So I started to think about alternatives. I could zip down the html, css and images. But then the customer would have to unzip it before reading it. And a lot of people wouldn’t understand how to do that. Then I could convert it into a document format not having limitations on the page format. But again the software I used didn’t support anything else but exporting to html and pdf.

What would have really helped me out was if we’ve had a unified way to bundle one or many html files (including resource files like images/css/js/movies) into one compressed file with a predetermined file extension. This would be pretty much the same thing as OpenOffice have done with their document files for years (It’s really just a zip-file). This way my customers email client would know how to handle the file by unpacking it and opening it in the default browser.

This could be really easy to implement:

1) Define an internal structure for the compressed bundle
2) Consider if it would need a meta file defining what to be found inside the bundle.
3) Find a file extension for this bundle format (eg: bwp)
4) Decide what compression format to be used.

And then the hard part:

Getting the different mail clients / browsers / operating systems to implement support for the format. *Gah!*

Please let me know it such a thing already exists, or if there have been any attempt to standardize on a solution concerning this.

I still think that some people are spamming their Twitter account a lot. But I have found the “unfollow” button. So now I follow people that tend to tweed funny stuff or things that I am interested in.

I still dislike the reply system. It is extremely hard to understand that people are finding this useful. I also stick to everything I said about tiny urls. They waste my time.

I have found software that makes it easier to follow communication on all the different services like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, ++. So it really doesn’t bother me being on yet another channel anymore.

So my new view on Twitter is: It is a nice little tool keeping me updated on things that interests me at work. But it has really no value for my private life. There Facebook is the right tool.

I speak to you in klingon

Encoding URL’s in JSTL will give you problems. It turns out that the specification has a weird idea of automatic URL encoding. How they came up with this idea beats me. Or what really beats me is that they haven’t made it possible to manually override the encoding scheme to be used.

When encoding a URL you must know what charset a character within the URL should be encoded to. And that has to be a charset that the server which the URL leads to understands. So if you for example have encoded an URL with Klingon and the receiver decodes it as Esperanto, it will fail. JSTL will automatically encode any URL with the encoding scheme that your site is using (Actually the encoding scheme is taken from the Response object). But this is really useless if you are creating an URL to an external server that requires another encoding scheme than the one your site is using.

Example 1

Let’s say that my site is using ISO-8859-1. That includes source files and all content returned to the end user. Now I want to add a link to Twitter on all my articles. This link should automatically post a new tweed. And since I’m living in Norway I would like the text to be something like “Nå leser jeg : http://www.jakobnielsen.net/?p=1″

So I add this to my JSP file:

<c:url var="shareUrlTwitter" value="http://twitter.com/home">
    <c:param name="status" value="Nå leser jeg: ${siteUrl}" />
</c:url>

<a href="${shareUrlTwitter}">Tweed me!</a>

Where ${siteUrl} is a variable containing the URL to page we are at.

So I deploy the changes to my server and expects everything to work as planned. But clicking on the link immediately gives me a problem. The norwegian letter å is replaced with a strange character. Why is that? Well, as we could have expected, Twitter is not fond of ISO-8859-1 encoded URLs. It really prefers UTF-8.

Something is wrong

So we’ve ended up with a URL looking like this:

http://twitter.com/home?status=N%E5+leser+jeg%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fwww.jakobnielsen.net%2F%3Fp%3D1

which is encoded with ISO-8859-1. What we really needed was a UTF-8 encoded URL like this:

http://twitter.com/home?status=N%C3%A5+leser+jeg%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fwww.jakobnielsen.net%2F%3Fp%3D

Ok, then we just need to tell the c:param tag or the c:url tag what encoding scheme to use when encoding the parameters right? Sorry dude! You cannot specify encoding for URLs in JSTL!

Conclusion

The JSTL specification states that all names and values in a <c :param> tag should automatically be encoded.

…It is indeed redundant, but is consistent with<jsp :include>, which supports nested <jsp :param>sub-elements. Moreover, it has been designed such that the attributes
name and value are automatically URLencoded.

It doesn’t say anything about what encoding to be used. The Jakarta taglibs project has solved this by picking the encoding from the Response object. For internal linking this works. But when creating external URLs this strategy must fail when creating a link to a server using another charset.

So, in these cases you have to come up with your own tags to solve the encoding problem.

How this problem could be solved

What is missing is an encoding attribute in the c:url tag, where you could specify what encoding scheme to be used.

<c :url var="shareUrlTwitter" value="http://twitter.com/home" encoding="utf-8">
    <c :param name="status" value="Nå leser jeg: ${siteUrl}" />
</c>

Anyway here is my 8 reasons to remove my account.

1. I’m not interested what music people are listening to, what parties they are on, +++.

2. Replies on twitter sucks! Bigtime! They do not point to the actual post, only to the person who wrote it. Hence there is no point in trying to follow a conversation.

3. Given the limitation of 140 characters per posting, people tend to use services like tinyurl.com to shorten url’s. This really sucks as well. Cause I have no chance to see if this is pointing to an url I already have seen or not. It wastes my time.

4. People tend to post the same links. In the previous #IE6 campaign on Twitter my estimate is that more than 60% of the messages was duplicates.

5. I already have more than 8 ways to communicate on the Internet. I really don’t need another.

6. Some people I’m following on Twitter seems to be “twitterholics”. They just have to post something every hour. Even though they really doesn’t have something to say.

7. There are a mix between companies and people in twitter. I really do not like that companies can use this arena as a free commercial channel.

8. Twitter only makes some sort of sense with a client like Twitterific. I find it really disturbing. And it takes my mind away from things I am supposed to do at work.

So my conclusion is that Twitter probably suits people without a life that desperately tries to find out what all the other folks are doing.

But maybe I am wrong, and that I one day will return with an open mind. Until then…..

…bye Twitter!

Read more at http://www.jakobnielsen.net/java6-gif-backport

Copyright: Use is freely as long as you keep the image intact.

Add this to your pom.xml inside the <plugins> tag:

<plugin>
  <groupid>org.mortbay.jetty</groupid>
  <artifactid>maven-jetty-plugin</artifactid>
  <configuration>
    <jettyenvxml>jetty/jetty-env.xml</jettyenvxml>
    <scanintervalseconds>3</scanintervalseconds>
    <connectors>
    <connector implementation="org.mortbay.jetty.nio.SelectChannelConnector">
      <port>8180</port>
    </connector>
    </connectors>
    <systemproperties>
      <systemproperty>
        <name>org.apache.commons.logging.Log</name>
        <value>
        org.apache.commons.logging.impl.Log4JLogger
        </value>
      </systemproperty>
      <systemproperty>
        <name>slf4j</name>
        <value>false</value>
      </systemproperty>
      <systemproperty>
        <name>log4j.configuration</name>
        <value>file:./jetty/log4j.properties</value>
      </systemproperty>
    </systemproperties>
  </configuration>
  <dependencies>
    <dependency>
      <groupid>commons-logging</groupid>
      <artifactid>commons-logging</artifactid>
      <version>1.1</version>
      <type>jar</type>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
      <groupid>log4j</groupid>
      <artifactid>log4j</artifactid>
      <version>1.2.13</version>
      <type>jar</type>
    </dependency>
  </dependencies>
</plugin>

Note that I point to a ./jetty/log4j.properties file. This could look something like:

log4j.rootCategory=ERROR, A1
log4j.logger.no.api=DEBUG
log4j.appender.A1=org.apache.log4j.ConsoleAppender
log4j.appender.A1.layout=org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout
log4j.appender.A1.layout.ConversionPattern=%d %-4r [%t] %-5p %c %x - %m%n

This will print all log messages to your console.