Ah Yes ... The First Casualty of Echo Has Arrived and it is Anyone Who Uses an Aggregator and Reads Mark (or uses Feedster)

Well, well, well.  This really blows.  I just caught this over on Dive into Mark:

 Update 2: I have removed the namespaced elements from all of my RSS feeds. Since there is no way in RSS 2.0 (as-is) to specify both the excerpt and the full text of a post, the feeds now only contain excerpts. Also, I switched from using link to using guid for item permalinks, as discussed recently.

More...

So what does this mean?  If you:

• Use an aggregator, you can no longer read Dive Into Mark (which is bloody well wonderful) in full.  The content has been reduced to a sentence.
• Use Feedster then you can't search the full content or view cached entries of Mark.  Hopefully Mark will choose excerpts wisely but this also loses urls for hyperlink analysis, etc.

Sigh.  This may be technically correct but it feels a lot to me like hosing people who support you* with a flood of cold urine.  That's just wrong.

*i.e. the people who read you religiously with an aggregator.

Bias Disclaimer: I run www.Feedster.com which indexes RSS feeds so this clearly hurts my interests.  Still its Mark's feed and he can be technically pure if he wants to.  Even if it does amount to pissing on people in the interests of purity.

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Foolishly Tossing My Hat into the Ring on Echo ... Here's What I Want

Ok.  I've followed this discussion from afar.  And since I couldn't even find where the Wiki* was to add this idea, here's what I'd like: Post Level Geo Urls.

As Richard Soderberg has done his best work to convince me of the importance of this, I have to start by giving credit to him.  Anyway ... What I want is a zip code / latitude / longitude / gps coords that can be applied to a single post.  Why?  Because blogs are a great way to capture off the cuff knowledge, feedback, etc.  Long time readers may recall my troubles with the furnace in my current residence at 124 Langley Road in Newton MA.  What I'd ***love*** is the ability to (in a standards compliant way) tag my blog post with this data.  Then some future poor sod who rented this place could take advantage of my troubles and ask intelligent questions like "Fixed the furnace yet you pathetic excuse for a landlord"?.  As blogs become less and less about purely digital stuff and more about the real world, this is increasingly useful.

Or how about this -- "find me anything about what's happening within a 25 mile radius of Reading, PA ?".  If coordinate approaches became standardized, I could do this in a hot second.  Well maybe a day or three.

And if you think the fact that I woke up w/o hot water today and on restarting my furnace, I then found thick smoke filling my basement AGAIN has anything to do with this then you would be 1000% correct.  Necessity is indeed the mother of invention but I suspect that Rage is invention's father.

*Note: I didn't try very far.  I did find an RSS profile wiki but is that the same as Echo ?

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Mod_Rewrite Stuff

Some good mod_rewrite stuff is here:

• http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000826.html
• http://philringnalda.com/blog/2001/12/fun_with_mod_rewrite.php

Yes I am blogging this pretty much solely since I need this again shortly.

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When Audio Books Run Amok!

I'm a big, big fan of books on tape for car trips.  And since this past weekend in my (all too brief) time offline, I had to drive up to Maine to see family, I went out and bought a handful from my secret supplier.   Yeah I know that sounds like they are illegal drugs but I've found a spot to buy audio books for (on average) $7 each.  And when I saw a $7 copy of Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, I was just plain stoked. 

So you can only imagine my disappointment when I was listening to The Diamond Age ... And it wasn't right.  I mean NOT, NOT, NOT, NOT right.  It turned out that my tape 1 while being labeled as The Diamond Age was actually this Dean Koontz book.  ***Grumble***

This type of thing ever happen to anyone else?

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Warning New Engine Coming Later Today

Well the new Feedster engine should be coming later today.  I had some great testing from Mike over in Australia (sorry for no link; I forget the url).  He made a number of complimentary remarks including:

sh*t.... that's a hell of alot better!*

Yep.  It is.  It also brings more query possibilities and flexibility.  We'll handle this migration pretty conservatively and I'll be online via IM all day long for any issues that arise.  I'll post to here and the home page when the change is made.

*And it isn't that Feedster is bad but we passed the 2,000,000 posts level yesterday and that basically seems to have taken the breath out of the current Feedster engine.  Hence the new one.

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