Miscellaneous Daily Links

A melange of different stuff:

• Useful: Bob Doyle's CMS Review
• Neat: Doing More With Your iSight (thanks Terry!)
• Suggestion: Snapz Pro -- I was going to suggest here to add iSight support to Snapz but the prospect of registering turns me off. 
  Recommendation: Make it easy for customers to give you input.  Input is valuable.  Make it hard and you get none or little.
• Wanted: PHP REST API example (I want this too!)
• Tragic: The Idiocy of BlackBoard
• Lying: This RSS isn't English !
• Cool Pictures: Rotterdam
• Interesting: Social Software
• MySQL: Francois on MySQL
• Fascinating: Who Thought There Were So Many Ways to Shorten a URL?

5:21:21 PM  | Permalink:   | comment []  |  IM Me About This   

[POST DELETED]

Note: I missed OSCON this year in favor of Kevin Werbach's spectacularly wonderful SuperNova conference so I write this from the perspective of being told about it by a friend rather than personal experience.

-- Randall's comment:

Wow, deja vu. People comment about my legal case without getting all the facts straight, and now they comment about my parties likewise.

I did not (either personally, or as Stonehenge) hire strippers to appear at the Alpaca party. That is a blatent lie. I resent that this is being passed along as fact.

I *did* invite many local friends of mine to come to my party. Many of them showed up. Nobody was *paid* to show up (not even my staff). Yes, I tried to invite more women that I knew than men that I knew, in hopes that the dance floor would be more even, but most of the women showed up with their husbands/boyfriends anyway. {grin}

So, please do not spread more unfounded rumors. I won't invoke legal action if you stay to the truth.

In fact, I'd appreciate if this comment would be hoisted up and made a part of the original blog.

ORIGINAL CONTENT DELETED AFTER EMAIL FROM REFERENCED PARTY -- EMAIL BELOW

I'll give you some time to correct your allegations.  But
you need to either remove that thread, or fix what you said.

I'll not have you libelling my business with unfounded allegations.

--
Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095
<merlyn@stonehenge.com> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/>
Perl/Unix/security consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc.
See PerlTraining.Stonehenge.com for onsite and open-enrollment Perl training!

12:39:11 PM  | Permalink:   | comment []  |  IM Me About This   

Advertising on Feedster

 Its Here! 

Fully self service, powered by paypal.  Should be easy enough to use but if you have problems, let me know.

12:12:00 PM  | Permalink:   | comment []  |  IM Me About This   

Feedster Adds Sherlock Support and it Rocks !!!

Wow!  I'm totally seeing the benefit of working with a real apple developer -- my partner Francois.  He just implemented Feedster sherlock searching and it just plain rocks.  As a mostly PC guy, I doubt I'd have even thought about supporting this but Francois is a tried and true Apple guy and just took it on himself to do this.  Wow.  Sherlock is an extensible user interface structure where different apps can have different "search channels" so if you use a Mac and you like Feedster then just go here:

sherlock://http://www.feedster.com/soap/Feedster/SherlockChannel.xml?action=add

(Note that this link might get mangled by Radio / IE and you might have to copy and paste it).  Cool stuff.

10:04:20 AM  | Permalink:   | comment []  |  IM Me About This   

A Suggestion for Aggregators

Now if I was making an aggregator, I'd want to make it easy for people to subscribe to RSS feeds.  Really I would.  Now take a look at the Feedster seach results page and you'll see that even we're trying.  The three aggregator specific links on the right allow you to click on a Feedster RSS feed and subscribe to it in any supported aggregator.  So what's a supported aggregator you ask?  Well its any aggregator that exposes a web interface for subscriptions.  There are two ways to do this -- ports and protocols.  The port mechanism means that the aggregator runs a tiny little http server on a port and uses that for subscriptions.  Radio and AmphetaDesk both do this.  Of course they both use different ports.  Sigh.  The other mechanism, protocols, is what Kevin Burton did with NewsMonster which uses NewsMonster:// links.  Now what I'd recommend to aggregator vendors is that they standardize on an aggregator:// protocol so that other tools which produce RSS can easily embed that into applications.  I'd gladly add a generic Aggregator button to Feedster in a heartbeat so that this could work with any tool that handles the aggregator:// protocol. 

Thoughts? (Oh yeah and please, please standardize on how you want arguments passed in).  Finally, since aggregator vendors compete with each other, if anyone needs an impartial moderator, I'm happy to pitch in.

Oh and a few other questions are likely to emerge from this:

• Why isn't aggregator X listed here?  Well we didn't know how to support it.  Let us know.
• Why is NewsMonster larger?  Are you getting paid?  Nope.  They're larger because that's the size that Kevin did the icon in and I couldn't make it smaller w/o truncating NewsMonster.  I thought about the Jamaican version -- NewsMon -- but that didn't work for me.  Still I will be truncating it soon unless he gives me new artwork.
• Any significance to the order?  Nope.  Just how I copied and pasted them in.

6:30:01 AM  | Permalink:   | comment []  |  IM Me About This   

Do I Link too Little ?

I've been meaning to write this piece for a while. So here's the question -- do I link too little?  Although there are no established norms for blogging and when you should write versus link, I increasingly find that I write more than I link.  Now that isn't due to lack of things to link to.  I find stuff I should link to every day but I also have a lot to say and creating a post for everything I'd like to link to seems painful at best.  I've been debating a format link this for a daily / every other day post:

Interesting Links: PHP, RSS, Feedster, Etc (title)

Heh.  Some cool stuff today:

• php: XYZ (obviously linked)
• open source: PQR (obviously linked)
• Recommended: ABC (obviously linked)

The last time I tried this last summer, someone objected that items weren't getting individual handling and descriptions so I shelved it but I do actually have a job (feedster) and this is a way to link more easily while still writing what I need to say.  Thoughts?

6:18:57 AM  | Permalink:   | comment []  |  IM Me About This