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This site is no longer maintained.
My current weblog.
Monday, November 04, 2002I'm finally taking the plunge and switching to Movable Type. I'm not going to bother importing this weblog, at least not initially. Too much work for too little benefit. My archives can stay here indefinitely.
My new home page and weblog. Feeds are available in RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0, and RSS 2.0 flavors. I'm not going to set up RSS redirects. I don't like Userland's solution because any aggregator that doesn't understand the format will barf on it. HTTP 301 redirects are better supported, but I don't feel like reconfiguring Apache to allow .htaccess files.
For the couple of people that subscribe to my category feeds, I'll get around to re-creating those eventually. Stay subscribed to the current feeds and wait for an update.
Tuesday, October 08, 2002The other day Ian Hickson dropped by and added a comment to my post calling for a Pingback Retrieval API. My response is that the Radio community loved Pingback, but I still don't see any implementations for Radio users.
Having a Pingback Retrieval API, and encouraging the creation of stand-alone Pingback servers supporting that API, would accomplish several things:
- Random CMS can integrate with Random Pingback server. The end-user is empowered to choose whichever Pingback server best suits their environment (Perl, ASP, Cobol).
- Provides a clear path for certain classes of CMS, especially client-based tools like Radio, to integrate Pingback. The CMS folks can focus on integrating pings with the CMS instead of having to re-invent the wheel by creating yet another Pingback server.
- Third-parties would be able to provide Pingback services to end-users.
The Pingback Retrieval API doesn't require many methods: Register, List, and Clear would be enough. Everything else is an implementation detail that can be left to the developer. Better implementations might provide a web interface for managing pings and offer additional services, like ping-forwarding via email/RSS/Trackback.
If you build it, they will come...
I'll put my money where my mouth is: Add a Pingback Retrieval API to the official spec and I will commit to building a reference implementation and hosting it until such time as it can no longer be supported by my web host.
Monday, October 07, 2002Newz Crawler, Part III: Living with Newz Crawler
On the whole, Newz Crawler is vastly superior to Radio's aggregator. It's fast. It's organized. It's fast. Fast fast fast. I have been using myRadio to impose some order on top of Radio's aggregator. I use Mozilla's "Bookmark this group of tabs" feature to load all of my myRadio pages at once, and walk away for a few minutes while it churns...
Speed is good.
I also like that it allows me to quickly see which feeds have updated. Sometimes I'll do a scan, see that none of my important feeds have updated, and move on to doing something else...
I'll probably register it once my trial expires, in spite of my aversion to nag-ware.
What I don't like:
- Sometimes it marks unchanged items as unread. Two of my feeds consistently display all items as unread.
- Weblog client encodes quotes, breaking all hyperlinks. I fired up tcpTrace and compared against Pocket Blog just to be sure that this wasn't an issue with Radio.
- Weblog client doesn't support the MetaWeblog API. No titles, no categories, and don't even think about liveTopics.
- Weblog client doesn't have spell-check. It is so easy to integrate Word's spell-checker, and there are so many inexpensive ActiveX/COM spell-checkers, that it's almost inexcusable not to offer that functionality.
Saturday, October 05, 2002The .NET Guy points out that Newz Crawler nags because it's not registered. I knew that, but the nagging is notably pervasive and annoying.
It can be a pain to trigger scrolling on the Channels pane during drag-n-drop.
Most operations occur in-memory, if Newz Crawler crashes you lose whatever has happened during that session.
Doesn't respect system locale settings for dates.
Friday, October 04, 2002To blockquoteth myself:
The only thing holding me back is the aggregator. I like the reverse-chronological view, the grouping functionality that myRadio provides, the ability to retain items in the aggregator indefinitely, and of course, the weblog integration.
I'm giving Newz Crawler a try, and initially posted this entry from it.
Pros:
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Native UI.
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Feed grouping (Folders).
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Folders can contain other folders.
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Granular on-demand scanning -- scan feed(s), folder(s), or everything.
- Weblog integration with WYSIWYG editor.
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Favorites folder for storing news items for later use.
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Detects items that are only a headline and link, automatically loads linked content.
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Hot-key to mark all items as read (Catch-up function).
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Hot-key to delete all items (Clear function)
Cons:
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Time-delay nag screen on launch that requires a button press to clear.
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Nag screen on close that requires a button press to clear.
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Constant reminders throughout the program that it is unregistered.
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Favorites folder cannot contain sub-folders.
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Supports Blogger API only -- no titles, no categories.
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WYSIWYG editor has some odd issues with control focus.
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Puts a tagline on weblog posts.
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Using Clear function will cause all items to re-appear as new in the next scan. Manually removing all items from a feed does not cause this.
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Sometimes double-clicking an item will cause an infinite number of IE windows to appear. This has happened to me three times. I'm not going to double-click anything in NewsCrawler ever again...
I need some more time to play with it, see how well it handles updated and duplicated items. Overall I like it, in spite of a few bugs... but I hate to pay for any program that nags.
