Offered without comment.

Post about HTML5 logo and overblown “controversy” surrounding it:
1,078 hits on the first day.

Post about details on W3C touch events spec, including a roadmap and future plans:
273 hits on the first day.

What’s a favatar? It’s a favicon! It’s an avatar! It’s a portmanteau!

Well, really, a favatar is a profile picture hosted at the URL a commenter provides, with the filename favatar.png. I made it up!

Okay, so I’m not the first person to make it up. Apparently, a gentleman by the name of Paul James scooped me by a few years, with the same name and a rather similar idea for the same problem. I had this idea out of the blue, while in Montreal for Libre Graphics Meeting 2009, and was dismayed to find, again, that there is nothing new under the sun. So, I put it in my box of maybes.

… Until this weekend, when I added a WordPress plugin to display images for commenters, to make it easier to follow a thread and humanize the conversation. Something that has always bothered me about those images is that they usually come from a third-party service, Gravatar.com. This is actually owned by the same parent company that develops WordPress, and I am sure it’s a fine service for what it is, but I dislike such centralization where it isn’t necessary. There are some also-ran services like Wavatar, monsterID, OpenAvatar, and so forth, but Gravatar (or “Globally Recognized Avatar”) is the big one.

What’s the chief difference between a favatar (note the small f ) and a Gravatar (note the big G )? A favatar is a convention, not a service. It’s distributed. It’s cooperative. It’s web-like. It’s owned and controlled by the person, not (necessarily) by a proxy or host.

The problem I see with Paul’s original idea around favatars is that it revolves around reusing the favicon.ico, which is typically too small for the purpose of a comment avatar (though not always: ), and ‘*.ico’ files don’t display in the <img> element in all browsers. And stylistically, a favicon and an avatar seem to be distinct. As far as I’ve seen, despite a few plugins made, and some good conversation about it, the idea hasn’t really taken off, and the name is just too good to let lie fallow.

So, I put on my hacking mittens, and borrowed code from one or two existing Gravatar WordPress plugins, Easy Gravatars by Dougal Campbell and WordPress Gravatars by Rune Gulbrandsøy. Stir well, bake for 3 hours, and out comes Favatar Plus, my new WordPress plugin. It first looks to see if the commenter has supplied a website address, and if they have a file there called favatar.png (so far, I assume I’m the only person who does). Failing that, it falls back to a Gravatar, then to an Identicon (courtesy of Gravatar.com, actually), and ultimately, as a last ditch effort, falls back to their favicon, if found.

My original idea also included linking their image to a vCard called contact.vcf, if found at the same base URL, but in testing that, I found it a little unintuitive… you click it, and suddenly you’re opening iCal to import a stranger’s contact info when you just wanted to read their blog. So, I took that bit out, though I suppose I could make it optional. So, instead, it links to the base URL itself.

I do like the idea of a convention for everyone to expose their “about me” info, along with their favatar and contact info and favorite services, at some dereferenceable URL… a portable profile. Maybe I’ll play with that in some later version.

For now, I’ll see if anyone picks up on this and creates their own favatar.png image. I’ll be tickled pink if someone comments on this post and uses their newly minted favatar.

I’ve been doing a lot of website stuff this week. Here’s some highlights:

W3C Working Group Sites

A few weeks ago, after long neglect, I finally updated the SVG WG page with a template that better matches the new(ish) W3C site redesign. Each working group has its own eclectic home page, which seems a bit silly to me. So, I took the template I made and converted the group pages of the WebApps WG, SVG Interest Group, and FX Task Force, and I’m talking with other W3C team contacts about converting theirs as well, though we’ll see how many switch over. From my perspective, having a consistent look&feel is important, and would make the W3C site more usable.

The new template I made is done in HTML5, with the <header>, <footer>, <article>, <section>, <aside>, and <nav> elements (and a reference to Remy Sharp’s HTML5 shiv), possibly even used correctly; the SVG WG page has a scripted live microblog feed from the @svgwg Twitter account, and an inline SVG easter egg (look for it in Firefox and WebKit nightlies).

Short Notice

I have been wanting to write or install a URL shortener on my own site for a while, so I didn’t have to rely on the brittle third-party services like TinyURL, which I feel don’t fit the spirit of the Web. They obscure the link, and act as a massive throttling point. I looked around a bit before for a custom URL shortener, but never found one that suited my fancy.

But on Saturday, after converting my URLs to have nicer, more meaningful, more RESTful names on the advice of the ever-helpful Helder Magalhães, I was in a mood to tackle the problem, and I found a great summary of some of the options by a fellow named Eric Severance. He described a better list of criteria than I’d considered, and I went with his top pick, Pretty Link by Blair Williams.

Despite the silly name, Pretty Link has almost all the features I wanted and then some. It’s easy to use, it integrates into my WordPress blog, it lets me pick a meaningful shortname, and I can shorten not only my own blog’s URLs (lots of WP plugins let you do that), but any random URL I want; it even tracks how many people have followed the links, which to me is mildly interesting, but for people more into their brand would be very handy. The only thing I’d like to see is a way to automatically publish a public page that lists all the shortened URLs and the title of each page, along with the expanded original URL; maybe I can hack that in, somehow (and maybe I just haven’t found it yet). Just for posterity, I compiled a list of all the links I had tweeted before, and dereferenced them, which you can find on my expanded URLs page.

Commenter Avatars

I’m playing a bit with my site theme. I’m happy with it overall, but I think the column width could be a bit wider; I’ve already bumped up the font size. I want to enable nested comment threads, because I think they are easier to read, but I’ll need to overhaul my theme quite a lot to do so, since it’s from an older version of WordPress.

In the meantime, I added commenter avatars. The default image is a Gravatar; as with TinyURL, I don’t like artificial centralization in avatars, and in this case, it seems particularly silly. So I cobbled together my own WordPress plugin to take an alternative approach, which I’ll blog about next time.

My last post was slashdotted. Not servers-melting slashdotted, but unusual-volume-of-comments slashdotted. I posted it late on a Saturday night, so I guess they had no other news fit to print.

It was interesting, and a little bit exciting, to be linked from Slashdot. I have no great insights, but a few observations.

1. I thought something was odd when I started getting comments from outside the SVG community, which is the only place I can imagine I have any sort of fame or notoriety. So I followed a Twitter reference on SVG back to its source. I’m sure this is the most I’ve been referenced in Twitter, too… though most weren’t retweets of my own pointer to my blog. Interesting to see how Twitter and Slashdot interact, and how aggregators like Slashdot are the primary focus of links from Twitter, moreso than the original source. Some aggregators retweeted the story several times at intervals, I reckon to get more attention from those who blinked the first few times (srsly, smashingmag? Retweeting it 11 times? Okay).
2. I was surprised that “indexing SVG” was the topic that got the attention of the Slashdot community. I didn’t expect anyone to be particularly interested in my little study, outside the rarefied Web Standards community, which is who it was written for. My guess is that it may have seemed a bit controversial, because someone from the W3C looked with a critical eye at Google (a Giant Corporation, and one of our members). Everyone loves scandal! I’ve learned my lesson… now all my posts will attack some company. (If you are interested in some press-grabbing attention, my fee for insulting your company on this blog is very reasonable.)
3. In true Slashdot fashion, it’s pretty obvious that many of those who bothered to comment clearly didn’t read my blog post, or didn’t get my central point; it’s not surprising, since that wasn’t really the audience I expected (and I do ramble a bit). Some folks tried to turn it into an SVG vs. Flash debate, which entirely missed the point. That said, there were some thoughtful comments that I replied to on Slashdot and on my blog.
4. I spent much more time following up on my post than I expected. I’m glad it wasn’t a weekday, where it may have gotten even more attention. Still, I hope it did give some people food for thought.
5. Either I’m too prolix (guilty!), or Twitter has reduced the average attention span to… ooh, shiny! Adobe’s JD took a friendly dig at me in his comment, and maybe on Twitter, too. My post was a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter. I prefer to thoroughly explore an idea and provide context and evidence when I bother writing at all. I suppose that is old fashioned. I’ll work on it.

Sorry, I have to go now… my fifteen minutes are up.

This week on Pop-Linguistics, we will be looking at words derived from song lyrics.

wang-chung

Pronunciation: \ˈwäŋ-chəŋ \

Etymology: Part of song lyric, from name of performing musical band Wang Chung, from Chinese Huang Chung (simplified Chinese: 黄钟; traditional Chinese: 黃鐘; pinyin: huáng zhōng) for “yellow bell”, the standardized bass pitch of ancient China.

1. intransitive verb To shamelessly self-promote an artist or performer’s identity by including the name of the performer in the work performed, in an off-putting manner, as in the lyrics of the song, ‘Everybody Have Fun Tonight’:

Everybody have fun tonight,

Everybody Wang Chung tonight

Usage: “Why do rappers and hip-hop singers have to wang-chung so much?”

1. noun An act of wang-chunging.

Usage: “That song was just one long wang-chung!”

2. adjective Characterized by excessive instances of wang-chungs.

Usage: “Those wang-chunging losers can’t sing.”

party in the usa

Pronunciation: \ˈpär-tē ən thə yü-es-ā\

Etymology: Lyric of a song of the same name.

Date: 2009

1. noun A form of name-dropping of more popular or talented artists within a performance in an attempt to associate the performer with the qualities or characteristics of those artists.

Usage: “This song could use a few more parties in the usa, or we’ll never hit the charts.”

1. noun An act of cynical, insincere tribute, characterized by unwitting irony.

Usage: “Referencing Jay Z while using autotune is a real party in the usa.”

So, I don’t really pay much attention to my blog, or my site stats, or any of that… probably not nearly as much as I should, given how effective a medium blogs are at promoting ideas in the Web Standards profession.  I tend to write quite a lot, but most of it is emails to various technical mailing lists, especially W3C lists.  I should probably pay more attention to getting ideas out into a broader public sphere, with more diverse comments and feedback, like you can do with a blog.

But not this blog… not right now.  Because this blog is invisible.  If I recall correctly, I had a PageRank of 6, which seems to be moderately respectable.  But since my blog was hacked (maybe because it had a PageRank of 6), no amount of PageRank will help, because Google has cut me off.  So, as I mentioned on my last post, I did all the voodoo, adjusted the bones just so, and asked Google pretty-please won’t they reindex my site.  They replied that they will think about it, in a few weeks (just slightly passive-aggressive in a way only the popular kid can be).  I wonder if my PageRank will emerge intact?

But on the up side, I took the opportunity to clean out my virtual attic.  I took down old content and databases and experimental installations of software, wiped out old user accounts and email addresses, and generally made it easier for me to manage everything.  Installing the latest version of WordPress also gave me the chance to reorganize the sidebar a bit, adding my Twitter feed and removing dead blogroll links (though I need to add some new ones).

I should also try to figure out a way to finally expose an index of all the hundreds of SVG files I have hidden in the back alleys of my site.  Some of them are just experiments, some are examples of best practice, some are fairly cool and elaborate, some are just conformance tests.  I’ve hesitated because some of them are also rather crappy code that was written for the Adobe SVG Viewer, and either doesn’t have a namespace declaration (so it won’t work in modern browsers), or it uses some feature not supported in most browsers.  I’ve now put up an empty placeholder page, just to lay the groundwork.

I’ve also entertained the notion of running an index of my posts to public W3C lists, but out of context, it probably wouldn’t mean anything, and wouldn’t offer more than you could get by just searching the lists manually.  Maybe a weekly summary would be better?  Or maybe no mention of it at all would be most preferable… I think a certain amount of silence from me would do me and the people around me a world of good.

Maybe getting blocked by Google is a good thing after all…

Last year, I noticed that my blog had lost all its styling… I was busy with other things at the time, preparing for my presentation at WWW2008 (and my subsequent vacation in China), juggling cats, and so forth, so I didn’t really fret about it. I thought it was probably just my host temporarily flaking out.

But when I futzed around with it, I noticed that if I changed themes, the styling came back. Hmmm. But again, didn’t think much of it. Well, it had been hacked, and hacked good. I rebuilt the theme from scratch, and that seemed to fix it (the hacker had injected some hundreds of fascinating links inside the header and footer templates). But for some reason, nobody could leave comments anymore, and some of my posts had disappeared. Days turned into weeks turned into months… and Google let me know that my site was still hacked in some mysterious manner that honestly doesn’t interest me much, but which had a pragmatic downside: they removed my site from their index. Simple fix, they said: just uninstall your site and start from scratch.

For a while, I just put my excess energy into my twits (other people may have “tweets”, but mine are so inane I think “twits” is more appropriate). But I had a hankering to blog again, so I finally put a few uninterrupted minutes together and un- and re-installed my blog software, exporting and importing my history. Maybe this will fix it? Only the Shadow knows…

But at least comments seem to work again, and over the next few weeks, I may play around with new themes and other adjustments.

Wow… keep meaning to write in this thing, but I’m not yet in the habit. I seem to have reached the maximum number of things I can think about at any one time. Anyway, here’s the short recap of what has been going on with me lately. Having bought a house in Chapel Hill, NC, I was legally obligated to either get pets and buy a hybrid car, or become a vegan. Now, I’m a vegetarian, but I’m not crazy enough to go vegan, so we got a couple of cats named Prettyboy and Floyd from an animal rescue group and picked up a “seaside pearl” (that means “blue”) Prius.

We got the cats about 4 days ago, and they had a bit of a trial adjusting (we faced a challenge convincing them to use the litter box for a couple of days, which is lovely on the hardwood floors and the erstwhile chair cushion), but seem to have decided to indulge us.

We bought the Prius almost accidentally… our old ’93 Toyota Corolla (dubbed the “Casserolla” when a cheese casserole was lingeringly spilled in the backseat) has been dying a shuddering death for months, so having put off getting a new car until we found (and financed) a house, we went out a couple of weekends ago to test drive a Toyota Yaris or a Scion xA. We did drive a Scion, but the Prius was just so much nicer (and with a better resale value) that we ordered one on the spot. It was delivered yesterday, on my birthday, October 24th. It’s pretty 21st century. We got the simplest option package, but even still that came with keyless entry and startup (as long as I have the “key” on me, I can open and start the car, without touching the key), and a rear-view backing-up camera. This is as close to a luxury car as I ever intend to buy. We saw a lecture last week by Dr. Wallace Broecker, the gentleman responsible for the groundbreaking theory of the Great Ocean Conveyor that was key in the understanding of global warming, on the need to develop an efficient way to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere. We chatted with him after the lecture, and among other things, I asked if the Prius would really help the environment… he praised it not only for those qualities, but also just for the engineering and comfort of it (his wife has one). I’m not fooling myself that I will save enough money in gas to make up for the price, but I felt like it was my civic responsibility to do what I could for the environment (and it really is a nice ride).

So, speaking of my birthday, we went out to visit some friends last night, then had a great time at Fuse, a local nightspot, where we had a good dinner and bumped into a different crowd of friends for a fun conversation. The night before, we went to the Cat’s Cradle to see Bettie Serveert (an old favorite band from the Netherlands, 15 years old now!), and really enjoyed the local opening act as well, Alina Simone. A few days before, we saw some friends’ bands… The Strugglers opening for The Prayers & Tears Of Arthur Digby Sellars at Local 506, and it was a great show as well. I used to see at least 2 or 3 shows a month (sometimes that many in a week!) just a few years ago, but I’m not as in the know about bands and shows these days. Still, we want to make it a point to get out to live shows more. My girlfriend’s younger, so her knowledge is a little more up to date than mine.

Man, what else? Work-work (we have revamped our database to be a lot faster and more powerful, and I’m renovating the charting package to match), and standards work (mostly SVG), and secret project work, and domestic stuff, and reading, and hanging out with friends, and seeing The Prestige (we don’t go out to movies that often, but I loved this book), and all that normal stuff that one does when one isn’t in a foreign land. I promise I’ll talk more about Morocco, by request, in some upcoming post. And more about technology. And less about quotidiana.

I’ve been accused more than once of “reinventing the wheel.” Let me assure you that that’s meant to be a stinging insult among programmers, where reuse is the key to efficiency and laziness (both qualities I admire).

But sometimes the wheel is broken, and sometimes it just doesn’t work right for the job at hand. I wouldn’t want to drive a car with a solid-body fixed-axle wheel.

And sometimes, you have to reexamine your basic assumptions. Maybe the wheel isn’t the right tool for the job at all.

I don’t want to reinvent the wheel. I want to reinvent fire.