http://norman.walsh.name/2005/10/23/feedback 8 137 2005-10-23T12:35:46-04:00 $Date: 2005-10-23 19:53:34 -0400 (Sun, 23 Oct 2005) $ Norman Walsh 2005 Norman Walsh A few thoughts on a few of your thoughts. Ursula K. LeGuin The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next. You are, gentle readers, mostly unknown to me. Comments and trackbacks demonstrate that these pages are not unread. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some of my friends, colleagues, and acquaintances read these pages. Bloglines tells me just over 100 of you are subscribed to the “What's New” feed. It's nice to have you here. Welcome. On the subject of these pages as a whole, two comments stand out: Putting “recent comments” on the home page wasn't universally seen as a positive change. Providing a feed that contained the full text of each essay, rather than just the abstract, would be seen as a positive change. Lest it be said that I'm not responsive to suggestion, I've removed the comments from the home page, replacing them with a small, simple indication of the number of comments. I've also created a “full text” feed: http://norman.walsh.name/atom/whatsnew-fulltext.xml. It's only available in Atom because I refuse to publish escaped markup. For the moment, consider it experimental. I don't much like what I had to do to make it appear in Bloglines without a bunch of bogus styling (and Bloglines still gets things wrongs: incorrectly interpreting escaped markup, losing spaces, etc.); elements, like annotations, that currently require some Javascript are obviously not going to work; and there may be other problems. But for now, it's available. Finally, on the subject of feedback of another sort, one essay, more than any other, was the consistent, unrelenting target of trackback spam. So I've made it possible to disable trackbacks on a per-essay basis. Guess which one no longer has it enabled? Why that essay got so much trackback spam (nearly one a day, on average, where all the other essays combined probably average one a year), I leave as an exercise to you, gentle, anonymous readers. I sure has heck don't know.