Another one of my completely random, and probably uninteresting observations about the MobileMe preference pane in Mac OS X System Preferences. It’s also an excuse to try out a very short screencast with Jing and its Screencast.com hosting.

If you can’t, or don’t want to watch the video, if you search for iTools (.Mac/MobileMe’s original name) in the search box of System Preferences, it highlights MobileMe as a search result. Just as you’d expect from an intelligent search tool, it realises what you really mean.

However, that functionality hasn’t been replicated for if you search for .Mac, now MobileMe’s former name. It does highlight Back to my Mac as one of the results, but just as with iTools, MobileMe should be highlighted straight away.

Due to some work that is happening to our house (hot water here we come), the electricity supply will need to be turned off at some point. This means that there will be some downtime for this server during the period of Monday 11th – Wednesday 13th.

Unfortunately, I will not actually be here at the time and it is not yet clear when or for how long the downtime needs to occur. It should, however, be a relatively short downtime period; I am not expecting the server to be down the whole three days.

In any case, the machine will be safely powered down before the supply is turned off and will come back up as soon as possible.

UPDATE: In the end, it didn’t need to go down at all! Everything is still running smoothly.

Like many, I use FeedBurner to handle the RSS feeds for this blog, which gives me the benefit of all of FB’s special features, including detailed statistics on my feed’s usage.

I also make use of its email subscription service to allow people not familiar with feed technology to subscribe to the blog and have updates delivered to their inbox (Publicise > Email Subscriptions in your FeedBurner account).

My recent redesign means that my pages are now served as XHTML 1.1, rather than 1.0 Transitional*.

The code that I use in the sidebar to show the email subscription box (the code provided by FeedBurner) won’t validate under XHTML 1.1, though, which annoyed me. So, I fixed it.

You may wonder why anyone in their right mind would care if a little snippet of code doesn’t quite validate, since it doesn’t make any user-visible difference. Aesthetics are one reason and also some mobile browsers can be really fussy about validation.

So here’s how to use my fixed code if you want to have the email subscribe feature – but also have valid XHTML 1.1 markup.

First of all, log in to FeedBurner, click the relevant feed and go to Publicise > Email Subscriptions. Under Subscription Management, there should be a box with the default code, which should be something like this (line breaks added by me for readability):

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