Jeni's Musings

I haven’t been posting here very much of late because my XML-related posts (which tends to be most of them) have been going on xml.com. When I joined xml.com, the promise was more exposure with a wider audience. Then they changed the blogging system, and changed it again, and by now I’m not sure if there’s any audience at all!

However O’Reilly have, finally, provided author-based Atom feeds. So if you want to subscribe to my future xml.com posts, the crucial URL is feed://broadcast.oreilly.com/jeni-tennison/atom.xml. If you want to see my previous posts, they can be found under the “blog” tab on my author page.

I’ve started blogging on XML.com. There’ll be rather less XML on this blog as a consequence, but I do plan to keep it going for less XML-related posts. My first post is about Bad XML; read and enjoy. FWIW, if you didn’t already know, I’m also now on twitter.

I’ve installed reCAPTCHA Drupal module as a way of combating the large amount of comment spam that I get on this blog, and to support the reCAPTCHA project. What a fantastic idea! I see that there’s already a term for using human expertise in a fun or transparent way to solve problems that can’t be solved by computers: bionic software.

ReCAPTCHAs are fun and add to human knowledge, but if you want to avoid them (they do take a little time to load) then create yourself a login. On the other hand, if you have some spare cycles, then you can do reCAPTCHAs on the reCAPTCHA site without creating lots of comments here.

I guess it’s an indication of something (like just being indexed by Google) when you first get comment spam on your blog. Anyway, I really don’t want to insist that commentators create accounts here, so after several annoying days of repeatedly deleting spam comments, I installed the Drupal Spam module and every spam comment since has been captured.

So I finally have just enough spare capacity to start blogging. And if James Clark and David Carlisle can join the party late, why not me. (Yes, M. David Peterson, your eveel plan is coming to fruition.)

So what can you expect? Well, naturally there’ll be musings about XML, XSLT, schema languages and so on, including tips and tricks as I think of them. I’ll probably also have a few rants about overlapping markup, particularly LMNL and Creole. And anything else that sparks my interest.