A Present for Jeremy and Sven or "Bite Me Adobe"

Here you go guys.

Adobe Reader: Just Say No

Why: Jeremy, Sven

8:40:53 AM  | Permalink:   | comment []  |  IM Me About This   

Happy Birthday Jeremy!

Jeremy just had a birthday.  Congrats man.

8:29:27 AM  | Permalink:   | comment []  |  IM Me About This   

Thanks Robert!  Or "How About Another 2000 Odd Posts in One Shot?"

Well even though I'm a php junkie and an ASP refugee, I'm not stupid or blindly arrogant (well I hope not) so when I see a comment like this:

http://weblogs.asp.net is my favorite site to check during the day. I'm so glad to see that my company is providing hosting for this site for free -- and with seemingly few, if any, strings attached. Here's a FAQ on the new home for this site.

More...

I figured that I should take a look.  After all Robert is my favorite Microsoft Employee* so when he says he reads this, I thought it was worth taking a look.  I saw that they had an opml** file of all their rss feeds so I passed that in to the original OPML loader I wrote back in March when Chris Pirillo donated his feeds to the cause and I let her rip!  1935 postings in one swell foop!  And all the blogs that Robert now reads are part of Feedster.  Very cool.  Thanks man!

*I should come clean though and admit that he's the only Microsoft employee I know right now.

**Feedster not indexing the blogs you read?  Drop me a line with a url to your opml file and I'll see that it gets in.

8:14:55 AM  | Permalink:   | comment []  |  IM Me About This   

Really Simple Syndication.  Not!

How interesting.  I started making sure that the O'Reilly weblogs were part of the Feedster universe and then I hit this one:

• HTML
• RSS

And the rss (well RDF actually) has NOTHING To do with it.  Nada.  Zip.  What's up with that?

8:06:28 AM  | Permalink:   | comment []  |  IM Me About This   

Congrats ActiveWords

Buzz from ActiveWords just got some great press:

While GuruNet is built around the art of the click, ActiveWords is all about eschewing the mouse. The idea is to create a series of customizable keystrokes or shortcuts to launch programs, transport you to Web addresses or initiate some other computing action.

You might type "xl" to bring up the Excel spreadsheet, "calc" to launch the calculator or "nem" to prepare a new e-mail. You can even dedicate a single letter, like "q" for starting up Quicken. And you can use ActiveWords to automatically type in a longer string of characters; I use "ecb" to spell out Edward C. Baig.

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Very good going.  Nice to get national coverage from USA Today.  Something for Feedster to aspire to.

8:04:47 AM  | Permalink:   | comment []  |  IM Me About This   

Don't Be Shy Now: If You Leave Feedster Feedback, its a Good Idea to Tell Us Your Blog

This posting is written for one person and one person only -- you left me a comment in Feedster's feedback form last night at 1:53 am that was logical, rational and reasonable.  And I don't have any problem with it -- but you didn't tell me what blog is yours and not only does this need to be tested and you are the only blog I know of with this -- but I have a work around already in place.  Just leave your blog url for me and I'll turn it on for you.

Yes you're right that there is a better way to do it -- and we'll get to it.  But we can solve your issue now, today, in about 35.7 seconds (time to write one sql query and add you to an exclusions table).  Doing it the other way requires:

• Parsing your blog's home page
• Grabbing meta tags
• Aborting a process
• Making sure this code works everywhere in all cases

Now for one blog that's trivial but I'd hate to add another page fetch to every processing run.  But we monitor over 30,000 blogs now so even simple changes have big impacts.  So until we write a caching layer for what you want and then a way to determine if the cache is expired, the work around is actually better -- less bandwidth for everyone and its already tested and it works.

7:44:20 AM  | Permalink:   | comment []  |  IM Me About This