Archives for Sep 2004
Bloglines Web Services
Bloglines released documentation of their Web Services. It’s a simple REST interface that returns RSS 2.0 entries, OPML blogrolls, and a count of unread entries.
This offers blogroll and entry synchronization among multiple computers. Now, I’m thinking about moving back to FeedDemon. I originally left because Bloglines allowed me to read my news on the go. Offline reading was out of the question. And no matter what improvements Bloglines has and will make, the UI isn’t near what a desktop GUI can provide.
Now, imagine if the Bloglines API was open. Then, instead of adding a Bloglines Channel Group in FeedDemon, you would add a generic server-based Channel group using the same API. Community based aggregators could provide news to their members through online syncing or a web based interface. This sounds an awful lot like Usenet…
I went to download FeedDemon 1.5 beta this morning, and came across this announcement of NewsGator integration. I wonder how similar the two APIs are?
new homepage with merged feeds
I’ve started using a couple more services for providing content on this site. First, there’s my totally awesome comics photostream by flickr. Since I’m a heavy user of Bloglines, I’ve been wanting a way to easily keep a track of important items I read. I knew about its Clip Blog feature, but did not know it was available in RSS.
I would rather present that data merged into one feed on the page, rather then having multiple columns for each feed. I sat down and wrote a simple Atom/RSS merge script with magpie. It was more difficult then planned because I was presenting multiple feeds in multiple formats, formatted different depending on what type of data it is.
Of course, a better plan popped into my head, use a service to translate my non-Atom feeds. I looked into FeedBurner, which recently released some new features: linkblog splicing and flickr integration. Exactly what I needed.
My homepage now includes all three feeds, but the individual feeds are still available.
google browser?
I first saw this at Slashdot:
“The New York Post is reporting that ‘Based on the half-dozen hires in recent weeks, Google appears to be planning to launch its own Web browser and other software products to challenge Microsoft.’ I took a guess and did a whois search for Gbrowser.com and indeed Google Inc. is listed as the registrar.”—Will Google Launch a Browser?
firefox
Firefox 1.0PR is out. This update has a few improvements, but the most noticeable is its Atom/RSS support. Live Bookmarks display syndicated feeds as a folder of links.
Combine it with a bookmarking service like del.icio.us and you can share the latest bookmarks (or view others’ bookmarks).
Also, I’ve been kicking around some ideas. Right now I have three information stores feeding this site: the main blog, my quickies sidebar, and my comics photostream. I’d like to try merging them into a singular feed for the homepage. I could style each item according to what it is (blog entry, quickie link, photo).
I’m really interested in Leslie Orchard’s feedReactor. Sounds like something right up my alley.
wifi difficulty
I’m no expert in WiFi, but this looks like a bad signal. It just started happening last week, with no change to my current configuration. I’ve taken my laptop and my Netgear AP elsewhere and received a clean signal.
Super JumpDrive
Recently I caved in and purchased a 256MB Lexar JumpDrive. I got tired of leeching my friend’s anytime I needed to move some files. Since it has a key ring on the wrong side (I’d rather snap the JumpDrive off the keychain, than plugging it in with my keys hanging off of it), I was wondering how long it’d be before I lost it.
Instead, I left it in a pair of pants and ran it through the washer and dryer. The amazing thing… it still works. Give those engineers a raise.
Anyone want to make any bets on how long it lasts now?
sin city shots
If you’re excited for the Sin City movie coming out, check out these screen caps of the trailer.
comicbook photostream
So, I got hooked on the Flickr bandwagon. It’s a very nice photo management web application, with plenty of web service hooks to play with.
I thought it would be cool to post the latest pics of comics I’m picking up. So, I hacked up a PHP script to grab my public photostream ATOM feed, save the latest photo to the local server, and put together some HTML to display it. It’s using Magpie’s built-in caching, and the last-mod date of the local saved image to make sure I’m a good internet citizen.
I don’t want to hear how crappy my PHP code is, because I know all about it. I plan to write a python script to handle this somewhere other than on each request of the site’s index. I figure it won’t be long before some python flickr libs will be out so I can load a flickr filesystem next to my gmail filesystem. Wee!
Update: The code has been removed due to display problems in IE. I tried like hell to get the overflow property to work, but it just wasn’t meant to be. Anyhow, I have a link to the source code...
save full text RSS!
Scoble reports that blogs.msdn.com gets full-text RSS feeds turned off. Reason? Insane bandwidth consumption. It’s not so much that RSS is broken really. But, you get thousands of clients grabbing feeds multiple times a day (default for most aggregators is every hour), and of course you’ll have bandwidth issues. This goes for RSS, Atom, HTML, etc.
There are some things that can be done, such as compression and conditional HTTP GET (which are both features of HTTP). You need servers that compress feeds and send Last-modified and Etag headers, and you need clients that can decompress and send If-Modified-Since headers.
From what I can tell, Microsoft is doing their part. Whether clients are misbehaving is another (more important) issue.
The funny thing about the internet, is we’ve been here before. Syndicated feeds aren’t new, and there’s already a mechanism to scale content: nntp. Bloglines works in a similar way. You subscribe to feeds, and Bloglines handles all the fetching for you. Bloglines only has to contact blogs.msdn.com once for all the main feed subscribers.
Mark’s Winer Watcher was very interesting:
“Winer initially complained about all of the bandwidth being used since Winer Watch was polling his RSS feed very 5 minutes. Pilgrim responded that he was using a set of distributed mirrors from people who were already checking Scripting.Com’s RSS feed once an hour anyway, so the system would have no impact on Scripting.Com’s bandwidth.”—Brian Carnell
All I ask is if you don’t provide full-text RSS feeds, please provide good titles and summaries!
custom build providers
Fritz Onion experimented with custom build providers in ASP.Net 2.0 and shares his insights. Amazing. I don’t know much about CodeDOM, but I have a feeling I’m going to learn soon…
gmail as a blogging tool
Gallina is a blogger engine running off gmail. Messages are blog entries, and replies to messages are comments. It’s not the first time the email»blog barrier has been broken, but Gallina is apparently shit hot because it’s related to gmail. —via slashdot
source control for dummies (couldn't resist)
Eric Sink is writing a fantastic series on source control.
“Our universities don’t teach people how to do source control, or at least mine didn’t. We graduate with Computer Science degrees. We know more than we’ll ever need to know about discrete math, artificial intelligence and the design of virtual memory systems. But many of us enter the workforce with no knowledge of how to use any of the basic tools of software development, including bug-tracking, unit testing, code coverage, source control, or even IDEs.”
mono + knoppix = monoppix
Monoppix is a version of the popular knoppix linux boot disk, with mono and XSP development support built in. Great for quickly testing mono’s ASP.Net support in linux. Originally reported by Sanjay straight from the bleeding edge.
