Revisiting XHTML. Ever since XHTML was introduced in January of 2000, arguments as to its use and rationale have been flung about… [Web Standards Project BUZZ]

I spent some reading about this today. It was interesting but not important. It sounded too much like whining to me. Writing valid XHTML is not that hard for what I do so I write code that validates. My general feeling is I like the web pages I develop to work in most browsers and have the nice features that make web browsing fun. As an example I recently modified the design for Legacy Farm to:

1. Simplify the navigation menu.
2. Make it compatible with Netscape 4.75 and the other non-CSS browsers like it.
3. Make the pages XHTML 1.0 compliant.

Simplifying the navigation menu and fixing the CSS to work with non-CSS browsers were my major issues. I was afraid of losing potential customers. XHTML was a minor issue for me since customers cannot tell the difference and HTML Tidy did most of the work. I get this warm, fuzzy feeling that by writing valid XHTML code my web pages will be usable in most browsers and I will already be on the most likely path for future standards.

Problem: I had an Excel spreadsheet with email addresses. I wanted to add the mailto: hyperlink to a range of cells. The answer came from Suat at experts-exchange.

Goto Excel VBA (Alt+F11) and Insert->Module to add a new module then copy And paste the following code into this new module. Then return excel and select the range which has email addresses (you can select other cells, you don't have to use multiply selection) and then run the macro by pointing Tools->Macros->Macros and selecting ChangeToEmail macro. Code will look into selected range and change the cell to a hyperlink if cell has an email address in it by using cell value as email address.

'—-Code Start—
Sub ChangeToEmail()
Dim rng As Range
Dim cll As Range
Dim tmpval
   Set rng = Selection
   For Each cll In rng.Cells
       tmpval = cll.Value
       If InStr(cll, “@”) > 0 Then cll.Hyperlinks.Add cll, “mailto:” & cll.Value
       cll.Value = tmpval
   Next cll
End Sub
'—-Code End—

Feed Validator has moved. The Feed Validator, previously located at feeds.archive.org/validator/, now has its own domain: http://feedvalidator.org. If you have any scripts, templates, or applications that point to the Feed Validator, now would be a good time to update them. (204 words) [dive into mark]

Hey, thanks for telling everyone…finally. I ended up using the Redland RSS 1.0 Validator yesterday when my favorite validator was not found. I thought they probably took the server down for maintenance. Today I find out its moved. I checked both feeds and my 1.0 feed failed because the channel description used dublin core. I took the dc: out and the feed validated. I then updated the footer in my dreamweaver templates for the new url to the validator.

I was playing with RSSOwl recently and saw what I thought were some problems in my rss feed for legacy farm. I cleaned up the date errors. Since the feed looked ugly in RSSOwl, I started to wonder about what the feed would look like if it was transformed into RSS 1.0. I eventually ended up at http://ideagraph.net/xmlns/ssr/modules.htm. I took the rss2rdf.xsl (courtesy of Sjoerd Visscher) and ran it on my feed. Using XSLT to transform the feed is pretty cool! I validated the new feed on the Redland RSS 1.0 Validator. It had a couple of errors: title, link, and dates. The validator complained about the missing required fields: title and link. The title field was there but it used the Dublin core. My date fields had a different format and were being extracted incorrectly. I modified the xsl file and I now have a valid and correct RSS V1.0(i.e. RDF) feed. It still doesn't look good in RSSOwl but it is less ugly. Oh well! You can see the final product at http://www.legacyfarmltd.com/rss1.xml.

Iwas trying to pay bills today and got  a little distracted today with my T-Mobile bill. When I called T-Mobile to complain about roaming charges appearing on my bill, the representitive said that I did not have nationwide roaming. I knew I had signed up for it and had not been charged for roaming until recently. So I pulled out all of my T-Mobile bills and spread them accross the dining room table. My wife could see I was not happy so she did not bug me about the mess I had just created. After a little hunting I figured out the month they started charging me for roaming. When I called them back and pointed out the problem month, they apologized. They accidentally removed nationwide roaming when they added international roaming on my wife's phone. Oh well!

Eric Hoffer. “Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.” [Quotes of the Day]

qotd september 4. Patricia Neal: “A strong positive mental attitude will create more miracles than any wonder drug.” [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

Amen!

I re-installed WinPT & GnuPG today. I got a bunch of M$ security announcements today. I know M$ has problems but this was quite a bunch so I decided to spot check the validity. I had uninstalled WinPT & GnuPG awhile back since I needed to upgrade. The new versions are not much different than the previous versions. I had one bug that took me a little time to recognize. Outlook 2002 suppresses blank lines. If you copy the text of the security announcement to the clipboard with the suppressed lines it won't verify. Stop suppressing blank lines and the text copied to the clipboard will verify.

I had wondered about this for awhile but I think that I finally have it figured out. When you change your domain password on WinXP you need to logoff to change the cached credentials. Otherwise you will nagged into changing the password a second time.

I spent part of this Labor Day trying to update my “Friends List” in Mailtrust Pro. As I have mentioned earlier in “Spam Management”, Mailtrust is my first line of defense for my email addresses against spam and viruses. Mailtrust uses a combination of spam lookup, regexp filtering, blacklist, and whitelist to filter my mailboxes. What I knew but ignored until today was that I was behind in updating my friends list. An important email got deleted today. It had failed one of the filters and had been marked for deletion. After I read it I forgot to remove the delete checkmark and add it as a friend. My valid email addresses are in Outlook and I did not have an automatic approach to updating this list. Today I searched and found a temporary fix. I found an Outlook VBA macro found on spampal.org that dumps the email addresses to a text file. Since I have two contact folders I modified the macro to dump the emails from both folders. Then I copied and pasted the resulting file into the Mailtrust whitelist file. Mailtrust found and removed the duplicates. It would be nice if I could run this macro automatically each day and automatically update Mailtrust but Outlook is pretty fussy about running any macro. Since I do not add email addresses very often, I should probably be safe for a long time.