Dave writes about what I've always thought was a good idea but have a serious reason to care about now: we want to be able to subscribe to audio content feeds via something like RSS and get it downloaded directly to our iPods. I'd love to be able to have |NetNewsWire| automatically add any .mp3 enclosures to a special playlist in iTunes.

Steven from Panic complains about how complicated it got to redesign his MovableType weblog. Several of us chimed in to promote |WordPress| -- no wonder the community is growing so quickly. :-D

Steve wrote to point out that the main function in Link Linker rm_link, was conflicting with the wp-amazon plugin. I've fixed the problem and uploaded a new version.

Sun Microsystem's CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, has a blog. Now, I don't care a heck of a lot about what's going on at Sun, but I am enjoying hearing about life from Jonathan's POV. Largely he's using the blog to address issues that are facing Sun these days, like how they are going to monetize Java, or how to compete with "Free" software.

Scripting News: 5/17/2004 >At some point in the next few months, there will be an open source release of the Frontier kernel. Not sure what license it'll use. There won't be any grand expectations of what kind of community will develop. Even if no bugs get fixed, if no features get added, if no new OSes are supported, it will be worth it, because its future will be assured. That's the point Ted makes, and that's my reasoning behind this.

Sean McMains (friend and Conversant user) has been out of work since March when they closed the office of Electronic Arts where he worked. > Woohoo! Just heard from the University, and they extended me an offer! I should be starting on Monday.

Fascinating new development environment for building Objective-C Cocoa apps, called ObjCBrowser, based on a SmallTalk IDE. By Joe Osborn. (Thanks Mike!)

Well, I managed to survive Monday's brain-bake, so obviously Murphy was not satisfied. Grilling a nice fat rack of boneless pork ribs tonight I got a rather severe burn to my forearm from the grill lid. Damn.

Thanks to Weird Al, I'm in my happy place, listening to Al doing the Backstreet Boys singing about EBay, Eminem rhyming about TV, and Avril Levine crooning over cheese pizza, kissing cousins, and roller coasters...

I got to talk to Mo, owner of Coffee Rush, today. He and his brother Yanni (no idea if I'm spelling that right - they're Jordanian) have been running Coffee Rush for a year now, and evidently started planning for it 5 years ago.

Jodi, dear that she is, has been picking up my blogging slack lately over on . She's covered our visit to Paulo Soleri's Arcosanti, my mom's plans for an Ivy Family portal, as well as a site of her own, and she's reviewed X-Men 2, which we saw yesterday (hint- it rocked!). If posting seems slack here, for the latest!

Keola Donaghy sums up my feelings on Apple's Music Store exactly: quote...please don't ignore the greater potential of this service to level the playing field for artists and smaller labels who cannot get the attention of the major labels that are now available on your service.endquote

">" border="0">

The Blogger fail-safe: pictures of your cat. In this case, Toby, our cute, lovable and ornery tabby.

I recently found a solution to a problem that had been bugging me for some time.

Conversant has this really cool email gateway - all posts to this site go out to anyone who is subscribed to the site and has the list feature turned on.

So, when I write a post like this one, the post goes out over email, and the <blockquote> tags are stripped. How do my subscribers know where the quote is?

To the rescue: Conversant&#39;s text resources. A resource is like a Manila/Radio shortcut: it&#39;s a defined piece of text that gets replaced with something else when the content gets rendered. Resources are most often used for links and images, but Conversant has a powerful resource type called a Text Resource.

A text resource can have anything in it - html, text, and Conversant template macros. So I essentially write my own no-arg macro called&#39;quote&#39;:

<-#if condition="ioInterface&#39;email&#39;"-->
----- quote --<-#else--><blockquote><-#endif-->

If the post is being rendered for email, it inserts the "----quote----" text, otherwise it renders the blockquote tag. A partner resource called&#39;endquote&#39; inserts "------" or the closing blockquote tag.

Now, when excerpting text, I start the excerpt with |quote| and close it with |endquote|, and it gets rendered legibly both on the site and in the list email.

Random Stuff:

• Thanks to Scoble linking to this post, I'm now #41 on Popdex. I'll be gone in a couple days, but it's been fun!
• TidBITS is looking for a CMS, Zope/Plone mentioned as a possibility.
• I rode 16 miles yesterday, in 1 hour, 20 minutes. My longest ride this year.

Dave invents the whitelist.

Of course, no journey would be complete without a few choice temptations along the way.

Jodi posted last night about an Iranian woman we got to spend last evening with. She and her family survived the ten year war with Iraq, and had to flee their homes on the Iran/Iraq border when Saddam's troops came. It was fascinating to hear.

Chris Ruzin re-arranged his archive section partly based on my work on the new calendar on this site. Cooooool.

Jodi had a job interview yesterday. She's not taking it though, and she reports on that and other news on her site today.