cloudsoup

• Custom eBay Searches Delivered by RSS » track auctions by keyword, item number, etc
• CogNet » MIT cognitive neuroscience web site
• XML.com: The Road to XHTML 2.0: MIME Types » MIME confusion beckons
• Mirrors. Photographs from the Arkansas State Prison 1915-1937. » found and printed by Bruce Jackson

A photostream à la Flickr from the cloudsoup gallery. Plus an RSS or Atom feed. Plus plus plus …

• Favourite software » from Mark Taw
• List management in WordPress » from navid azimi, an interesting list manager plugin
• Jared Diamond on the collapse of the Mayan civilisations » the author of ‘Guns Germs and Steel’ on environmental collapse

Google’s gmail comes complete with an Atom feed that I’m consuming in Sharpreader, my feed reader. I’ve known for some time that I could set up an RSS feed for my IMAP mail on cloudsoup.com but it’s nice this comes ready-cooked. One up to gmail.

A while back Cal Henderson, now of Flickr, gave a talk about Flickr and PHP that sparked off a discussion at Kottke called Normalized data is for sissies, after one of Cal Henderson’s (presumably) throwaway remarks.

The slightly interesting discussion on Kottke’s weblog post was enlivened when Stewart Butterfield, who is Cal Henderson’s boss at Ludicorp chipped into the thread and said, about the charge that Flickr was slower than snot on an ice fisherman’s beard:

Also: Slow? Is not!

and then immediately:

OK …. sometimes image serving is slow, and we’re working on that

Well, in my experience Flickr crawls. Just tested it – 26 seconds to bring up a single full-sized image 500 x 400 pixels in size. I suppose it’s something to do with the dynamic creation of a .swf file from the original image if as Stewart says it’s nothing to do with the speed of the database. But it is slow.

Lovelypics/zoebootsPractising with Geoff Hutchinson’s plugin.

• Font Paradise – your source for free fonts » free Windows TrueType fonts for non-commercial use

From Forbes Magazine:

By Internet standards RSS is ancient, invented circa 1997

From the Welsh Assembly:

At this stage, however, Cymru Ar-lein is not in a position to do more than monitor the rise in popularity of both RSS and Weblogs. While keen to embrace and promote appropriate new technologies both within the National Assembly for Wales and throughout Wales as a whole. Cymru Ar-lein must move at a pace which is feasible for our customers (sic).

Looks like the cluetrain has passed them by at the Assembly. No suprise there, it’s par for the course in Wales. Why do they insist on calling electors and visitors to the Assembly website ‘customers’, though?

The Welsh Assembly still has a website that contravenes the law (the Disability and Discrimination act) and isn’t the least bit accessible. Now the website isn’t even working.

This could be a Server caching error, or it might be caused by limited memory. Perhaps the latest service pack hasn’t been applied.

I see that First Minister Rhodri Morgan mentions the 100 Welsh Heroes poll in his Christmas message. That’s probably ill-advised, given that the poll was fixed, Tom Jones really won it, and the National Audit Office is currently investigating the poll.

• Welcome to the 2004 NORAD Tracks Santa Website » North American Aerospace Defense Command using taxpayers’ dollars effectively
• Little Boxes » CSS layouts from thenoodleincident