Someone came up with a cool idea to add a universal edit button to make editing wikis easier. It adds a button like for RSS feeds that redirects the browser to the edit page. It’s clever but it aims way too low. If you can get browsers to add an editing button you have an opportunity to either point to an online form or a standalone application that could also edit the page.

Got a couple of good comments on my last post about NewsGator Syncing that I thought were worth following up on. Firstly, Greg Reinacker points to the article I had in mind about how NewsGator polls the feeds, and Andy pointed me to this forum posting about it which shows how to see why feeds aren’t updating. When I go and look at my feeds I find a whole bunch reported as having errors from the source of the feed – obviously why they’re not updating.

Jef Atwood has discovered the implicit variable type declaration in C#: BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader (new FileReader(name)); Who came up with this stuff? Is there really any doubt what type of the variable br is? Does it help anyone, ever, to have another BufferedReader on the front of that line? This has bothered me for years, but it was an itch I just couldn’t scratch. Until now. Actually, there is a question about the type of br – it could be a BufferedReader or it could be any superclass of BufferedReader and sometimes that distinction is important.

I love the fact that I can read my feeds in NetNewsWire and on my iPhone seamlessly, but there’s one really annoying aspect that’s almost driving me to turn off syncing for a large number of feeds: NewsGator is days or weeks out of date for many feeds. When syncing is enabled in NetNewsWire it no longer downloads feeds directly, but instead gets them from NewsGator which is how all the syncing magic works.

Kevin Gamble has an excellent post Enterprise 2.0– working in the open: A week doesn’t go by where I don’t hear from some administrative group who wants to work in a wiki, but wants their work to be private. When this happens I almost always tell them, “Then a wiki isn’t for you. If you want to collaborate with a small group where no one else can see it use Google Docs.

I got just got home from a very entertaining evening with some folk from the Web Content 2008 conference watching, or rather largely ignoring, an overall boring game of basketball between two teams I didn’t know from a bar of soap (for the record, the Celtics won and were premiers or something). Anyway, I found in my email an entire conversation within Ephox around this article on CMS Wire about the talk I gave today.

I’ve seen in a few places people getting excited about the upcoming support for Google Gears in WordPress as a way to locally cache common files so they don’t have to be downloaded repeatedly. For instance, this article from Geniosity Musings: But, some of the new features (and features I’ve just started using now that I use the Visual Editor) just aren’t as cool thanks to the not-so-great internet speeds in South Africa.

Kevin Gamble echoes an increasingly common theme at the moment, complaining that some US ISPs are trialling metered internet plans instead of unlimited data: This is serious stuff. This is an both an economic and freedom issue. Changing the way the Internet works means people will be less likely to share and to try innovative things. If you don’t think this will impact the quality of your Internet experience you are dead wrong.

I’m commuting to work these days since Ephox has a sweet office in Windsor and while I’m there by myself at the moment its still nice to get out of the house. Anyway the point is I now have 30 to 40 minutes each day walking to the train station, waiting for trains or sitting on the train. In the mornings this is the perfect opportunity to review email and feeds but in the afternoon there aren’t many of those so the trip is somewhat boring.

More a bookmark for myself than anything – the W3C has published a preliminary guide to differences between HTML 5 and HTML 4. Quite useful for anyone planning to update their products for HTML 5.

I have a very simple benchmark for judging how much emphasis a site puts on people instead of technology – I look at how it identifies those people. Sites that don’t have anything to do with people treat everyone the same and don’t have a name for their users at all. The next step up is sites that let you log in some how and then refer to you by your username or email address.

I come from a family of teachers and despite running for the technological hills myself, still wound up marrying a teacher, so I’m surprisingly familiar with schools, teaching and technology in schools. It also helps that I’ve had a couple of jobs running IT in schools and I’ve always kept an interest in how technology is being used to aid teaching. It should come as no surprise then that I was quite interested in Mark Ahlness’ post about a new WYSIWYG editor being added to the blog software his third grade students have been using.