Excuse the mess! Lost my Blogroll this evening...

No, lost my blogroll is not a quaint euphemism for the result of imbibing or devouring too much food and drink in too short a time.

It is what happens once in a while when I am getting the template in one of my blogs hosted on Blogspot.com.

It has happened once or twice before tonight. Tonight, it happened to three blogs, all one right after another.

I was editing each one of their templates in a different tab of the same Firefox 1.5 web browsing window.

I do not know if the fault was a flaw in Firefox, a flaw in Blogger.com, or a transitory communications glitch. Right now I am not leaning toward believing it was the latter.

I do however, know what the error was: a good chunk of the last part of my template for each blog just disappeared!

The failure, of course, I noticed when my published blog contained nothing but a command bar across the top, or not even that and just a little garbled Bloggerish-HTML.

Reacting the problem was simple - though left me with a tragic loss. I lost my entire list of handy links (i.e. Blogroll) in the sidebar in two of my blogs, one of which was this one.

I was lucky that I had a browse of one of the blogs open in another browser before this blog apocalypse happened. I was able to clip out and save that one's sidebar definition directly from the HTML of that page.

Fortunately, Blogger does provide a way chose a new template - and you can use that to restore an old one to its factory-settings.

This problem has hit other people. I have seen it in the Blogger-help newsgroup, so I know I am not the only one. Having been hit by it 4 or 5 times on 2-3 occasions, I can attest it is a bear when it happens.

If anyone from Blogger ever reads this, here is what Blogger does not do, and what it appears it should do, in order to prevent problems like this in the future.

1. Include marker comments or better yet blogger tags at the very beginning and end of the document
2. Make sure those marker comments/tags are there BEFORE replacing the old copy of the template.
3. Validate the blogger tags. If the last bunch of them are empty, do NOT just overwrite the template without asking first, showing the user the BEFORE and AFTER version of the template, and getting them to fix-or-confirm the change before proceeding.

People who write blogger.com templates and people who write Blogger.com template editors should study this advice and decide if they can help with this or not.

The morals of the story are:

• have backups
• do not panic, you might still have a copy of something in an editor/viewer buffer or on disk
• consider your recovery options carefully
• use whatever information the disaster did not destroy to help recover

I should have my page looking almost as good as new shortly. Although, I did not have a backup, things mostly broke my way on the other 3 points.

Technorati tags: blogspot, disasterrecovery, blogging, blogger, css, blogroll

Microformats catching on

Microformats seem to be catching on rather quickly.

Technorati already supports several. Weblogs are already beginning to use them. Very shortly, some of the leading web browsers will support them as well.

Go take ao look at the blog entry linked to below. It features a review of a popular social website, and the review is marked up using the jReview Microformat.

Johnny's Software Saloon: review of TV.com website with embedded hReview microformat metadata:

Note this blog post has been encoded with hReview standard format microformat metadata in order to make it easily digestible by social web services like Techorati.com and modern web browsers like Firefox 2.0.

CSS was originally designed for controlling font appearances and content layout on web pages. However, some of its element attributes are now seeing double-duty use as metadata fields.

Another weblog about CSS begins

Most of the web today completely relies on CSS for styling the appearance of documents.

Whether a web page is HTML, XHTML, or perhaps some other form of XML - CSS can be used to style it. Not just affecting the appearance of text - but also controlling the layout of different blocks of content on the page and even inserting images and text as needed - for a little extra panache.

While CSS is not as powerful as XSLT in terms of reorganizing and filtering the content of a document, it does have some strong advantages over XSLT.

1. works with grungy real-world HTML pages, not merely XHTML/XML documents
2. very concise way of defining rules - selectors and properties, that is all it takes
3. supported by every web browser to some degree
4. no programming skill required at all in order to be able to write CSS

There are a lot more things that they both have in common.

1. can operate on any XML document (yes, it is true - CSS 2 can style XML)
2. supported by virtually every browser, to some degree (note fully support CSS 2.1, the longtime current standard, yet)
3. supported by every web browser to some degree
4. Java text components support CSS, a little - and XSLT completely

I have been working with XSLT for almost 5 years, and CSS for almost 4 years.

I have had the odd pleasure of generating HTML pages with my CSS in them from my own hand-written XSLT. I generated XSL-FO marked up documents with the identical content and corresponding styles.

I like using all of them. They are a lot of fun. They are understood, literally, by software around the world.

There probably is not a desktop computer in the world at this point that does not understand these technologies. Certainly, every computer made in the past 7 years does.

So CSS is extremely relevant to business people, home computer users, bloggers, people reading/writing email - everyone who uses a computer, really. Even programmers, if you must know.

Because CSS is so important, I wanted to own a blog that would keep track of the exciting developments going on with this powerful tool. Text speaks what is on the mind. Adding CSS expresses it.