Month: June 2003

Is there an aggregator that supports the ability to receive an IM from blo.gs that would then trigger the aggregator to grab the feed for that site if it was X number of minutes old?

As it stands now, a site gets updated, and if they ping blo.gs, then blo.gs sends me an IM telling me the site has updated… but why tell me? Why not tell my aggregator to check if the feed it currently has cached is X number of minutes old, and if so, download the fresh version. Heck, my aggregator could then alert me that it’s got new stuff waiting.

That seems more efficient than my aggregator checking all feeds for an update once per hour, and me having to pay attention to IM’s from blo.gs

I’ve been using nttp//rss lately, and I’ve uncovered a nice little feature. (Oh that word ‘feature’ is always trouble, as it’s sometimes interchangeable with the word ‘bug’ depending on your perspective.)

See, nntp//rss stores each item in an RSS feed as an item that you can read in your newsreader. Well, I noticed that occasionally you’d see double, meaning an item would appear twice – or so it seems. Reading the title of two items would make you think they were the same, but reading the contents would make you realize that you were getting the original post, and a version that was later edited.

Many of us edit posts for various reasons, such as fixing mispellings, adding a note via <ins> or getting rid of something via <del> perhaps, but there are some people out there who write something, sometimes without thinking first, or sometimes just plain stupid. Well, now we can easily do a diff between posts, and see how people alter what they wrote, perhaps changing the entire tone in the process. Is there anything wrong with changing something you wrote to say something quite different? I’ll let you decide that.

Yeah, we here at Rasterboy Enterprises fully support the whole Echo Project thingy.

Especially if it deals with dates and times in an intelligent way! ;)

Hmmm, we’ve been down this road before, have we not?

I never fully drank the Movable Type Kool-Aid, and as I’ve said before, it’s an extremely well done application, from the UI to the code, I don’t have any real issues. My problem is with the license. Which people describe as vague, and rightly so. At one point in time I created templates to match this site, tested importing data, and had things tweaked just so. Still, something kept me from pulling the trigger, and it was the license. It worried me. (Then again, I’ve been called a “license weenie.”) Oh, it’s not that Movable Type wasn’t under an open-source license, it was that the license had some strange restrictions. Like the whole, “you can’t charge someone to install/support it” thing. It made sense at the time, Six Apart was just looking out for themselves, wanting to make the money (if there was any) on support services. I don’t blame them at all for that, but it did conflict with my needs.

I work with software, and I do support for software, and often I get paid for this. I invest my time and money in learning how things work and charge others for my knowledge and support. This can’t be done with Movable Type. That’s ok, there’s other software that it can be done with, and I end up using that. Still, when I look at how powerful and just plain nice Movable Type is, I think it’s a shame I can’t add it to my list.

(Oh, before you sign up for that new Google’s AdSense service, you should make sure you have a commercial license for Movable Type. Or you should ask Six Apart. Or… hmmm, it’s not really clear what you should do…)

I’ll end this by saying that I wish the best for Six Apart, the Trotts, and Movable Type. I really wouldn’t say this much about it if I thought it was crap. I think it’s good, and I want to see good come out of it. That’s it…

(See what other have to say about this.)

One more thing: Six Apart is listening, and reacting – good for them.

We mentioned yesterday that WWW::SimpleRobot did not respect the robots.txt file. Well, there’s always WWW::RobotRules, which was easily dropped into place providing me a simple robot that followed the rules of a robots.txt file, if one exists.

My “outlinebot” is working quite well now, and I’m sure I’ll be tweaking it for the next few weeks or months… If I haven’t said this in a while, I really like Perl…