Dear Lazyweb,

Since this worked so well to find a great article on HTTP caching… Does anyone know of a good introductory article for how to get MathML to display in Web Pages across multiple browsers etc.

My primary recommendation unfortunately will be to convert it to an image, but I’d like to provide instructions for the folk who want to maintain accessibility for their equations as well. Related and also interesting is anything discussing mime-types, XHTML and how to solve the IE problem.

I’ve just gotten back from a wonderful trip around Italy and have discovered a second endemic fail-point for mobile technology solutions: assuming you always have network connectivity. I suspect this really only applies to mobile phones more than mobile devices that only have wifi. When travelling internationally, your mobile phone becomes incredibly expensive if you leave international data roaming on so while you’re away you only have internet via wifi. When travelling in Italy (and Australia), this means you don’t have internet access, period.

I’m going to need this soon and I’ll never find the link again in the IBM forums so I’m putting it here.

Exporting and Importing a Web Content Library

It should let you move web content (minus drafts and previous versions unfortunately) from one IWWCM server to another.

There is so much effort put into coming up with complex ways of filtering spam, yet somehow the blatantly obvious posts still get through. Google Blog search for sites linking to my blog is 100% spam and they are all the most common form of splog these days:

%NAME% wrote an interesting post today on %SITENAME%
Here’s a quick excerpt

%COPIED POST CONTENT%

Get more information from %SITENAME% %LINK%

The copyright of the above excerpt belongs to %SITENAME%. We welcome any comments from the copyright owner.

CMSWire – News You Can Use:

When the homepage is dominated by news you are not necessarily communicating more. In many situations, you are damaging your reputation as a quality news source. Forcing news into people’s faces just annoys them. The fact is, most intranets really don’t have that much news that’s globally interesting, so most intranets need to focus on the commonly used resources or the targeted information that’s specific to smaller groups – often that’s not PR written news or even news at all, more just status updates.

Dear Lazy Web,

Can anyone point me to a simple introduction to HTTP caching? I know quite a lot about it and can just dive into the relevant standards, but I’m writing an article that will be read by people who have never heard of HTTP cache control headers before and I’d like to give them a good starting point.

Thanks,

Lazy author, er believer in reuse…

Answer

This article on MNot has an excellent overview of the whole issue.

Kevin Gamble:

I know I must sound like a broken record on this point, but the message just isn’t sinking in. What’s it going to take for people to “get” this? A million dollars or 10 million dollars. It doesn’t matter. The people are not coming. You have to go to them. It’s pretty simple actually. The thing is, corporate thinking is all about owning stuff. So the natural tendency is to want a community that you “own” and thus you have to build a new community and get people to come. It’s nice to see some studies highlighting how rarely that actually works though.

From CMSWire:

Optaros has announced the launch of a new user interface framework for Alfresco. DoCASU 1.0 is an open source initiative, bringing AJAX and Rich Internet Application features to the Alfresco Enterprise CMS platform UI. Docasu “is not intended to replace the already existing Alfresco web user interface,” but rather is aimed at those who require a simpler and more user-friendly, yet highly configurable interface solution. Sounds like a sensationally good idea to me. It’s surprisingly difficult to get a team together that has the back-end skills required in terms of scalability, content management etc and the front end skills to create an intuitive UI for users. Or in graph form and Ephox specific:

iUI looks like a promising library for making the development of iPhone webapps much simpler.  Worth keeping an eye on since there’s no barrier to entry for iPhone webapps unlike with native iPhone apps.

I had two of our keen young developers (Dylan and Suneth) email me overnight to ask my CTO-ish opinion of trends in the mobile space and how they might apply to Ephox. It’s a very good question – with the advent of BlackBerrys first and now even more so with the iPhone, mobile internet is finally moving from “the future” to “the now”, even if it’s not evenly distributed yet. Of course, Ephox is squarely placed in the enterprise content creation business so no matter how popular the mobile world becomes we’re very unlikely to bring out a mobile phone game or a tip calculator. So here’s my take one where the mobile world is with regard to enterprise content creation.

I’ve quickly come to realize that the mobile worlds has a huge dependency on synchronization tehnology to make things work smoothly. Toucan read your email on the phone and reply from your laptop. Read rss items should be synced and just about everything else on your phone should be synced with somewhere else. The problem is that generally synchronization support is lousy. NetNewsWire is too slow syncing feeds, Mail.app doesn’t seem to notice if a message changes from unread to read and the WordPress iPhone app doesn’t seem to download drafts that you created in the browser interface. Sync is the killer requirement that goes unsaid on mobile devices. You can spend as long as you like polishing he UI but if your synchronization isn’t seamless your app will be a chore to use. If you get it right users won’t notice at all.

Brent has an excellent post up about his experience developing NetNewsWire for the iPhone and he manages to say what I tried to yesterday before I got caught up listing my frustrations with Mobile NetNewsWire:

I’ve always worked in public or semi-public: release, listen to feedback, release, listen, repeat forever. I worked this way for years UserLand. All of NetNewsWire was developed this way, beginning with the very earliest betas of NetNewsWire Lite back in 2002.