I hereby promise not to rant. Much.

Hey all you zealots .. give up and use tables.

If you have to have a meaningless <div>, you’re no longer semantic .. give up and use tables.

If you have to use Microsoft’s conditional comments just to get it to work in Internet explorer .. give up and use tables.

If you have to ask a chat room or forum how to get your three-column layout to work .. give up and use tables.

If you need to vertically center one piece of content against another .. give up and use tables.

If you spend more time arguing with someone than you can save by avoiding tables .. give up and use tables.

If you care so much about avoiding tables that you don’t have any time left to help people with their actual problem .. give up and use tables.

If you end up with classes in your CSS that are designed to give you the benefits of tables without using a table tag .. give up and use tables.

Seriously folks, you’re spending too much time avoiding them and proselytizing about your avoidance of them and not enough time creating useful content that the semantic nature of that content is worthless.

Update:

Woohoo! I just got banned from #html on freenode because I argued for using tables. There was no argument and no discussion. (OK, so I was mocking his inability to justify his contention, but seriously? banned?) BTW: I’m ‘Woosta’, ‘[wito'] is the zealot in question.

[22:53] <to_> which tag would you use to wrap <label> + <input> tags in a form?
[22:53] <[wito]> to_: I’m a fan of <fieldset><label><span>Text:</span> <input/></label></fieldset>
[22:54] <Woosta> I think it would be best defined by the design
[22:55] <to_> [wito]: but if you want to make input floating to the right of label in a 2 columns presentation layout, don’t you use a wrapping tag to clear float ?
[22:56] <[wito]> to_: actually, I use a display:table hierarchy
[22:58] <Woosta> just use a table
[22:59] <[wito]> Woosta: WRONG
[22:59] <Woosta> no: it works and it’s fast
[22:59] <Woosta> piss farting around with CSS is a poor use of your time
[23:00] <[wito]> Woosta: protip: you don’t argue with me.
[23:00] <Woosta> Bwahahahahha
[23:00] <[wito]> Especially not when I tell you to stop offering destructive, counterproductive advice as you are now
[23:01] <Woosta> Zealots make me laugh
[23:01] <[wito]> How about you spend some time in the quiet corner?
[23:02] <Woosta> Why me? I have plenty of time up my sleeve. I think you need the time out so you can get some work done as your stupid-ass CSS crap takes you 20 times longer than a simple table would.
[23:03] [Notice] -ChanServ- You have been quieted on #html by [wito] (wito)
[23:03] *** ChanServ sets a ban on __________.
[23:03] <[wito]> Let’s have some quiet time for Woosta

Update 2:

Found this funny mug on Zazzle

I noticed today that when I play something (anything) in Amarok, it updates my Last.fm account that I listened. So if you go to my last.fm profile, you’ll see what I listened to today. If you go back in time you’ll see what else I listened to.

Where’s the pressure then?

Well, ever since noticing that, I’ve been second-guessing myself each time I go to play something. After all, it’s now public information! Do I really want to play Michael Jackson’s ABC? Too late! I already did, and now you know!

I ended up deciding that if it’s going to be public on Last.fm, I might as well put it on my site. So over to the right there is a few albums I’ve listened to. Or maybe not .. I swear (really) that I haven’t listened to anything from “The Best of Bryan Adams”

My RSII avatar is now also my gravatar, and it’s let me add my other email addresses to the one account. So now my CPAN modules all show my RSII Gravatar. When you look at CPAN, you’ll know that the Rick Measham over there, is the same as the Rick Measham over here. Now if only we can convince more sites to implement gravatar-managed avatars!

I’ve just installed gravatars on my blog here, so if you have a gravatar it will show up next to your comment. If you don’t have a gravatar, you’ll get the default silhouette.

I like to call that avatar an RSII: Reverse Signatures for Insecure Identification. (If you want to say it out loud, I’d suggest ARzee)

This is the opposite of most security. When you see that avatar next to my name, you’ll know that it’s not some other Rick Measham. I signed that point of presence by uploading my avatar.

The reason I call it Reverse and Insecure is becaue there’s nothing secure about it. It doesn’t prove that the presence you’re looking at really is me. Anyone can create a ‘Rick Measham’ account somewhere and upload my avatar that they downloaded from some other place (like here). What it proves that it’s not not me. That is, it’s not some other Rick Measham you’ve found.

If you find a Rick Measham account with some other avatar, it won’t be me.

So when it was asked again this week, I decided to bite the bullet and have a go at using pipes to actually do the task, and while I was at it make a tutorial.

Last Perl Mongers’ meeting Paul gave a talk on Effective Procrastination using Hiveminder. Then he put all his slides together, added a voice track and uploaded it to slideshare.net. That seemed to be a fairly effective way of encapsulating my tutorial, so I set about collecting screenshots of the process.

First thing I did was upload the slideshow to slidecast and put text instructions on Jaikufans.com. But I still wanted a full presentation, not just static slides.

So next task was to record the voicetrack. I’m well-equipped for such tasks and amazingly managed to do most slides in a single take without a full script! Then I used slideshare’s amazingly good synch tool to line up the slideshow with the mp3, and hit publish. Before I went to bed I was thrilled to see that 26 people had watched it. All from Jaiku as that was the only place the slidecast had been promoted (after all, it’s not much use to anyone else!)

Then this morning. I see I have an email from slideshare.net: I’ve beed selected as today’s Slidecast of the Day! Now I want to slidecast everything!

You can see the final slidecast, in all it’s glory over at slideshare

But then I started thinking about it some more, and the more I think about it, the more it smells.

In Google’s words: “We plan to use the ideas and technology behind Jaiku to make compelling and useful products”

So what can Google gain from buying Jaiku?

• Users? No, Google has users-a-plenty. If they bought it to reduce the players on the field then they’d have bought Twitter’s userbase
• Microblogging? No, they have orkut
• Mobile presence sharing? No, they have zingku which has some way cooler features for that
• The Nokia app? Ahhh .. now here’s something worth buying. Their gPhone needs an addressbook and why go for a boring addressbook when your phone will have permanent networking? So they bought Jaiku’s addressbook .. and got a bunch of non-mobile microbloggers included.

Expect to see Jaiku microblogging discontinued and absorbed into their coming facebook competitor (Orkut 2.0 on November 5th?). Expect to see the Nokia App become the addressbook on the gPhone.

“We plan to use the ideas and technology behind Jaiku to make compelling and useful products” .. not ‘We plan to continue to maintain Jaiku as it is and just make it better’

(Adapted from my comment at Jaiku)

Update: I note that Tim O’Reilly came to the same conclusion 

Dear Agony Aunt,

I logged onto Facebook this morning and my girlfriend’s status has changed from ‘Boyfriend’ to ‘Single’, so I checked my Jaiku followers and she’s not following my updates any more.

OK, so I just made that up, but if web2.0 is how we’re all communicating now (broadcasting rather than narrowcasting) I think it’s probably happened at least once.

In a web2.0 world, we all have hundreds of ‘friends’ who ‘follow’ our every move but from whom we could not borrow a cup of sugar. The concept of friendship has been cheapened as we endevour to have more friends than everyone else. We befriend everyone we come across in the hope they reciprocate and befriend us. It’s all rather slutty really. Do we really need all these hundreds of ephemeral friendships? Or are we better off with just a few people we truly care about?

1. Rename the file to jaiku.php and place it in your wp-content/plugins directory.
2. Go to the Plugins menu in your admin panel and ‘Activate’ the Jaiku plugin.
3. You’ll then have a submenu under Plugins called ‘JaikuPost’. Enter your Jaiku username and API key there. Also choose if you want to send to Jaiku by default.
4. Next time you edit a story, you’ll see a ‘Jaiku’ box on the ‘Write Post’ page. I recommend dragging that towards the top of the widgets on the side there.
5. When you click ‘Publish’ it will now take a little longer to save as it has to run off and shorten the URL and post it to Jaiku.

Todo:

• If the post has a category whose name matches a Jaiku icon, you can have it use that icon
• Some sort of option to set your location from your post

Edit: 2007-09-22 23:47

Version 0.00.02 is now available from googlecode: http://wp-jaiku.googlecode.com/. Any issues and all future announcements will be over there.

Changes:

• Categories can have icons associated with them. When you make a post in a category that has an icon, that icon will be used (if you use two categories, both with icons, a random icon will be used)
• Removed some code that gave some PHP installations an unreasonable feeling of insecurity

Installation:

• Same as last time.

Upgrade:

• Deactivate the current version, copy this into place. Re-activate.

Bacn is the wrong term.

Bacon is the king of porcine produce. Bacon is smoked, fried, savored. If someone offered me ham or bacon, I’d take the bacon every day. Almost everyone I’ve spoken to has the same reaction. There is no better way to eat pig than thick slices of double smoked bacon. So why on earth would PodCamp decide that it was the right word for messages that come between ham and spam?

I don’t know, but I plan to stop it.

These message should be called ‘Sausage’. A pork sausage is still an enjoyable way to eat pig, but it’s grissly and made from the parts of the pig you’d prefer to not talk about (seriously, if you ever try a saussage made from prime-cuts, you’ll hate it!)

A sausage, like notification email, is nice. But it isn’t the best. It’s not full of useful or enjoyable information, gossip or photos from friends, but is made by a machine to tell you something you may or may not overly care about.

From now on, I plan to append the words “Sausage Damnit!” to any posts I see that relate to so called ‘Bacn’.

Please join me (and feel free to link it to this article if you don’t want to write your own!)