So Scott -- What about the New RSS Effort ?

I've gotten more than a few questions about my / Feedster's thoughts on the new RSS effort and all I have to say is that we'll support it when needed.  I generally try to stay out of standards efforts -- they take a huge amount of energy and time (more power to Sam Ruby for doing it) that I usually don't have.  That said, I'm tracking it lightly in the background and he's doing good stuff it seems.

Even so don't think that Feedster won't be supporting the hellish mess that RSS / RDF can be for a long time to come -- blogging tools won't support the new stuff for **years** to come probably.  We've seen such a mess in the area of feeds that its utterly horrifying but you still have to give credit where credit is due and due -- RSS just plain works.

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I Did a Bad Thing and I'm Sorry

Last week on the spur of inspiration, I added into Feedster a "Published: 2 weeks, 3 hours ago" type display and I never credited the source of the code: Natalie Downe.  She wrote a brilliant function for this as described here:

• Her on this
• Simon on this

I'm really sorry for not giving credit earlier but work, machine crashes (this is the 2nd if not 3rd time I've written this post) and just plain life got in the way.  Thanks Natalie!

And if you need an elegant php implementation of this, see her code.  Nice work (and Feedster users seem to love it).

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Francois on Performance

Francois is talking about the overall performance work we're doing on Feedster.  Right now most but not all of the bugs are out and we'll be testing over the weekend (although I'm largely offline and its unclear if I can or can't blog remotely).

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Good Interview

If you're a web designer, this interview is well worth reading:

John Witchel is the creator of BrowserCam, an amazing service where Web designers get to see screen shots of their Web sites on all major operating systems, screen resolutions, browser brands and browser versions.

In this conversation, Witchel discusses the technical magic behind the BrowserCam service, the professional challenges that led him to create BrowserCam and the limitations of a screen capturing service.

Anyone tried it?  This might actually be a service worth paying for.  Certainly it sounds great.

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A New Way to Make $$$ from Open Source

Hm... Maybe I'm nuts on this one but in the past two days I've done the following:

• Printed the docs for TikiWiki (360 pages)
• Hole punched them
• Put them into a binder so I can read them.

I've done the same thing for phpAdsNew and for the PayPal api docs.  All of these were done in PDF files.  I wondering if one of the online print businesses might offer this as a service to the Open Source community i.e. you have a "Order Docs" button which lets them get your pdf, print it, bind it and send it to you.  I'd spend some $$$ for this.  Reading PDFs on screen basically sucks wind.  And its worse then ever with the new Acrobat so this makes sense to me.  I don't know if its economically viable but if the project got say 20% of it, it might work for all parties.  Thoughts?

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Watch Out for this IP Address

Martin is having some really crawler hammering his site issues: http://traumwind.de/blog/?detail=2003-06-26_14-13

Martin's smart and a nice guy so I'd watch out for this.

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Recommendation wanted: PHP Software for Managing Custom Mailing List

I have a client who sends out a regular email newsletter filled with job ads in a specific market segment.  I bid it out with all custom software to manage the database, email sending, bounce management and double opt-in subscribing and that was a bit too pricy for them so I'm wondering if there is a good open source app in PHP I could use for this.  Any thoughts?

Thanks in advance.

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Feedster Performance

I've gotten a few IMs lately about performance issues in Feedster and I wanted to let everyone know that performance is right now a huge priority for us (we've been grinding for most of the past week on little else).  And we did a major architecture revision yesterday that, while it isn't live yet, is working out well.  In the course of a day, we managed to substitute* the architecture of the Feedster search engine with the engine from rss-Search.  It actually surprised us how quickly we did it.  Right now we're testing and dealing with minor issues like result paging and sorting by blogrank.

*This was roughly equivalent to taking your pontiac GTO and pulling the 327 small block V8 and dropping in a high performance Jaguar V12.  They look different, work different, smell different, are shaped diffferently and yet when its all done, you have a damn fast car.  You're also just plain amazed that it worked or "it worked????  damn!" .  We're not done with benchmarking and tuning yet so we can't say what the speed difference will be but we're pretty optimistic and I'm Feedster's toughest critic.

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