Dylan Greene dot com

I hopefully fixed the RSS 3.0 feed and didn't break it more. Thanks to Iain 'Spoon' Truskett for pointing out that I didn't follow the RSS 3.0 specification about what to do for multi-line values.

I added a blog archive feature, incase you are curious about what I wrote in the past. The search engine searches blog entries, the photo album names, and the photo captions.

I also added a new behavior when you look at photos, clicking on the photo goes back to the directory. And since it used to not know which page of the gallery that photo was on, I fixed that bug too.

Finally, if you haven't seen Part 1 of Roomba Wars, you should check it out.

Check out the "hilarious" (according to critics) adventures of my Roomba (the vacuuming robot) in this several part series. Part 1 is now online.

Two other articles you should see:

Without strict network security, for example, he noted that robots connected to the Internet could be taken over by hackers and used to spy on or wreak havoc in a home.

And here's a review of a Roomba clone called the Electrolux Trilobite. This robot can roll back to the recharger when running low on batteries (Roomba must be plugged in every so often) but for that feature you'll pay $3000! My Roomba cost less than $200. The Electrolux Trilobite also will fall down stairs because it doesn't have sensors on the bottom. The Roomba not only avoid stairs, it also makes a great martini (if it happens to bump into the right ingredents).

These photos sorta fell to the wayside for a while, mostly because I re-designed how the photo sorting and indexing engine works, which took some time, and partly because I forgot about them. Enjoy! (The photoblog sorts the photos by the date the photos were taken, so these won't be at the top of the list.)

Here three books you should be reading.

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How To Restore The Sanity by Alan Cooper, Paul Saffo Target Audience: Everybody, especially if you design, build, or manage anything humans use. Learn: How to design and build stuff your users will use and enjoy. Cool thing: Many examples in the industry that you'll be able to relate to, from VCRs to Microsoft's software problems and how they could be fixing them.
Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug, Roger Black Target Audience: Web Designers, even hobbyist like myself Learn: How to build a good web site Cool thing: This book is short and full of pictures. The author states that he knows you'll never finish a huge book, so his goal was to make it short enough to read on a cross-country flight.
About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper, Robert M. Reimann *NEW EDITION* Target Audience: Software designers and builders Learn: How to build good software Cool thing: Updated chapters on Goal-Directed Design, building personas, and new chapters on visual design.

You might not recognize Alan Cooper, but you have heard of Visual Basic, which he invented and sold to Microsoft.

The problem:

I see that somebody writes something cool in their blog, and I want to share it with a friend. I can put it on my blog for the world to see, but the specific person I want to see it might not visit my blog for another day or two, or even if they do, they might not realize that the information is especially for him or her to see.

The solution: Aggregator Inbox.

Picture this scenario:

1) Craig sees an interesting blog entry on NeemaNet that he thinks Dave Winer would be interested in.

Either:
2a) Craig clicks on a link on NeemaNet and puts in Dave Winer's email address and short note, hits submit.

or:
2b) Craig clicks on a link on Dave Winer's blog and put in the NeemaNet blog entry url and a short comment.

Zoom over to Dave Winer's laptop:

1) When Dave Winer looks at his collection of aggregated news, there's a new collection: Inbox.

2) Each item in the Inbox is the retrieved blog item via the URL emailed to him.

3) If a single blog/entry is emailed from more than more person, it's shown only once, but the number of people who emailed him about it is shown as a number besides it.

4) The first one in the list was mailed to him by 10 people - Must be important if that many people wanted Dave to see this entry... Dave views the entry and decides it's something he'd like to mention on his weblog. A click or two later, it's now mentioned on Dave's blog. So quick and easy! So automatic and painless.

5) Hmm... Dave doesn't care much for this next blog entry. Dave clicks a different link this time, and now any emails about that blog entry will be ignored. Dave clicks another link - now any emails about that entire blog will be ignored. These emails aren't lost forever, they are just stored in another trash-like collection.

Thanks to the Aggregator Inbox, human-based spreading and hearing of interesting information is now easier and practically automated.

I'm busy in my free time building the system that runs this site, so i don't have the time to write my own aggregator. I haven't even settled on a favorite aggregator to use yet. It's still the 3B's (Browser, Bookmarks, and Blogrolls) for me... for now. If you like this idea, let me know.

By popular demand (ie: My dad doesn't want to read my rants, he just wants to see the new photos), I've created an automatically generated photoblog. Feeds in RSS 2.0, RSS 3.0, ESF, and whatever other formats I support will be available shortly. A blog and feeds are already available for the captions to the photos. Have you added some captions lately? Go do it, it's fun!

Any other features you'd like to see?

I'm going the way of the Raging Platypus, a wonderful blog satire for us blogging geeks put on by Mark Pilgrim. By that I mean I'm supporting every known weblogging standard possible. DylanGreene.com via RSS 3.0 is now available. By the way, I still stand behind my comments about RSS 3.0 and ESF being unnessary. Add to that, RSS 3.0 has nothing to do with RSS 0.x, 1.x, or 2.x - do we need this many independent forks for one standard?

iRobot - Please make available a Roomba "home" where my Roomba will "relieve" itself of the dirt and stuff it's picked up, as well as recharge the battery when needing juice. This way it could automatically cycle through my house every couple days when I'm at work. Also, it would be nice if it started the cleaning process via voice command, such as "Here boy, here boy, go clean up that mess" (and it would go right to work on the area where I'm pointing.)

"Gooood Rooomba Gooood!"

Today, armed with an expired 20% off coupon, I bought a Roomba, the first and only vacuuming robot.

When my girlfriend and I saw the Roomba at Bed Bath and Beyond yesterday, we thought it had to be a gimmick, and even if it was real, there would probably be better robots online. I tried the demo unit in the store, and it was impressive. It never got stuck or cleaned the same area twice. I was impressed, as were the many people who watched it scurry about. Clearly the biggest problem with having an cleaning robot do the cleaning for you is not to watch do the work the whole time. Trust me, it's a lot of fun to watch. The store demo didn't show much about the cleaning ability - the store floor was already clean, maybe from other people who tried the Roomba.

After getting home, I did some quick web searches. I found that not only is this the only automated cleaning robot, it has some great reviews to go along. iRobot (the parent company) needs to update their marketing, because nowhere did they mention that they are the company that built the robot that explored the pyramids of Egypt, were listed in Time as one of the Best Home Invention for 2002, or that hackers have already started taking apart the Roomba to see if Wifi can be added for remote control and more. With this information, and an extremely excited girlfriend who couldn't wait to watch the Roomba explore my house, I decided to purchase one. I used my only Bed Bath and Beyond 20% Off Everything coupon the day before, but a quick call to the Baileys Crossroads store confirmed that they accept expired coupons, one of which I happened to have.

The unit, which we have not named yet, is in my house now, where it is getting a required 12 hour charge before it can put to use. After that, I'll see what Roomba can do to my rarely vacuumed floors. I'll post photos and maybe even videos later this week.

Oh the joys of robot automation! Just hope it doesn't get out of hand!

Somebody decided that RSS has gotten too complicated and uses too much bandwidth, so they designed something called ESF (Officially: Episula Syndication Feed; unoffficaily: Even Simpler Format.) I disagree with the need for this format, however I present to you the ESF feed for DylanGreene.com.

Why do I think ESF is unnecessary?

Bandwidth can be saved in other ways, such as compressing the page before sending it (most web browsers support gzip'ed pages, and aggregators should too). Also, not using every single optional RSS and RDF field will save lots of bandwidth. Publish multiple RSS files - one with all of the details and one with just the meat.

I do agree that using RDF and overlapping namespaces can become complicated, but once you program your weblog generator to output everthing correctly, you done, and the Internet becomes a better place thanks to your work.

Next quick project: RSS 3.0 support. RSS 3.0 is basically the same thing as ESF. People need to talk before inventing more standards. I know I'm just adding to the problem by supporting both of them, but what else should I do? I prefer to be cutting edge, no matter how dangerous.

I've made the photo captions available via RSS 2.0: http://www.dylangreene.com/rss-captions.xml

I'm not sure if this is real or not, but the author claims to be blogging from Baghdad. Here's some it's real/it's fake conversations. Debka is a good news/rumors site, claiming to get their information from insiders. Know of other good alternative sources?

I'm creating a simple web-based game and I need some artistic help. Are you good with photoshop? Can you draw caricature-like cartoons? I'll give you credit in the game and link to your home page if you have one, but there's no money involved. The game is a puzzle game. The graphics I need will be images of famous people.

Here's lots of examples of them both!

I emailed Alan Cooper asking why he doesn't have a weblog. His reply:

I think he's making a mistake and missing out on some big opportunities to help others learn about goal-directed design, personas, and other good Cooper-isms... But to each their own...

I'm trying to figure out which term is going to be the normal accepted term - blog or weblog. I can't see a reason for both of them to mean the same thing. Does one mean "i have mostly personal rantings on mine" and other means "I have technical and political insights and issues on mine"?

Awesome, it works, but it's 4am, so I'm going to sleep now.

In real life, I'm a Usability and Design Engineer. Simply put, this means I help in designing things best for the users. I was just wondering... If people like me get our way and over time "everything" becomes easier to use (from VCRs to computers to shopping to ordering a drink at Starbucks) - will that free our mind for more important things - which will eventually lead us to a new age of enlightenment -- or will it make us all lazy, constantly expecting perfect affordances, no longer able to solve real world problems?

My favorite book on web design is aptly called Don't Make Me Think. Is this my secret goal? To make users stop thinking? Once the users stop thinking, is that the point that I can interject whatever I want into my users' heads? I think Amazon had this in mind when they made their site - "Don't make users fill their head just trying to find stuff - instead free room up to get them in the mood to buy stuff." Well, that's my guess.

BTW - Alan Cooper and Steve Krug - you guys need weblogs. Linking to your books and corporate sites is sooo 2001. Don Norman (Design of Everyday Things) has one. It's not updated regularly enough, nor is it easily syndicatable, but it's a start.

I've moved both TeacherReviews.com and Messageboard.com to the new server and they are both back online now. If you don't see them yet, wait a couple more hours and they'll return (I had to change the IP address which can take some time).

I must give thanks to the many TeacherReviews users that have contacted me over theweek asking to keep the site online - especially a Sarah from SFSU who also helped test the new site. An especially huge thanks goes to Timothy Macrina, self-taught expert in all things online, for his help and generosity in providing server space, software, and bandwidth.

Next: to move this site (DylanGreene.com). Stay tuned!

A couple years ago I was the second of less than a dozen selected by some people at Microsoft as "Microsoft's Geek of the Week." I got a cool exclusive t-shirt to proudly show off how much of a geek I am, and a nice interview on Microsoft.com. Not long ago, I found that Microsoft took my interview overseas to China. I wonder if this version of my interview on Microsoft's China web site says the same things as the English version. (Sadly, the English version of the page is no longer online. Well, it was about three years old and part of their Windows 2000 promotional campaign, oh well.)

I really dislike how emotionless blogging can be. For example, when I write something, you (the reader) have no idea if I'm happy, confused, excited, or being sarcastic.

More importantly, search engines and aggregators don't know anything about the writer's emotions.

I propose adding Emotion XML tags to blogs, news stories, photos, and RSS so that search engines and news aggregators can use that information to further filter what users want to see, and help users understand what they are seeing:

For example:

Once the emotion tags are there, they can be displayed in several different ways. For me, I'd might show a small 64x64 photograph of myself making a face of that emotion. Some people might want to use a generic smiley face library like we see in messenger software. Others might prefer the simple ALT text of "happy" "sad" etc... Emotions would also be recorded in RSS to make searching and indexing easy.

So what do you think? Who wants to help me bring emotions to the web?

I have the backup CD of everything TeacherReviews in my hand and I'll be uploading it to the new system shortly. It's then going to take me some time to reconfigurethe sitefor this new system and figure out how MX records and the such so thatit can receive email.

I'm back from Snowboarding, we had a blast, and the photos will be up shortly. Actually I was back on Sunday, but I've been busy and haven't had a chance to mention it here yet.