No I Didn't Forget About the Bookmarklets ...

Feedster!  Now available as a bookmarklet!  Get it here.  I tested this on both PCs and an OS X iBook.  The PC stuff worked but the OS X stuff did not.  I have no clue why.  And before Mozilla Andy jumps all over me, I did them for Mozilla too.

That's about it for the day.  Database is much larger, the pool of RSS urls is larger.  New hardware soon.  Good stuff overall.

Miscellaneous and Random Stuff

Oh and here's the rant of the day: Stupid, Stupid VB.  Even better than the bile I spewed this morning about ASPx stuff.  This one covers the myriad of human factors issues in Visual Basic.  I'm an ex-VB guy and I can attest to every single one of these.  I'd also add one more -- why is the dialog box for selecting COM objects to insert onto a form tiny?  I mean I have hundreds of the damn little things and I look thru them in groups of maybe 15.  Hello?  Microsoft Product Managers?  Anyone Listening?

Inbox Buddy

I've gotten some questions about my Inbox Buddy anti-spam product and does Feedster mean that we're now not doing that?  Nope.  We have the resources and committment to do both.  In fact, we'll be pushing the 1.1 version of Inbox Buddy out the door next week with some improved anti-spam features and performance enhancements.  If you use Outlook then you really might want to check out Inbox Buddy.  The people that have it pretty much love it to pieces.

Note: I'm one of the people who wrote Inbox Buddy so keep that in mind.  That, however, doesn't mean that its not a good product.

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Feedster Update

New hardware is coming along nicely.  Not tremendously helpful when the root login info as 12 hours late but cie la vie.  You can still get a lot of prep work done.

Broke the 100,000 indexed posts barrier today.  I don't know why that's particularly impressive to me but it just feels good.  Oh and surprise!  We're now indexing blo.gs content as well.

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Note to Self: Don't Read Scoble Late at Night or Microsoft Bloggers Now Added and a Rant

A wee bit tired this morning.  I made a quick round of my normal stops in the blogosphere last night and I happened by the Scobleizer.  Now I've met Robert in the real world and I always get something out of reading his stuff -- but it usually doesn't cost me sleep.  You see what happened is Robert pointed me off to Microsoft Watch and a list of Microsoft bloggers with weblogs.  So I thought "Wouldn't it be nice if they were all indexed".  And there I was making sure they got stuffed into the system.  Here's what I found:

• Probably more than 50% of them were already in our database.  Go figure.  I guess that either a) people are adding themselves or b) the RSS auto discovery routines I wrote work better than I initially thought ;-)
• Microsoft bloggers use a plethora of different tools.  I do think, however, that the dominant one is Radio.  Blogger, Movable Type and other systems are also represented
• Not all Microsoft bloggers have RSS feeds
• Topics span work and personal
• Devhawk.net did a really smart thing with Feedster -- he added it to has blog's UI essentially as a "virtual table of contents".  Good idea.  I think I need to offer some viewing improvements if people are going to do this.
• Someone needs to teach the "gotdotnet" folks what RSS is.  Also I couldn't believe their HTML source when I was poking around.   So get ready for a vent.
  
  <RANT CLASS=NASTY BILE=HIGH FRUSTATION=SEVERE>Go look here and look at the __VIEWSTATE input element.  To me that's just plain lame.  Use a session, send a cookie and use your horsepower for this, not my bandwidth with every page view.  And if you really want to barf then click around a bit and go here.  They seem to be encoding the entire viewing history in a really nasty way and shipping it back to you every single time.  It just gets bigger.  After navigating thru like 3 pages I had 6,554 bytes sent down the wire that did nothing for me.  Thanks for nothing.</RANT>

I guess its not all that bad actually but it just seems damn silly.  I hope that's not a dot net feature but I'm afraid that it is.  Sigh.

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Nice Quote about Outliners

If you aren't a regular outline user then you've probably never had this experience:

I think back 20 years to my own experiences, back to the very first days of Living Videotext and when I saw ThinkTank.  It was like magic.  Dave Winer really did something special.  A tool that reflected your own thoughts and ideas in a format that you learned from early on in school; the outline structure. (about 1/2 way down the page) [_Go_]

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Everything's Fine

Just running a little behind today hence the lack of blog postings.  But Feedster is nearing in on the "100,000 posts indexed point" (I wonder if I can get fries with that).  Very cool.

Other random stuff I found interesting:

• I missed Elwyn's comments in MicroDoc News about Feedster on Monday.  Thanks!
• Jeremy's MySQL presentations sound awesome.  Sorry I won't be there.
• Chris has interesting search results (not from Feedster)
• Aaron has a good overview of live audio streaming.  I'm not up on this and it was a good read.  Recommended.
• Via Inessential: Tom Bridge has an interesting Net News Wire feature request.  I wonder if Feedster plays into that.
• Via John from Angie: Here's a good and free stock photo service.  I liked this one.

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