How to Blog Anonymously

Monday, April 9th, 2007
I originally wrote the following as a sample chapter for a book proposal. Now that the right to blog anonymously seems to be under attack from some unexpected quarters, I felt this might be a good time to put this out there.

Sometimes you can write more freely if you’re anonymous. You may want to talk about really personal and embarrassing things. You may want to talk about subjects that embarrass and upset governments with armed police or large corporations with lots of lawyers. Sometimes you just don’t want your employees to know their boss enjoys knitting tea cozies on the weekends. Sometimes you may not even care all that much about anonymity, but just want to establish different identities for different activities, much like novelists use pseudonyms when switching genres. It is absolutely possible to blog anonymously, and many people do it.

How much trouble it is depends on your security needs and paranoia level. A lot depends on what’s likely to happen if your anonymity is breached. For instance are you worried about being:

  • Laughed at?
  • Fired?
  • Arrested?

Obviously if you think the CIA is going to be hunting you down, then you’ll take anonymity somewhat more seriously than if you’re merely worried your brother might make fun of your Ashlee Simpson fan site.
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The Holy Grail Refactored

Monday, April 2nd, 2007

Here’s a neat rearrangement of Matthew Levine’s Holy Grail CSS layout (fixed width left and right columns and liquid inner column) I’ve devised for Refactoring HTML. This is based on the non-equal height, no extra-div version. The basic idea is reorganizing the style rules into three sections:

  • The rules whose values must be copied verbatim.
  • The rules whose values can be set to arbitrary values.
  • The rules whose values are calculated based on the arbitrary values.

This makes it easier to see exactly what you can change independently, and what else you have to update when you make such a change. Here’s a sample stylesheet. LC stands for left column, RC for right column, and CC for center column.
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A Call for Accessibility

Wednesday, March 28th, 2007

The following is an early draft of the intro to Chapter 6 of Refactoring HTML. The remainder of the chapter will address specific recipes for improving site accessibility, especially those tasks that remain after a site has been made strictly valid (which is addressed in earlier chapters). Comments, suggestions, and corrections, are appreciated.

The Web has the potential to more fully integrate people with seeing, hearing, physical, learning, and other disabilities into society. By limiting the interaction necessary to communicate, as well as enabling delayed communications so that participants can move at their own pace, the Web has transformed our relationships with each other. Properly designed web pages neither know nor care whether you’re reading them with a CRT or a screen reader. Properly designed forms neither know nor care whether you’re inputting data with a keyboard, a mouse, or voice recognition software.
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PUT is not UPDATE

Saturday, March 10th, 2007

PUT remains one of the most confusing HTTP verbs because it is so frequently misdescribed, even by people who really do know better. The common description is that PUT is for UPDATE and POST is for creating new resources; and this is wrong, wrong, wrong.
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Google and XHTML

Thursday, March 8th, 2007

Apparently Google does not recognize XHTML, at least not when served as application/xhtml+xml. Try this search which should return exactly one hit pointing to an XHTML document. Notice that the file format is “unrecognized” and they offer to let you “View it as HTML”.

XOM XPath Mapping

File Format: Unrecognized – View as HTML
XOM 1.1 supports XPath 1.0 reasonably faithfully. However there are some differences between the XPath data model and the XOM data model you need to be
www.ibiblio.org/xml/XOM/xpath.xhtml – Similar pagesFilter

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