Gadgetopia

dive into mark: Eighteen months after he wandered out of the blogging world, he's wandered back in with a heart-warming post about giving his kid a bath. If you don't know who Mark Pilgrim is, read his Dive into Accessbility sometime. It fundamentally changed how I structure Web pages.

Every exit: Does anyone know what happened to Mark Pilgrim? This was the last post on diveintomark.com back on October 18, 2004. It's time for me to find a new hobby. Preferably one that doesn't involve angle brackets. Or computers. Or electricity.

WrongRoom: Mark Pilgrim gets uptight about the wave of stripped text editors like DarkRoom and WriteRoom which have no controls or anything, and are just green text on a black background. Reading the change logs of these programs is like traveling back in time. Way back. Latest changes in JDarkRoom ...

Cruft-free URLs in Movable Type: Mark Pilgrim has created a great URL scheme in Movable Type for the cleanest URLs I've seen yet. Clean URLs are an anal-retentive obsession with me. I found this via a great page at Brainstorms and Raves devoted to URL beauty. Mark is using MT ...

Mark Pilgrim's list of Ubuntu essentials for ex-Mac users: Kottke says Apple should be scared of this. Joe has used Ubuntu and claims that it's borderline amazing. [...] Mark Pilgrim recently switched to Ubuntu Linux after becoming fed up with proprietary Mac file-formats and the increasing use of DRM technologies ...

Winer Watcher: Mark Pilgrim, who runs Dive into Mark, has set up a page that pings Dave Winer's site every five minutes. It compares what it gets to what it got the last time, then displays the posts with color-coding to show what Dave has added, removed, or changed.

Uh oh I may have started a new addiction... I'm a subscriber to O'Reilly's Safari Bookshelf service, which I've discussed before. Tonight, I was doing some heavy reading into Microsoft Sharepoint, and I was getting annoyed at the interface. Reading books online is never fun, but I usually just ...

Greasemonkey 0.4.1 (The Next Generation): Apparently Greasemonkey has been gutted and put back together to fix the huge security hole in the last version. I can confim that, despite massive architectural differences, GM-TNG is incredibly backward-compatible, even with complex user scripts like Book Burro, BugMeNot, and GMail Persistent Searches. I ...

Hot RSS [dive into mark]: Mark Pilgrim has a pretty funny post where he subtly and effectively slams CNet for creating a new RSS format, incompatible with any current newsreader. OK, now we're grooving. instead of , instead of ,

instead of . Praise Murphy, and pass ...

Accessibility Internet Rally: 2003 Training: Here's a fantastically comprehensive tutorial on making Web sites accessible from Knowability. The thing about making your site accessible is that it tends to improve the site immensely for non-imparied users as well. In the end, this is just a bunch of really good guidelines ...

Ubuntu Linux now on my new Thinkpad T43p: Wow!: A glowing review of Ubuntu on the desktop. Like Mark Pilgrim, Jeremy is impressed (so is our very own Joe, for that matter). I cannot overstate how important this is: Ubuntu is the first real "desktop" Linux I've ever seen. There's ...

Why Microsoft won't beat Six Apart: A good article on how and why software gets adopted by the masses. Interesting information on what happened with Quark. "I wouldn't worry too much yet, because no team has asked me the important question yet. What's that? 'How do you get the A-list ...

National Federation of the Blind files Target lawsuit: This is going to be an interesting one to watch. This could have huge implications for Web development. Sexton, 24, who lives in Berkeley, Calif., and the National Federation of the Blind are suing Target on behalf of the 1.3 million blind ...

Essentials : Mark Pilgrim has listed his "essential" software tools for doing his job. I always like to see these the absolute, "can't live without" tools of people who do the same work as me. As the risk of being self-indulgent, here's mine: Email: Thunderbird or Mozilla Mail via ...

I've complained off and on about the lack of user-defined fields in Movable Type. Today was finally the day I got off my high-horse and messed with some code. Here is a method to add a new field to the MT database. The field can store whatever you like, can ...