...by the inmates...for the inmates...
Tuesday, September 07, 2004Install XP Without A Product Key
Install XP without a product key.
Direct and Related Links for 'Install XP without a product key'
“Microsoft’s new Windows Product Activation presents support techs with all sorts of new challenges, including the need to have a valid product key to install, or reinstall, Windows XP on workstations. But what do you do if you can’t find the CD with the original key that matches the machine you’re working on? You can discover the key using ViewKeyXP…. If you try to reinstall Windows XP and don’t have your original product key or… By marc@lockergnome.com (Marc Erickson). [Lockergnome's IT Professionals]
Make My RSS Perfect, Please
RSS would be perfect if....RSS is pretty simple. In fact, RSS wears a big t-shirt that says, “Simple is my middle name.” Publishers are adopting RSS all over the place and advertisers are trying to figure out how to reach this elusive and finicky audience of early adopters, but RSS is a pretty unfriendly medium for advertising compared to the regular Web or even spam (formerly known as “email”).
Me? I love RSS. I couldn’t keep up with the embarrassingly small percentage of WIN sites I read if I didn’t have FeedDemon, but there are a few things I wish RSS and feed readers could do. Many solutions to RSS problems involve server-side scripting — like the HTTP Conditional GET, which spares Web servers some of the load of repeated requests for feeds that have not changed — but scripting can only do so much.
Authentication
Not just for subscribing to content, but some people want the ease-of-use of RSS for a private news feed. If someone knows the URL, they can read your feed.Dynamic content
Like email, you cannot change the content of a feed once it has gone out the door. But worse than email, if you do change content after it has made its way to feed readers, many of them will do redlining and show you exactly what changes were made. Is it a good thing or a bad thing that they are constantly pulling down new versions for comparison? Maybe it’s a good thing to know that someone removed a paragraph that changes the entire tone of their post, but if I fix a misspelling, add a missing word or change my punctuation, do you really want to see little red underlines and strikethrough everywhere?Advertising and personalization
Without cookies and JavaScript support, you cannot intelligently serve ads in your RSS feeds. If you put an ad in with every post and people look at the 10-at-a-time view in their feed readers, they see ten copies of the same ad all on one screen. This discourages bloggers from putting ads in their feeds which, in turn, discourages them from putting all of their content into their feeds.RSS doesn’t know what a post is
I mean, RSS is all about showing you posts, but when bloggers switch from excerpts to full posts in their feeds, most feed readers load all 20 stories again as if they were new. The feed reader only knows which post is which by the date, title and content. Those are all blogger-editable. If I edit a title, does that make it a new post?The Atom spec addresses unique identifiers for posts with its “atom:id” element. Atom also takes the syndication to the next level allowing you to move content in and out, not just out, but it doesn’t address the “dumb client” issues.
To be fair, HTML doesn’t do any of this either. HTTP — the communication between Web servers and browsers — handles all of these things. But feed readers use HTTP to get RSS files from Web servers. Why don’t feed readers support more HTTP features? When Internet Explorer and Safari have built-in feed readers, will RSS feeds suddenly become more dynamic and powerful?
What would you like to see RSS and feed readers do? [The RSS Weblog]
On This Day Macro From Steve Kirks
On This Day Macro. Dave Winer has been writing a weblog for quite some time and has built quite a history of posts. He sometimes uses that history to prove a point or remind us of how far we've come. I always enjoyed reading the comparisons between current events and events from the previous years on his weblog and I hoped one day to have it on mine. That day has come. onThisDay macro Installation: save the file and use the Radio application's "Open" command from the "File" menu. Radio will offer you a location to save it in the object database that's the same as the place it came from. In this case, I stored it in a table called workspace.srk.scripts, but you can store it anywhere in the workspace table in your Radio installation. This is a simple macro in appearance, but hearty in its execution. It runs through your database of Radio weblog posts and compares the date you wrote the post to the same date in years past. It will find posts for last year, two years ago and three years ago and display the results in one of two ways: full content or summaries. If there are no posts, it returns no content. I plan on modifying this into a tool in the next few weeks and will include:
I'm using it on my weblog in addition to the radio.macros.weblogRecentPosts macro. Now, when I want to write a weblog post, I open my desktop homepage and see my recent posts plus any posts I made on the same day in years past. Leave questions as comments on this post. It's not a destructive macro so I don't expect any problems, but be careful, OK? [Steve Kirks: house of warwick : Radio notes]
- Preferences for content amount
- Automatic posting of historic content to your weblog
- Templates to allow you to control the layout
Most Search Phrases Are Unique
"According to Amit Singhal, principal scientist at Google, over 50 percent of the 200 million searches performed a day have never been searched before.Good discussion at SEW"
From SearchEngneBlog
http://www.searchengineblog.com/archives/2004_09_01_archive.html
Study: Fortune 100 Lack SEO
Study: Fortune 100 Lack SEO. The number of Fortune 100 companies who deploy effective search engine optimization (SEO) techniques has tripled in the last two years, but only a scant few have well-optimized sites, according to analysis from Oneupweb.
The 2004 study of the first 100 companies in Fortune Magazine's Fortune 500 list revealed that only nine had definitive, ethical optimization campaigns — up from just three in 2002 — indicating that this powerful group may be missing out on valuable online market share. [ClickZ News]
RSS: In the Slow Lane on the Road to Ubiquity?
RSS: In the Slow Lane on the Road to Ubiquity?.Alex Barnett proposes that RSS is too new to be judged as a niche technology.
Don’t write off RSS because it was invented 5 years ago and ’still’ isn’t at ‘mass use’. If XML, IM and P2P (depending on how you define P2P) - are anything to go by (technologies that ride on the infrastructure that itself took decades to make prime time) RSS has another 3 years before it can be judged as ‘having made it’ or not.However, his commenters are not really buying his comparisions to other technologies, like email, web browsers, and instant messaging. Rick Bruner, whose original post prompted Barnett’s, replies:
As Olivier pointed out, IM was a lot farther along five years in than 1.4%, as was the Web browser. Also, you didn’t have the platform in place for mass distribution of email for many years (i.e., PCs and ISPs were not widespread till the early ‘90s), and with mobile telephony you had a cost factor that doesn’t exist with RSS. RSS has a lot more things going for it than some of your other examples: a mature distribution platform, loads of content, little or no cost.[The RSS Weblog]
RSS: Marketing's Next Big Thing Online (Part 1 of 2)
RSS: Marketing's Next Big Thing Online (Part 1 of 2). by Tom Barnes RSS is in its infancy. But the velocity of its adoption confirms that it is one of the most important media developments in recent years. Here's the bottom line: RSS is indeed marketing's Next Big Thing. *Please note: This article is available only to paid subscribers. Get more information or sign up here.* [Current Articles from MarketingProfs.com]
Secure RSS
A downside I mentioned during RSS pitch. However, everyone involved with RSS recognizes that secure RSS is necessary. One of the old articles regarding this need:
http://www.infoage.idg.com.au/index.php?id=490561186
I may need to review the current state of secure RSS for our first implementation.
RSS At Work, Part 2
Two positive RSS items:
- I gave a short version of last weeks's RSS pitch to the group who would own the implementation. Nobody laughed.
- My senior director put RSS on his "things to consider" list for review with peers.