There are 7 variants of the RSS format; a fact that has persisted to cause me no end of confusion in recent months. Thankfully, Mark Pilgrim explains all with an article suitably called ‘What Is RSS?’

Demonstrating that pink bubbles do have a place on the web, Tommy Hulme wins the stylesheet competition. A CD of his choice from the site will be on its way just in time for Christmas. Thanks again to all who took part.

Google have introduced a BETA version of Froogle, a Google style interface to hundreds of online shops. At first I thought this was some kind of joke, mainly because it’s a Google product that isn’t called Google. I suppose their brand is so strong that they can get away with this; I mean it’s not a great pun is it?

The Segway HT has its first fan site; Phillip M. Torrone commutes on his every day and has created a website to document his experiences. In my previous post, I discussed the personification of Apple Computers; at least you don’t get a birth certificate when you purchase a Mac.

Leander Kahney wrote a series of articles for Wired in he which explores the psychology of Mac buying; why people are so damn fanatical about their Macs and whether this is purely a result of Apple’s clever marketing strategy. The articles in this series are as follows:

• Mac Loyalists: Don’t Tread on Us
• For Mac Users, It Takes a Village
• Apple: It’s All About the Brand
• Worshipping at the Alter of Mac
• Baby, Friend, Pet: That’s My Mac

After reading through these articles, Mac users weren’t happy with the overall conclusion that their choice of computer was really a result of some kind of pseudo-religious brainwashing activity. Wired call this the Cult of Mac and consistently produce articles in which Mac users obssess about converting their iMacs into fish tanks or Mac SEs into PowerPCs running OS X. At first I thought articles like this were fun and interesting, but after reading John Gruber’s appraisal of them, I now realise that tales of Mac obsession are easy fodder for tech journalists to write about when they’re short of a story.

At about the same time that Kahney got a heap of irate mail in reponse to his articles, Jack Schofield at Onlineblog.com wrote about Kahney’s final piece ‘Baby, Friend, Pet: That’s My Mac’. In response to Kahney’s suggestion that Apple add human characteristics to their computers in order to form some kind of emotional attachment with their owner, Schofield wrote:

‘Clearly there’s now a major industry devoted to explaining why 2.5% of the computer-buying population is still willing to pay well over the odds for very slow computers that severly limit your range of choices and lock you in to a single dictatorial supplier. Maybe Miller should have looked at infantilism instead….’

So now we’re not only a bunch of pseudo-religious nutters helplessly neck deep in the Cult of Apple, but we’re also infantile while we’re at it!? As you can imagine, this started a bit of a flame war on the Onlineblog site, in which I was compelled to have my say on the subject. If someone chooses something over something else, isn’t it unfair to pigeon-hole them in this way? Isn’t it wrong to bracket, to generalise and stereotype like this? Answer: Yes.

As a Mac user, I see my iMac DVSE as a particularly well designed clump of mass-produced components sitting on my desk. I like it; it does what I want it to do. OS X - by way of its UNIX foundation and its ability to run Apache, PHP and MySQL – has helped me increase my knowledge about how the web works and that is invaluable to me. I don’t subscribe to the ‘digital lifestyle’ stuff; my ideal lifestyle involves being somewhere far away from the office Mac at which I’m now sitting. Computers still have a screen and a keyboard; the technology is in a box around which we position ourselves alongside other peripherals, and while we can now do more things with these plastic boxes, the way in which we use them has remained unchanged in over 30 years. Apple have made and continue to make products that make using a computer a more interesting and user-friendly experience. It is Apple’s legacy that creates the fanaticism, not the fact that it now makes computers that may look like new-born babies.

So, If you want decent, informative and balanced writing about the Mac platform, try:

• www.ranchero.com
• www.daringfireball.net
• www.macintouch.com
• mac.oreilly.com
• www.xlab.co.uk/macosx/

At last, you can now vote on who you think should win the Stylesheet competition! Over here…

Here’s an idea so simple and brilliant that you might wish you’d thought of it yourself; a writer scrawls words instead of the usual luminous identifying marks on the backs of sheep, creating random poetry as they mill around, vacantly chewing cud, munching grass and being flustered by Skip the farmers dog. These poetry sheep are on a farm in Morpeth, about 12 miles from where I live and it’s a testament to the craziness of the internet that I only found out about it via Anne’s Ottawa-based weblog.

Mathematicians have decided that of the 400 million different ways you can lace your shoes the most effective pattern is the ‘bow-tie’ [not to be confused with the fastening knot]. I can’t say I’ve witnessed such a method; I tend to fluctuate between the ‘criss-cross’ and the ‘straight’ patterns. I’m intrigued by the 397 million 399,999,997 title=> other options though.

Thanks to Mal and Stu for their stylesheet submissions last weekend; this brings the total up to a more repectable 4. Each stylesheet is available for selection on the Plink site using Chris Clarke’s PHP Style Switcher and a public vote will commence this week to see who will win an album of their choice from the recommendations so far. I’d like to think that in doing this competition, we’ve created something pretty unique and it proves the worth of designing sites using valid XHTML and CSS. Keeping the mark-up simple and meaningful has allowed others to work with it and submit their own interpretations of the how the site should be presented. So, to Kev, Tommy, Mal and Stu, thanks for taking part; I think it has been worthwhile.

Here’s another useful PHP script courtesy of Textism. When a person visits your site via a google search, this script reads the search string entered and highlights the words on the resulting page. By way of demonstration, do a web search for ‘conjugate lateral eye movement’, and you will see how it works.