👓 HTML Includes That Work Today | Filament Group, Inc.,

Read HTML Includes That Work Today by Scott Jehl (Filament Group)
As long as I have been working on the web, I’ve desired a simple HTML-driven means of including the contents of another file directly into the page. For example, I often want to append additional HTML to a page after it is delivered, or embed the contents of an SVG file so that we can animate and style its elements. Typically here at Filament, we have achieved this embedding by either using JavaScript to fetch a file and append its contents to a particular element, or by including the file on the server side, but in many cases, neither of those approaches is quite what we want. This week I was thinking about ways I might be able to achieve this using some of the new fetch-related markup patterns, like rel="preload", or HTML imports, but I kept coming back to the same conclusion that none of these give you easy access to the contents of the fetched file. Then I thought, perhaps a good old iframe could be a nice primitive for the pattern, assuming the browser would allow me to retrieve the iframe's contents in the parent document. As it turns out, it sure would!

📺 “The Americans” The Midges | Amazon Prime

Watched "The Americans" The Midges from Amazon Prime
Directed by Stefan Schwartz. With Keri Russell, Matthew Rhys, Brandon J. Dirden, Costa Ronin. Philip and Elizabeth tell Paige more about the family business, but pressing new questions arise when an operation takes a ghastly and unexpected turn. Meanwhile, a sensitive package jeopardizes Oleg's life back home.

👓 On blog search engines | Colin Devroe

Read On blog search engines by Colin Devroe (cdevroe.com)
Brent Simmons has been reminiscing about blog search engines and writing down some ideas for how one could be made today. Something he wrote sparked a memory.
Instead of having it crawl blogs, I’d have it download and index RSS feeds. This should be cheaper than crawling pages, and it ensures that it skips indexing page junk (navigation and so on).

👓 More Thoughts at Random on Blog Search Engines | Brent Simmons

Read More Thoughts at Random on Blog Search Engines by Brent Simmons (inessential.com)
I can dream about how I’d build one of these. (I’m not going to! This is way outside my expertise, and I have other things to do.)

👓 Wishing for Blog Search Engines | Brent Simmons

Read Wishing for Blog Search Engines by Brent Simmons (inessential.com)
One thing I wish we had that we used to have: blog-only search engines. You could go and search for a hash tag. Or for links to your blog or elsewhere. Or for keywords. Etc. It should have an API that returns RSS, so RSS reader users could set up persistent, updated searches. There used to be a bunch of these, and now there are none that I know of.

🎧 Spy vs. Spy | On the Media | WNYC Studios

Listened to Spy vs. Spy by Bob Garfield from On the Media | WNYC Studios

A pattern of assassinations baffled Ukrainian authorities. Then an assassin came forward.

New York Times reporter Michael Schwirtz set out to investigate a series of assassinations in Ukraine with low expectations. Reporting on a homicide as a member of the foreign press is daunting enough to begin with. His assignment was formidable beacuse many of the murders were linked to Russia — a government hostile to the media at best and notorious for murdering foreign journalists at worst.

But when Schwirtz approached alleged Russian assassin Oleg Smorodinov to question him about a murder, the accused provided an unexpected bit of testimony: a confession. And on top of that, Smorodinov disclosed the specific role the Kremlin played in ordering and directing his crime.

Schwirtz published his findings in a New York Times feature last week. Bob spoke with Schwirtz about spies, state-facilitated assassination and the experience of following a true story that reads like a Russian mystery novel.