I’m sure you’ll see this on every weblog around in the next few days, but I thought it was worth posting here in light of my open letter on CSS and the response it got. Wired News has completely redesigned their entire in standards compliant XHTML/CSS. It looks great, you can re-size the fonts in your browser, and Netscape 4 users (or any older browser) will just see the plain old content (screenshot) – not pretty, but completely accessible.

This certainly defeats the misconception that XHTML/CSS can work for simple weblog sites, but not realistically for a major content site. The next step will be to see a big name ecommerce company make the move.

Netscape 4 users are going to notice a pattern in the next year – sites are going to start looking a lot more like they did in 1997.

Listen to this post

3:29 MP3 File (1.59MB)

I did a reading in a wedding once – another story altogether – and was told after the ceremony by nice old man that I had a good radio voice. Ever since, I’ve been waiting and hoping for an excuse to tell people what I hit I was. I got tired of waiting, so there you have a rough segue.

Adam Curry of live.curry.com has been toying around with the idea of audioblogging. The concept is simple – weblogs including spoken word audio in addition to text. It would be something like bite-size chunks of talk radio, I suppose.

There are lots of potential problems with the idea of audioblogging. The biggest and most obvious problem would be that no one wants to hear me, or any other navel-gazing weblogger ranting and raving about something or other. When you read text onscreen, you can skim and skip to whatever you’re interesting it. Audio runs on the timeline of the speaker, rather than listener. This just isn’t how the web works.

Another problem is that weblogs post are often based on links to other sites. Links just don’t work in audio. If there was way to link from an audio file, I suppose you’d have to say “click now” instead of “click here”. Regardless, inline links also tend to change the way you write in ways that don’t translate to the web. I tried reading a few recent Acts of Volition posts aloud – and much of the text is written with the understanding that you’ll be following the given links and doesn’t make sense without them. Incidentally, they’re riddled with embarrassing typos.

It wouldn’t make sense to offer an entire weblog in both text and audio formats. Something written for one medium may not work well in the other, and something written with both medium in mind might not work well in either. This post, for example, is much longer than it would have been if I hadn’t planned on reading it aloud.

So, if you aren’t going to make audio versions of all posts available, what do you do with audioblogging? Well, you could, as Adam Curry is doing, only make audio versions of posts you think would translate well to spoken word – but I’m not sure there’s any value in repurposing of content like that. It does, however, lead to any idea I’ve had floating around in my head for the past couple of years: Acts of Volition Radio.

I’ve never really nailed down exactly what aov-radio would be, if were ever to exist. What I’ve had in mind, roughly, would be an occasional radio-style program, as a compliment to the text-based weblog, including talk and music, available for permanently streaming or download on the site. I’m not sure if I would ever get around something like this, but it might be a fun experiment.

I have the means to produce audio – recording software and a good microphone is all it really takes, so this post is an experiment. Does audioblogging make any sense? Let me know.

This post is the 500th post on aov since its inception almost two years ago on August 25, 2000.

A few stats:

• There has been an average of 0.8 posts per day, or an average of one post every 29 hours.
• Since the site has been opened up for reader replies on April 20, 2001, a little over a year ago, there have been an average of 5.5 reader replies per day and an average of about 10 reader replies per aov post.
• The 10 longest threads have been:
  1. matt abandons the virtual for the tangible – gets ink on hands (58 replies)
  2. An open letter to the web design community: Why should I redesign my site with Cascading Style Sheets? (56 replies)
  3. Timothy McVeigh Executed (45 replies)
  4. the new identity crisis (44 replies)
  5. BlogML: The Weblog Markup Language (41 replies)
  6. now what will i listen to? (40 replies)
  7. words and phrases due for retirement (38 replies)
  8. aov on the radio (37 replies)
  9. planning for life as a wealthy eccentric (35 replies)
  10. off to U2 – back in 3 days (34 replies)

I’m having fun.

I’ve been looking for a house for the past month or two and I’ve learned a few things about real estate jargon that might be helpful for anyone looking to take on an enormous amount of debt.

You might want to print off this handy legend and take it with you when you talk to real estate agents.

It also seems that, as a rule, all photos taken for real estate listings, particularly those on the web, are taken at night with no flash.

A note to those publishing real estate listings: if you do not tell me the price or location of the house, then I will not call you.

The highlight of my domicile-hunt so far was when the mortgage lady at the bank told me that as part of the first-time home-buyer package I qualify for such benefits as no-fee banking (on my current plan, this amounts to about $30/year, and it would be free if I wasn’t too lazy to switch banks), and, get this, three free months of AOL-Canada! That’s really tipping the scales.

If I ever do find a house that I like and can afford, the first thing I will do (that is after weeks of landscaping, renovating, moving, and cleaning) is sit down with a piping hot mug of ice tea (using my AOL-Canada CD-ROM as a coaster) and order some exploding dog wall hangings for my naked new walls.

I was given a subscription to Wired Magazine this Christmas and I agree that it’s been great recently (see comments by Jason Kottke & Jason Levine).

In an interesting move, they have published the entire contents of the latest issue online – not samples, not just the lead story – every word that appears in the print version is on the web. They’ve also started pulling content from the Wired Magazine site into the Wired News site. In the past, they’ve been known for their church/state-like separation between the print and web publishing divisions.

I welcome the acknowledgement that the appeal of a magazine goes beyond text and images. People will still buy the dead-tree version even though they can access all of the content on the web.

I owe these guys – they taught me a lesson that was key to the success of Acts of Volition: never promise anything. No regular content, no deadlines, nothing.

Kaliber10000 (aka k10k) was an enormously popular (enough to have backlashes) web design ‘portal’ (I’m sorry to use the word portal, but it’s true). In 2000, they opened up their news section to an elite group of web hot shots and the site became the collective weblog of the design community.

Though often saturated with design-for-designs-sake crap, the site was still always a great read because it was a casual congregation of interesting people (currently featuring Derek Powazek and former Slice of the Month, Jeffrey Zeldman).

How did they teach me this lesson of ambiguous publishing schedules? Last year they decided to take the summer off and close down the site until September. The site was down, almost a year, until yesterday.

People criticize, but they defend themselves by saying, $#@! Off – we run the site for free. Fair enough. When people tell me that Acts of Volition should do this or that, I say “sure, and you should give more money to charity”. It’s a logically questionable analogy, but effective in conversation.

I usually try to avoid linking to ultra-popular links that are on every web log and site on the web. Whatever it is, I figure you’ve probably already seen it. I break from tradition today and link to a fine site, worth the ridiculously long wait: Kaliber10000 (www.k10k.net).

I spend a lot of time reading on the web, but much of that time is spent (or starts) on a small collection of great sites. Some of these sites update every few hours (Slashdot), and others only every few days (Blogzilla).

A friend of mine, Jevon, has put together a great little tool to keep track of updates on your favourite sites. Blogtrack will scan a list of sites for you and notify you of which sites have updated.

There are other good tools along these lines. Most notably, Dan Sanderson’s similarly named BlogTracker. Sanderson’s tool works well, but is limited to monitoring sites that register their updates with the Weblogs.com services. Jevon’s tool works on any site.

Give it a shot (be sure and read the ‘bt Tips’ section once you’ve signed up).