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Wireless on Windows Sucks Slimy Green Toads I'm sorry but Wireless (Linksys specifically) on Windows can just plain bite me. Yesterday I had to work with Francois at his place so I had to reset all my wireless settings. Now this morning as I'm trying to get my email and run out the door for a plane (offline all weekend) -- nothing works. I do the restart dance. Nada. I shut down and pull the card. Nada. Zippo. Bupkus. Zero. Finally it comes up. I have to hand it to Apple -- I've never had an iBook have Wifi issues. Us Windows folks are sitting there swearing to beat the band and the Mac folk just look smug. I just...
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Feedsterlicious ! Heh. If you track our Feedster Stats page at all (and yeah its slow to display and I know I need to make a cached version) then you'll see something interesting: 160,000 + feeds now. That's right. Last night we added every Live Journal user to Feedster which doubled our database size. My hat's definitely tipped to Francois whose crawler architecture happily crawled > 1,500,000 posts in 12 hours. Nice job man! Jon Thompson nicely pointed out to me that while we might have implemented Sherlock support, we made it hard to find. Thanks man. Done! Now its linked to from the home page until it finds a permanent home. Now for a miscellaneous selection of...
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Any Hardware Guys Out in BlogLand or "How do I get Feedster on my Sidekick / PocketPC / Palm" ? Hm... We've had an increasing number of people ask us for Palm / PocketPC / Sidekick / whacky device here support in Feedster and we actually do want to address this. The real caveat here is that my current Palm is a Palm IIIx (no Internet access there), Francois doesn't even use a mobile device and since we're a teeny, tiny unfunded startup, there just isn't a hardware budget. All our funds go into our monthly equipment contracts and bandwidth. So if anyone out there works for Palm / Microsoft / Compaq / Dell / Danger / etc and wants...
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Feedsterize Yourself or "Your New Feedster Buttons Have Arrived" Heh. Hopefully you'll like these buttons as much as I do. And I know I need to add them to my own blog (note to self). Still feel free to add them to yours. Thanks to www.kalsey.com for the button maker UI and Paint Shop Pro for the rest.  (gif)
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A Mea Culpa to My Mea Culpa or "Maybe I'm Not So Stupid" With today's round of three blog entries, clearly I don't need any help from the peanut gallery* to tell me I'm dumb -- I'll do it myself -- and then retract it myself. The issue at hand is encoding binary files in syndicated content. I've recently learned that Atom allows for this -- and from a pure technical perspective, I'll admit its elegant. But from a practical standpoint, I think its rife with issues as I elaborated here. Well in the comments to that blog entry I saw a bunch of feedback and eased back on my position. The primary reason I did so was Dave...
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A Mea Culpa or "Its Wednesday and I'm Stooopid" Sigh. I thought I was making a valid point about Atom (and I do still kinda think that) but Dave correctly pointed out that RSS supports enclosures too -- something that I didn't realize. And, thus, everything I said applies to RSS as well. Yeah I should have definitely known that -- considering what I do -- and I do know it -- but .... So this is an egregious example of overwhelming stupidity. I'm not proud. So consider this an apology. I shouldn't have labeled / titled the post as I did. I'm tempted to just delete the previous post but that would lead to the whole arguments from a few...
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Atom: The Fatal Flaw No One Has Yet Noticed Now given that atom doesn't really exist yet, it may be early to make a draconian statement like "Fatal Flaw" but this is fairly awful from my perspective. I was being interviewed for Under the Iron and the interview brought this to my attention. The (most excellent) question was: Q: When Atom/Pie/nEcho is officially a spec and people start to use the real extensive metadata possible with it, will you need to adapt Feedster to searching more efficiently? Also, since Atom/Pie/nEcho supports content as sound files, pictures and even video, do you plan to look into those files and index their metadata as well? For the answer to the...
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More on Colors Jason has more on colors (I mentioned the matched color picker recently). Nice stuff.
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What if Your Product Didn't Work --- And Nobody Told You? I've been a user of Windows related multimedia files (originally .AVI) since like 1992ish -- back in the CD-ROM days and I just don't get it. Whenever I'm on the net and I encounter .MPEG or .MOV / .QTW / QuickTime video files they just plain work. Period. Rarely if ever does an MPEG file not play. Same for QuickTime. Why is it then that I rarely, if ever, can make a .AVI file just play? I'll see a .AVI file on the net and then I download it and nothing. I always see "Attempting Codec Download" and then "Error". And then, utterly annoyingly, Windows makes the less than...
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Miscellaneous Oddments Sorry for being so quiet. I've been re-architecting / re-implementing our meta tag indexer and suffering through the hell that is metatags. We try and be flexible but man, oh freaking man. When I look at the cruft that is metatags I just want to wince, moan, scream, pound my big right toe with a mallet and then scream some more. Anyway </RANT>. And don't even get me started on this annoying new thing where rssurls will sometimes have a ? after them and sometimes not. Hopefully more later. Via Nelson: Very Useful. Hey! Its Me! Thanks Chris!
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New Feedster Feature: Blog of the Day There are a lot of interesting blogs out there --- all with rss feeds. And Feedster, with what is now I suspect the single largest database of RSS feeds available, sees so, so many of them. Francois and I have been wrestling with this and, at least for now, we've added to the Feedster home page a "Blog of the Day" link that we'll try and rotate daily (doh!). If you want to make suggestions then use interestingblog @ feedster.com Thanks to Mike in Australia for doing the Blog if the Day graphic.
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Gnomedex: The Summary How do you describe a conference, Gnomedex, where you get to meet and hang out with: Tim O'Reilly -- If you don't get the reference then piffle to you Rob Malda -- the founder of Slashdot Dan Gillmor -- San Jose Mercury News Beth Goza from Microsoft who actually owns a Segway !!! Nelson Minar from Google Nick Bradbury from FeedDemon, Topstyle and Homesite Oh and, of course, Chris Pirillo Tom Bridge from MacSlash And, even better, all the myriad Gnomedexers and Gnomedex Bloggers (who are listed here) -- I got the best suggestions on Feedster from just different random people. And I'll be implementing those...
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Feedster Gnomedex Blog Carrying out my silly (but functional) tradition of a different blogging tool for travel, my Gnomedex blog is here: http://feedster.com/superblog/
and rss: http://feedster.com/superblog//?q=node/feed And apparently my Gnomdex Daily News is causing trouble. :-)
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Feedster, Being Busy and Doing da Gnome! Well Gnomedex keeps drawing closer and getting ready to be away (again) and doign some special stuff for Gnomedex keeps knocking blogging off my list. Sorry about that. Here are some interesting links: Interesting new web dev approach: http://osfs.apokalyptik.com/index.htm Adding smilies to your blog: http://waffle.wootest.net/past/000377.php Really Funny: http://perversiontracker.com/ CSS Is Bad and Can't Be Used for Anything: http://waffle.wootest.net/past/000379.php Interesting Blogging Tool (mac): iBlog A Great Reason to own a Mac: RadioShark iSight: Interesting Applications (read the last and 2nd to last comment) Outstanding: New Version of Blosxom! Aggregator:// Go Kevin! This I have to try: http://www.modsecurity.org/...
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Special Feedster Gnomedex Edition ! Check out http://www.feedster.com/news/ when you get a chance. What we've done here is dynamically (1/2 hour to 1 hour basis) create a "Blogpaper" a virtual newspaper assembled out of different blog entries all with a common theme. And, of course, the theme is Gnomedex. So if you're a blogger and talking about Gnomedex, this could well feature you. http://www.feedster.com/news/ Note: The dynamic nature of this won't really show up until people start posting when Gnomedex starts.
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GGSearch is Coming to Feedster I've had some interesting IM chats with Pieter and he's updating GGSearch for Feedster. GGSearch is a client side (for Windows) tool for more easily building Google searches and its actually pretty darn cool. The way it works is it builds up a search query and then sends it to the browser. Pieter made a conscious decision to avoid the Soap api for Google and he's going to apply the *same approach to Feedster -- just build up a url. Give Pieter any comments you have on how a client side API for Feedster might work. *Note: We do have a Soap API for Feedster although it is currently undocumented.
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Robots.txt Support is (Partially) Implemented I just wanted to let people know that we've now partially implemented Robots.txt. Now before anyone flames on, I can just let you know that the main Feedster spider, the thing that checks sites regularly, is using Robots.txt. We're grabbing it once per week, every Sunday. Please note that there is NO standard for how frequently you grab it and this is what we decided. If more frequent is needed, let us know. And please bear in mind that if you use robots.txt to turn off our indexing of your blog (which is fine) then we will still periodically check your url to make sure that you haven't changed your mind. If you want us...
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So What About that "Technorati Cosmos" Scott? I've had a flurry of requests recently asking why Feedster doesn't have a Technorati like "Cosmos". So over the past few days, with the assistance of Mike from down under who tossed in a critical string parser, I've been implementing this. And we're calling it your "Feedster Web". We looked at the whole Nebula / Galaxy / Constellation / etc but Richard Soderberg came up with "Web" and that one stuck. Now while the final code may not be ready until after Gnomedex (there's one bug that makes some domains non-"webbable"), I thought I'd at least give you a preview so you can tell me if we're on track.
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