Ever Lost a Post ?  Introducing the Feedster Blog Cache !

Wow.  Twice in three days tells me that people need this.  Late last week I was talking via IM with _an_unnamed_A_list_blogger who told me they had deleted a post and wanted it back.  And could I ever so helpfully do that for them?  A little SQL, a little elbow grease and **poof** it was in the mail.  Another happy Feedster user.  Then I just saw this posting from Jason:

Last night my journal was hacked. All of my Movable Type weblogs were deleted and the archives destroyed. Looks like they got in by just using my username and passwd which is not good. More...

Man oh man that must suck bad.  I feel awful for Jason so I popped him an email telling him that I have 337 posts of whatever content was in his RSS feed.  Now he can search for any post of his and click on the Cached link.  Or he could drill down to all posts from his blog.  Example of a random cached post.

Now there's definitely some html work to do here to make this look better, etc but I wanted to zip this out the door so anyone else that needs it can benefit from it.

Epilog

Like all skilled and lucky people, Jason has a tape backup of his system so he's out of the woods.  Still this should be helpful for people in the future.

Full Content Posts

As I looked at the database more, I see that Jason didn't have a full content RSS feed so his posts would have been only partially there.  While that's not great, it would at least be a start.  I'd strongly encourage people to move to full content feeds whenever they can.

Note: I know that this is going to introduce the question of "But I don't want my posts cached".  I get that.  If that's the case then use the Feedster Feedback form to let us know to turn off caching for your blog and we'll disable this for your feed.  We'll do our best to turn this around within 72 hours.  If you have multiple feeds then we need to know each feed url.

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Join Chris Pirillo's Brain

On Friday I took the large leap of faith and made the decision to formally "Join the Brain Known as Chris Pirillo".  What I'm referring to, of course, is Chris Pirillo's new BrainTrust mailing list.  This is an email based discussion list that, unusually, is not free.  Chris, of course, is the LockerGnome / Gnomedex Chris who's done an absolutely bang up job of using pure guerilla marketing and as I understand it, damn little capital, into a true Internet business.  That's wicked cool.

Now I'm not usually a fan of mailing lists -- I get hammered with so much mail already that to get my cheap, ranting self to join up and pay the $$$ for it, that's saying something. 

I can't tell you all that much about the list's content yet.  It just went live on Friday and its still gaining momentum but I think its going to be great.  Recommended.

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Is Solo Software Engineering Just a Man's Dresser in Disguise?

Even though the man's dresser piece really did happen.  And it really was so bad as to include SCSI cables in my dresser, I'm having a similar experience right now in my solo software engineering life.  You see Feedster has largely, to date, been a solo effort.  There is some code from other people but it isn't a lot and when you look at who is spending 70 + hours per week grinding on the code, that would be me.  I am getting a huge quantity of external ideas from people and that's utterly fantastic.  Some of the best features in Feedster -- heck almost certainly the best -- came from others and I'm happy to just grind it out.

But anyway as I was saying is that the main Feedster engineering has been a solo gig.  And the Feedster project is probably going to get bigger in the near future so that means "confronting the dresser".  You see I view solo software engineering as similar to the single man's* dresser.  You know the drill, we all start with best intentions and then life happens i.e.

• bugs slam you upside the head
• feature requests come in
• you get rushed
• you get stupid
• you get lazy
• etc

So what you end up with all too quickly is "The Single Man's Dresser of Code".  Its a directory structure that while isn't out of control, might have the equivalent of socks mixed in pants, a book or two tossed in the your shirts and so on. 

When you're not working solo, by definition you tend to keep the dresser neater.  Thing go in (largely) the right drawer and even the dirty socks get purged regularly. 

So the long and the short of it is that if you notice any weirdness today, its largely due to my cleaning the dresser.

* No disrespect intended to female software engineers.  I haven't ever observed a solo female software engineering effort in the wild so I can't really say how or if it differs.

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More Halley Goodness

Halley has a new Alpha Male piece.  Definitely worth reading and after laughing my (fill it in) off at lunch with Halley on Friday, I just had to link to it.  Recommended.  Over the course of an hour long lunch, Halley gave me like 15 new Feedster ideas at least one of which I can't wait to implement.

Oh and how cool, I'm now on Halley's blogroll.  Thanks!

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Feedster Preferences

Ok if you prefer a default sort, you can now click on the Prefs page, set the sort and it'll carry through back on the home page.  Sorry for missing this oh so obvious thing but I must have had one of those minor , ahem, brain farts.  Its working now.

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The Single Man's Dresser

Note: I've had some good email feedback recently on some of my more humorous stuff so I thought I'd post a few more and see what happens.  And so, I give you The Single Man's Dresser.

Here's how to tell when a geeky single male -- heck any single male -- really doesn't know what to do with themselves: They tackle the dresser.  Last night I was just tremendously, monstrously fried.  I just couldn't tackle any more code and when I worked on the technical review I'm doing for Sams, the words just flowed together.  Its bad when you look at code and that happens.  Really bad.

Then I made the mistake of looking at my dresser and thinking "Gee.  I haven't worn that in probably 6 or 8 years".  And then it began.

You know the drill -- the rooting out drawer by drawer of items that are irrelevant.  Now in my experience when a non-man goes through a dresser, they find clothes that aren't right.  Not men.  Here are a few of the items that surfaced going thru my dresser:

• A surfing wetsuit
• A remote control for a satellite dish that is mounted on a house I sold 7 months ago
• The instructions on how to cook with a fine bit of italian chocolate I bought last summer in Gorizia Italy
• A dual headphone adaptor for traveling with a co-worker and sharing your iPod
• A SCSI cable
• Batteries
• Shoes
• The guide book to a casio in (I think) Prague

So after eliminating all items without a textile base and then doing the folding, sorting, arranging thing, all was good.  But we're just going to ignore the whole concept of the male closet.  Its not a pretty sight....

Note: In my experience the "Single Man's Dresser" issue is much diminished when the man is no longer single. 

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