United States

The civic dashboard

On Friday my local paper ran a story entitled Keene crime rates steady over years. Because that link will go dark soon, I’m going to assert fair use for the part of the story that cites statistics: Strings of vehicle break-ins and vandalism and the occasional vicious beating or stabbing...

Understanding Wikipedia notability

Some fellow residents of my town have recently noticed, and pointed out to me, that I’m listed in Wikipedia as a notable inhabitant of Keene, NH. They’re more impressed than they should be. All forms of notability are subject to bias, but Internet notability is subject to a different...

Strategic choices for calendar publishers

Although I haven’t been able to confirm this officially yet, it looks like FuseCal, the HTML screen-scraping service that I’ve been using (and recommending) as a way to convert calendar-like web pages into iCalendar feeds, has shut down. The web pages that FuseCal has been successf...

Influencing the production of public data

New England still too wet. Escaping to sunny Old England.

We’re just back from a Caribbean vacation — with a couple of interesting souvenirs in tow. Under normal circumstances I’d feel a twinge of regret about turning around a day later and heading out again. But I’m not really in the mood to build an ark, which after 40 days of...

It’s the headings, stupid!!!

My recent adventure in naming the times of day was so much fun that I lost track of the original purpose of the exercise, which was to improve accessibility for sight-impaired users. When I interpersed time-of-day labels into each day’s event listing, I used HTML DIV tags. Wrong, wrong, ...