The Ajaxian blog has a overview of HTML 5 and XHTML 2, with XHTML 2 being the W3C's official successor to XHTML 1.0 and 1.1, and "HTML5" being the WhatWG's unofficial name for the collection of improvements being made to contemporary HTML practices. Both seem like promising new areas of improvement for the building blocks that all of us depend on when creating web pages or web applications.

Thanks to Scott Andrew at Strange Zen for the links.

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If you've seen Nokia's LifeBlog application and have wanted to play with it on your own weblog to try out the media blogging features, you'll want to take a look at the new Lifeblog API implementation for Movable Type. (And the implementation notes.)

If you're looking for a list of all the services where Lifeblog works, you can review the list of Lifeblog-compatible services, which has grown to include the new Friendster Blogs service.

If you're looking for more documentation on the Lifeblog API, you can look back to the Professional Network post on the Atom Format Working Draft update, which includes links to Lifeblog API documentation.

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padawan.info - Betting on the right horse at Six Apart? - March 8, 2005 12:54 PM...

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The Wall Street Journal has a look at marketers who look to blogs for discussions of their brands. This is a trend a lot of us are familiar with, but the specific examples are very useful.

Marketers say bloggers' unsolicited opinions and offhand comments are a source of invaluable insights that are hard to get elsewhere. "We look at the blogosphere as a focus group with 15 million people going on 24/7 that you can tap into without going behind a one-way mirror," says Rick Murray, executive vice president of Edelman, a Chicago public-relations firm.

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With the newest addition to our collection of Power Tools, we've made some interesting new functionality available for Movable Type users. The Tags plugin lets you easily add tags to your Movable Type entries, by modifying the Keyword entry field to allow you to enter tags, and automatically creating categories for each of the tags you submit. Creating archives for tags or including the tags in your XML feeds then becomes simple.

The Tags plugin also makes use of Movable Type's alternate application template functionality.

Brad Choate is one of our developers on the Movable Type team, and long before that he was a member of the Movable Type development community. Brad created Tags both in response to demand for a better user experience for labeling content and to show off some of the newly-polished features in Movable Type....

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Many of you spend a lot of time and effort just trying to convince your company or your clients to start a blog. But we think that, in many cases, the need is even greater: Many companies need to start a number of blogs.

Though there's been so much attention paid to business blogs in the past few months, we're still in the early days of awareness. Whether it's saving time in communication, improving the connection with customers, reducing the cost of gathering feedback, or just participating in the conversations around your industry, there are a number of ways to make the case for business blogs, even if a company is nervous about entering the blogosphere.

The good news is, those...

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Accessible design, unobtrusive scripting, and terrible cell phone browsers.

From all accounts, the recent @Media conference in London was a smash hit. One take-away that has appeared everywhere is a renewed interest in accessibility issues. Given the creation of the WaSP ATF and resulting discussion, the eye being kept on the under-development WCAG2, the interest in zoom layouts, and even the questioning of what we know, there's a lot going on right now.

At the moment, accessibility practices attempt to assist those with disabilities. This is a reasonable starting point. A founding goal of the web, after all, is to allow access to anyone, anywhere, at any time, on any...

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Less Is More

One key principle of interface design is not to overload your users by dumping every choice available on your site right there on the front page. Users don't mind drilling for information that needs to be drilled for. Important stuff should be readily and easily accesible, and category archives falls into the category of important stuff, especially since they're one of the primary ways someone navigates your site. But for anyone who posts on a regular basis, your category section can become rather large and unweildy, very quickly falling under the category of "choice dumping". Fifty-one categories and seventy-two months listed on your sidebar...

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When I first launched the Style Generator, the biggest request I got was to have some sort of colour scheme chooser or a random style generator. After a few attempts (and a lot of help from Brad Choate), I've finally managed to create the Random Styler. This random styler is capable of generating thousands of different Vicksburg variations with the click of a button (and some AJAX magic!). Some advanced features include: • Being able to change the number of columns (e.g. from a 2 column layout to a 3 column layout and so on) • The ability to edit the stylesheet generated - clicking the edit button will take you to the Style Generator where the stylesheet will be preloaded and you can tweak it...

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Google Suggest offers suggestions while you're typing in a search term. If you don't know exactly what you're looking for or how to spell it, the Suggest feature can make finding what you want easier. I've added the same functionality to danandsherree.com. Try it - start typing something in the search box at the right and watch the suggestions appear! It was a pretty easy feature to institute.

In an amazing piece of coincidence, Arvind at Movalog has just announced Suggest Search. For better or worse, his approach works a bit differently than mine.

If you want to use my incarnation of Suggest Search you'll first need a list of suggested...

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Noted usability maven Jakob Nielsen, long a subject of conversation and critique by bloggers, finally returns the favor with a top ten list of design suggestions for bloggers. Titled " Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes", the latest Alertbox offers a number of simple and useful specific items to review.

For most Professional Network members, a lot of this is a review of practices we're already familiar with, but it's worth taking a closer look at some of the suggestions. • No author biography and no author photo: When we launched TypePad two years ago, one of the first items we added was support for an "About" page and an author photo. If you're making a...

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3.2 (2005.08.25)

Major Features

• New dead-simple AJAX-powered installation/upgrade process (see screencast demo) which replaces mt-load.cgi and all mt-upgrade* scripts. Also eliminated the upgrade distribution since only the config file would be different. • Combined mt.cfg and mt-db-pass.cgi into mt-config.cgi. Shipping as mt-config.cgi-original so as to prevent overwriting when upgrading. • Introduced the new System Overview section which allows administrators to configure and manage aspects of the system across all weblogs • Introduced a plugin-based feedback rating framework which scores comments and TrackBacks upon submission on a scale from -10 (least desirable) to 10 (most desirable)...

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