Sunday, April 21, 2002

DIY News I'd been growing frustrated with the Radio news aggregation display mechanism so I decided to roll my own (in the spirit of DIY). The result is a page with all the information I wanted and it also loads a lot faster than the normal news page. My specs: I want to merge the concepts... a subscriptions type page with a link to the stand alone aggregator page. Ordered by date changed (start with most recent first, add pref later) Count should show items unread. So.... Link to news page Weblog name Items unread Date modified What I was looking for was a lot closer to the subscription page than the standard news page, so I started there. I build the services table in basically the same way, but use the date (as a number) as the table name. Thankfully, dates are negative numbers so sorting worked out of the gate. I also build a story list, with the feed URL as the name and the number of stories as the value. Once that was done, all I needed to do was run down the list of services (in order), and spit out the data. The result is a little slower than the subscriptions page and much faster than a fully loaded news page (and a lot easier to figure out what's happening as a result). It's possible in the future to only display the feeds which have unread stories by ignoring any entries which don't have an entry in the story table. But that's for another day... So now the question is, how should I package what amounts to a system page replacement? 10:10:37 PM

Patriotic home invasion In the Name of Homeland Security, Telecom Firms Are Deluged With Subpoenas. If you didn't think the Patriot Act was going to have some affect on civil liberties, the evidence of how it's being used today should give you pause. [Interesting People] 3:40:47 PM

User interfaces in free software Matthew Thomas has written Why Free Software usability tends to suck and todays addendum. Havoc Pennington has a slightly different view in Free software and good user interfaces. I think any project (free or for sale in some way) with a user interface faces problems if those involved don't know and practice good user interaction design principles. I can implement good UI (with appropriate feedback) and I believe I can often spot problems before others, but I don't really consider myself very good at this kind of thing. I get an occasional insprired idea, but that's about it. It's an interesting debate and a significant step. The free software community is maturing and beginning to seriously address the issue which can only mean good things for the future. [Hack the Planet] 2:40:05 PM

Creating your own lickable images I still think that creating Aqua like visual elements for web sites is pretty silly, but I'm in the minority I think. On the other hand, understanding the techniques used in Photoshop to create these elements is very interesting. [bOing bOing] 1:50:09 PM

iToilet The creator of the iToilet page has a pretty big axe to grind against Apple, but the concept is still pretty funny. (Thanks Kurt!) 1:40:35 PM

© Copyright 2002 Dave Ely.