More things you can do with RSS

Another glimpse of the possibilities opened up by RSS comes courtesy of Plusnet (I have to declare an interest here, as they’re my home ISP.) Like most ISPs that know what they’re about, they’ve got a ‘Service Status’ page that’s a quick way of finding out what’s going on with their service. Very useful if, say, you’re having a problem with their email server and you want to check if everyone’s having the same problem or if it’s just you.

But Plusnet have taken it one stage further by providing an RSS feed of their service status postings, which means that I don’t need to visit their site to see what’s going on - it simply appears in my newsreader. The advantage to me is that I can keep tabs on what’s going on in the background, the advantage for them is that it reduces the number of calls coming in to them from people just wanting to know what’s going on.

Having said all this, Plusnet are actually a great example of an organisation that ‘gets’ customer service in the first place. Take a look at what they’re posting on the Service Status page. It’s not just ‘this has gone wrong, we’re fixing it’ information - it’s proactive as well. I can see not only when things have gone wrong, but also what they’ve got planned, and perhaps most importantly what they’re doing about fixing the problems as they unfold. That takes a commitment on the part of the organisation - it’s all too easy to batten down the hatches and let the updates and information trickle out bit by bit, treating the customers as mushrooms as the saying goes. What Plusnet are doing is keeping me informed - so when things do go wrong, I cut them that extra bit of slack knowing that I can trust them to be telling the truth and be open about what’s going on and when problems are going to get sorted.

Why’s this important? Simply that the market for internet services is huge and highly competitive. I’d have little compunction about moving provider if their service was poor, because it’s relatively easy for me to do. To retain my loyalty - and better still, gain my recommendation - Plusnet have to work at it, and keeping me informed is part of that. RSS isn’t a magic bullet, and it would be no use at all if the organisation’s culture isn’t set up to regard customer service as a prioroty - but it’s a useful tool to add that elusive differentiator.

So what can you actually DO with RSS?

If you’ve been wondering about the practical use of RSS feeds, consider this idea from Phil Windley:

My friend Steve Fulling was recently in an auto accident–someone rear-ended him. That was no fun, but he was telling me about the awesome customer service he was getting from the body shop (Central Body in Provo). They called him up soon after his car was dropped off and said “Mr Fulling, I wanted to call you and tell you that your truck will be fixed on the day we promised and we don’t see any additional charges beyond what you were quoted.” In essense, they were reporting “on time, on budget.” They called again today to give him an update. That gave me the idea that what I’d really like is for the body shop (or anyone else providing similar service) to tell me: “Mr. Windley, we’ve emailed you the URL of a personal RSS feed we’ve set up for you. Load it into your feed reader and you will see twice-daily status reports on your vehicle.” I’m a geek–sue me.

And when you consider that the majority of organisations will have some sort of database-driven system to capture the details of each customer transaction, then the implementation of something like this becomes trivial in the grand scheme of things.

I’ve been memesuckered by the Book Game

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

That is beside the point I am trying to make, which is about how easily one can post something for all the world to read.

Testing trackbacks to Infosential

A test of trackback to Infosential

Security and how to think about it

It’s fair to say that as more and more of our daily lives and interactions go online, the importance of data and systems security becomes greater and greater. Unfortunately this is a great example of an area where fear, uncertainty and doubt is actively promoted by those with a commercial axe to grind - after all, it’s a vested interest of those selling security-related software and services to make us think that the world is a seething mass of virii and hackers just waiting to pounce.

If security has a silly season, we’re in it

The truth, as ever, probably lies somewhere between the dire prognostications of the vendors and there being no problem at all. The problem for us is to work out what’s reality and how to react. So this advice from Bruce Schneier, a pioneer in the field of cryptography, is pretty timely. He’s unusual in two senses - firstly because he’s an expert in a complex field who can write about the issues and the technology in plain English; and secondly because although he’s involved in the systems security business, he has a very pragmatic and un-alarmist approach.

This article outlines a five-step approach to security analysis that can be used to judge how effective a solution is likely to be - and can be used as a useful check to evaluate what’s snake oil and what isn’t. Too often security measures are the result of knee-jerk reactions to events that do nothing more than banging the stable doors shut long after the horses have departed, so it’s interesting to use the framework to think about some of the post-September 11th measures. To quote Bruce Schneier,

When you start using it, you’d be surprised how ineffectual most security is these days.

Dreamweaver changes < characters to %3C in links - the solution…

I’ve just spent a wild half-hour battling with Dreamweaver - I’d created myself some library items for the right and left-hand blocks of a blog page so that I could change the code at will and have it update the Moveable Type templates on the fly (OK, I know purists would use server-side includes, but library items are quicker, ok?)

The problem was that everytime I inserted the code into the page, it transformed some of the tags - so what started out as

<a href=”Library/<$MTArchiveLink$>” class=”rightbar”>

was being inserted into the code as

<a href=”Library/%3C$MTArchiveLink$%3E” class=”rightbar”>

Needless to say, the link was broken once the page was built and posted.

Much wailing and gnashing of teeth and googling (or should that be wailing and googling of teeth and gnashing?) ensued, until inspiration struck. The cause of the problem is Dreamweaver rewriting the code as it hits the page, so that it translates the URL encoding on the fly. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, but if the URLS are Moveable Type tags, it does.

The solution is to check the Code Rewriting section in the Dreamweaver preferences - chances are, it’ll be set to ‘Encode special characters using &#’. Change this to ‘Do not encode special characters’, and all will be well once more.

Curse Of The Uneven Backlighting strikes

Hmmm. The Curse Of The Uneven Backlighting appears to have struck. Something that my previous Wintel laptop suffered from, and I pretty much ignored - but of course this is a Powerbook, and it’s supposed to be perfect, dammit. I can’t decide whether it’s a) worth worrying about, not being a hair-trigger graphics geek; b) sufficiently much of a problem to be worth arguing with Apple / dealer about; c) drastic enough to cause an involuntary separation between me and My Precious (phrase copyright by Youngest Offspring); or d) the perfect excuse to lash out on a rather attractive Apple Cinema Display.

Actually, I already know the answer to d) - it’s GBP1049, which is a heinous amount to be spending on a screen. Even if it is something that you spend all day staring at, so what price your eyesight, yadda yadda yadda. And I’m still prone to getting lost on the vast expanse of screen real estate that is the 15″ version, so put me in front of a 20″ monitor and I’d probably need a map and compass to find the Dock.

Peter Green

I’ve only ever been tangentially aware of someone called Peter Green in a “wasn’t there someone else in Fleetwood Mac” kind of way, but then over the weekend I heard someone who’s name escapes me playing at the beer festival in Farnham, and he did a song called ‘Peter Green’.

Then I came across a Peter Green CD - Reaching The Cold 100 - in the library earlier, thought “what the hell”, and laid out a pound to borrow it for a week. A pound very well spent - oh, that man can play. Forget Eric “Power Ballad” Clapton (ok, later output at least) - it’s spare, relaxed playing that’s been recorded by someone who likes their bass as much as I do. Much satisfying thud is to be had courtesy of a decent set of earbuds.

A National ID Card Wouldn’t Make Us Safer, By An American

Well, it comes to something when we have to rely on an American to tell us why ID cards are such an embarassingly bad idea. This should be required reading for Mad Mr Blunkett, but given that he seems to be intent on out-Howarding Dracula these days, it’s probably not worth the Braille translation…

Luxury of Ignorance

Eric Raymond (he of Cathedrals and Bazaars) has been having fun with Linux printing of late, and has written a rant that should be high on the list of required reading for anyone who even so much as thinks about writing software. Not that it’s much better on a Mac…