Hello. I am Paul Kinlan.

I'm curious if my BlogExplosion traffic is genuinely interested in my content. If you found my blog through BlogExplosion, would you still visit if you'd discovered it elsewhere? If not, I'd love to understand why. Your feedback helps me determine if my content resonates with readers or if it's simply unread traffic. Email me your thoughts!

I've created my first AJAX application, an AJAX Technorati Tagger, which can be found here. It allows users to input text, receive suggested Technorati tags (powered by Yahoo's web service), and generate a list of related keywords. It's still a work in progress with some bugs, but feedback is welcome!

I'm developing an AJAX application to automatically generate Technorati, Feedster, and MSN search boxes with relevant tags for my blog posts. It's a JavaScript webservice queryer that uses results from one service as input for another. Currently, it only supports IE6/7 due to cross-domain data source import restrictions in Firefox. I'm exploring JavaScript code signing as a potential solution. The application integrates with Yahoo webservices, with plans to include Technorati and hopefully Feedster. There are security concerns regarding my Yahoo key. I aim to have a prototype available for feedback soon.

My previous blog post was successfully created using Kinlan's Automatic Tag Generator (powered by Yahoo!'s Web service). I'm excited about this and plan to include a link to the Ajax app in the next post. I'm also experimenting with Yahoo search and Technorati integration. I decided to include tags in this post by popular demand.

IE7 Beta 1 now has a feed auto-discovery feature, but it's a bit picky. It only recognizes RSS feeds (no Atom yet) and requires a specific HTML snippet with the correct rel, type, and title attributes. Direct feed links won't trigger the notification, and using text/xml instead of application/rss+xml won't work either. I've updated my blog to comply, but the feed, converted by 2RSS.com and containing ads, still isn't displaying correctly in IE7.

This post lists RSS feeds that aren't displaying correctly in the IE7 feed viewer. Specifically, they don't render in IE7's new format. I'm trying to understand why these feeds aren't working, and I've provided links to a few examples, including the IE7 blog, Channel 9, Scoble's blog, and my own blog. I've since updated this post with more information after speaking with Microsoft's RSS Product Manager (see the link at the top).

I had this brilliant idea to create a merged RSS feed using client-side processing. The idea was to have a main RSS feed that linked to other feeds. My custom XML would include a list of sources. Then, using XSLT in the browser, the client could merge these external feeds into a single view. It worked perfectly locally! However, I hit a roadblock with cross-domain security restrictions when I uploaded it to my server. The browser wouldn't let me pull in feeds from other domains due to security concerns. Additionally, client-side XSLT processing isn't universally supported. So, even if the security issue wasn't there, many feed readers wouldn't be able to display the merged feed. In the end, the project failed. But, I learned a lot about browser security, XSLT limitations and client/server interactions!

IE7 finds the RSS feed on channel9.msdn.com but doesn't display it correctly, only showing the raw XML. I'm looking for other examples of feeds that IE7 can't render properly to compile a list and see if there's a pattern or bug. If you know of any, please email me!

I made a typo in the title of my blog post! It should have been "A good test to check out the alpha transparency and I missed it!" instead of "I good test...". Oh well, at least the alpha transparency test worked!

In a previous post, I failed to test the alpha transparency feature. This post rectifies that. I've included an image with a green fade to white against a black background to demonstrate the effect. It may be garish, but it effectively showcases the alpha transparency.