isn’t much too be missed in the way of pleasing visual design. Now most bloggers, myself included, use some free blogging tools that make it simple to publish. The blogging tool probably comes with a set of built-in themes and even few that aren’t too ugly. This is mostly a good thing since it lowers the barriers to making personal publishing trivial even for the non-tech savvy (which delivers on one long-promised feature of the web). And it is also great for those of us don’t want to spend our nights working to get nice rounded corners or understand pleasing color combinations (I went to university where the school colors are brown & blue - needless to say they didn’t teach me any better) .

So hopefully content will be king and we can all stop playing with font sizes. But to do that, the gospel of RSS needs to be spread far and wide. Listening to a recent talk by Google’s Adam Bosworth at the MySQL conference, only roughly half of the attendents identified that they had heard of RSS or Atom. Now maybe they were just being lazy, or were insulted by the question, or were too busy playing with their laptops. But these are tech people and should be early adopters compared the rest of the web users. To help adoption of RSS, I’d make two humble suggestions. The first is that, like so many tech things, learning about RSS is way overcomplicated compared to how it is actually used by most people today (notwithstanding Adam’s interesting ideas for the future of RSS). Fundamentally, users don’t care about the RSS wars and the relationships between RSS 0.9x, 1.0, 2.0, Atom, RDF, XML and the rest of the alphabet soup. Nor should they care. All most people use it for is to subscribe to a feed. It is easy to explain to someone, “Stop visiting sites to see if there are new things; let them deliver to you!” They’ll get the value of that. What will be harder to grasp is why they would ever want to click on the button labeled . That’s like labeling something “Binary” - not very “self-describing” (to borrow an XML property). And labeling it “RSS” instead only raises it to a C- (sorry, no grade inflation). That is still the point of view of the technologist, not the user. My vote would be for “Subscribe…”, which is a user-oriented action (and is how FireFox begins the label for their button). Secondly, it would be helpful for the average user if it was easy to configure have a MIME-type or file extension automatically add the feed to their preferred feed reader. I use the Bloglines toolkit FireFox extension to do this today, but it isn’t trivial yet.

Vancouver, B.C., from Stanley Park, just because it looks nice

It begins, again. This blog has a new home thanks to a recent great deal at DreamHost which registered and hosted a domain for less than $10 for the year! I wasn’t even looking to sign up, but I couldn’t pass that up. It’s like walking past a twenty dollar bill or passing up free cake. And so far, DreamHost has been great. Registered the domain and the DNS update happened quickly. Timely emails were sent as everything came together. The admin panel is good, and their “1-click installs” are slick. Which is how the new blog format came to move to WordPress. I’d been using an older version of MovableType that was showing its age, primarily in it’s incapability to stop comment spam. So far, my simple blogging needs have been met. And it is, um, just a little nicer than the homebrewed one I wrote way back when this whole affair began. Hopefully this will be the first of many posts in the new home. And maybe there will be even more swearing.

The web has been abuzz recently with talk about the much-fabled “linux on the desktop”. I think it is going to be a while before you find a non-technical friend making “got root?” jokes and installing linux on their desktop, no matter how cool they think the screenshots of Xgl effects are. But there is a shining example of what is possible, and it comes from Apple’s OSX.

Novell is leading the charge to put linux on desktops (including their own), but is pushing it toward the enterprise, not your sweet, kindly grandmother. As a business strategy this makes sense - soulless corporations likely have more money than your loving nanna. But it is a very different proposition to convince a CIO she can save bags of money by deploying inexpensive linux desktops in her organization than a normal user freely choosing to run linux at home.

Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler posted his thoughts on why linux is not yet ready for the desktop. I think he gets it about right, and I’d second that if the answer to user’s problems involves upgrading libraries then the game is already over. But the technical issues are largely solvable if the will is there. Also, I think linux will have a marketing problem when it comes to the desktop of the “Regular User”. It has a connotation of being complicated and designed for those crazy and evil hackers. Just imagine explaining about all the different distros. Or the steps to getting started doing typical tasks like finding their email program. For the enterprise user, most of those issues don’t apply (i.e. the office worker didn’t choose the distro and they have an IT department to help), but are very relevant for the home user. Even someone as technical as jwz has switched from linux to OSX, in part because hardware configuration can be, um, a bumpy ride.

Some argue that open source mainly copies what has been done before, and rarely innovates on its own. In this case, deep innovation isn’t required. Apple has already shown the way to build a user friendly OS on top of Unix. And we already know that hackers love their Powerbooks and OSX, so there is no need to worry about alienating the hardcore hackers. Desktop linux should follow similar strategy to OSX of swaddling the sharp edges of linux with some huge simplifications for users along with alpha-blended, anti-aliased eye candy. The question is whether the linux desktop developers really want to strive to expand the user community to include folks who never want to learn anything as complicated as “ls”.

Over the long weekend we had some out of town guests, so we took advantage of the great weather to do some Boston sight-seeing. And since I’ve lived here my entire life, I’ve hardly done any of it in years. When I’m out of town I’m all for visiting musuems and learning the history of the place, but not when I’m home apparently. I think I cheated them on how little of the area’s history I know, feeling especially pathetic when I was unable to definitively answer how the Red Sox got their name. On the Fourth, watched the spectacular fireworks from the Cambridge side of the Charles river with the city skyline in the distance.

My phone takes lousy photos