Nick Bradbury

Dexter Cartoon for July 30, 2004

I had some nice feedback following last week's "Dexter" cartoon, so I've decided to make my old cartoons a regular Friday feature. I don't have many cartoons to choose from, but I should be able to keep this going for a few months. I actually drew "Dexter" five days a week for a couple of years so you'd think I'd have hundreds to pick from, but I have just a handful scanned in, many of which are too dated to reprint (they were all drawn between 1989 and 1991).

The ones I have scanned are my "safe" cartoons which I sent to syndicates. See, the majority of my Dexter comics talked about race, religion, politics and sex, and they used language that would make Garfield and Beetle Bailey run screaming into the hills. I knew I'd never get into the newspapers with that stuff, so I created a number of strips which tackled less sensitive subjects, hoping to use them to sneak into the papers. I figured once I was syndicated I could push the boundaries. Sounded like a great plan to me, but it hit a rather large roadblock: no syndicate was interested in distributing my work.

I spent a year or two slumming around trying to get my comics published, but had little luck. Then in 1995 I discovered the Web and realized I could do my own publishing - cheap. So, off I went to build my first Web site. At that time the tools for building sites were really bad, so I decided to build my own. On my Dexter site a few months later, I announced my new HTML editor - which, of course, was HomeSite 1.0. The end of the story is that HomeSite turned out be far more successful than my comics, and I followed HomeSite into a career as a computer programmer.

Anyway...that's the background story. Now here's this week's Dexter cartoon:

ANN: TopStyle Pro 3.11 BETA 1

It's been quite a while since the last release of TopStyle, so I'm pleased to announce that the first beta of TopStyle Pro 3.11 is now available to those who purchased version 3.x.

For details on downloading the beta and providing feedback, stop by:

http://www.bradsoft.com/topstyle/beta/

For information on changes in v3.11, please check out the release notes at:

http://www.bradsoft.com/download/readme/readme311b1.asp

Traffik

According to my server logs, 81.75% of my site's traffic this week came from warez and crack sites. This is a typical week for me.

A Silent Toon

I'll be buried in code for the next few days, which means I probably won't be blogging too much. So, I've decided to post one of my old "Dexter" cartoons to make up for my silence.

This one was originally published in The Daily Beacon when I was a student at the University of Tennessee, and it remains one of my favorites since it hasn't aged a bit:

WSJ Online Feeds and FeedDemon 1.11.3

If you're a subscriber to The Wall Street Journal Online, you'll be happy to hear that a set of WSJ Online feeds is now available. If you're not a subscriber, you can still access the feeds - but they'll show only headlines as opposed to full content (hat tip to Kevin H. Stecyk for letting me know about these feeds).

When I first viewed the WSJ feeds in FeedDemon, I discovered that the wrong titles were showing in the channel bar. At first I thought there must be a problem with the feeds themselves, but it turns out the problem was with FeedDemon. So, I've posted a new build of FeedDemon which fixes this bug - just visit the download page to get it. As always, existing users should install the new build directly on top of the current build. All of your existing information (including your serial number) will be retained.

Quitting Smoking

Dave Winer writes about his experience quitting smoking, and it reminds me of my experience quitting. Many years ago I was a smoker, and it took a couple of tries before I quit successfully.

My first attempt at quitting was doomed to failure. See, I noticed that my cravings were stronger when my friends and I went bar-hopping, so I told myself I'd only smoke when I was drinking. The result? I drank more often. Duh.

So I quit cold turkey, and that was well over a decade ago. I've smoked one time since then, about three years ago - not a perfect record, but not bad. The thing that made it easier to quit was that I stopped smoking right after the end of a relationship gone sour. I figured as long as I was giving up one bad habit, I might as well give up smoking at the same time.

More on RSS bandwidth consumption

A few months back I wrote about RSS bandwidth consumption, and this subject is again in the news following Chad Dickerson's recent InfoWorld column about his love/hate relationship with RSS. Dickerson notes that desktop RSS readers which hit a feed too frequently - and then download the feed even when it hasn't changed - are resulting in a huge server load.

However, as Dare Obasanjo points out, many of those complaining about RSS bandwidth consumption fail to configure their own servers to address the problem. Dare shows that InfoWorld's feed supports neither GZip encoding nor conditional HTTP Get, both of which would dramatically decrease RSS bandwidth consumption. The latest RSS reader stats show that all the major ones support these techniques, so make sure your server (and/or the feed itself) supports these techniques. If you have a static feed, chances are your server handles this for you - but if you have a dynamic feed (i.e.: one created on-the-fly with PHP or ASP), you may need to make some changes.

In the past, raising this topic has been followed by naive calls to stop using desktop RSS readers in favor of web-based applications, since web-based aggregators consume less bandwidth. I'm far too biased to argue about desktop vs. web aggregators, but the argument is moot since many people find the UI and feature set of web-based apps too limiting for their needs and will always want a desktop application (witness Outlook vs. HotMail). Arguing for either type of application is pointless, since each will be around for a long time.

BTW, I'm glad to see that Sam Ruby is proposing updating the Atom spec and the feed validator to support HTTP conditional get. My guess is that a lot of bandwidth will be saved once the feed validator warns about feeds that don't take advantage of the If-Modified-Since and If-None-Match HTTP headers.

Oh, and since I mentioned RSS reader stats, I have to get this off my chest: server stats are not an accurate representation of the popularity of individual RSS readers. A number of RSS readers default to checking for updates every hour, whereas FeedDemon defaults to checking every three hours. So, three times as many people would need to use FeedDemon for it to be ranked equally with these other apps.

TopStyle 3.11 Status

I know a number of people are anxious for me to release the first TopStyle Pro 3.11 beta, so I wanted to let everyone know that it's almost ready. I've been running a build of v3.11 here for a couple of weeks and it looks solid, so I expect to make the beta available early next week.

As I mentioned earlier, v3.11 is a bugfix release, so it won't have any major new features. Just in case anyone's curious about the changes, I've posted the current release notes.

Save $50 on Gnomedex 2004

Last month I blogged that I'll be speaking at Gnomedex 2004, and I mentioned how much I enjoyed the previous Gnomedex. Well, Chris Pirillo just emailed me a $50 discount coupon for the conference, and I have his permission to share this coupon with readers of my blog.

So, if you're thinking of attending, you have an extra incentive to sign up now. Just enter the coupon code below on the Gnomedex pre-registration form to save $50:

WILDGEEK

This coupon expires in a couple of weeks, so be sure to use it soon.

aDesigner disability simulator

IBM recently announced aDesigner, touted as "a disability simulator that helps Web designers ensure that their pages are accessible and usable by the visually impaired."

I haven't had time to really test it yet, but my first impression is that it's very nicely done, and it was immediately helpful in finding a few minor problems on my site. (Hat tip to Jack Brewster for the link.)