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…

Tim Bray had this idea, and I must admit, I had the same idea as well, an RSS feed of my financial transactions. I know, it’s most likely a long way off… or is it? While driving home last night I heard a commercial promoting email alerts from a bank. They seemed to be saying you could get sent account information via email. Now, I don’t know what kind of information they are sending, and I hope it’s encryped with PGP/GPG or something, but here’s where it gets interesting. If my bank sends me email with useful data, I can easily parse that data and build it into some sort of RSS feed for my own use. I know, it’s a lot more complex than that, but it’s the start of an idea anyway…

Which brings up another interesting issue. Privacy of RSS feed subscription information. Many people share their subscription file on their sites, which is a good idea, and does neat things, but I found when I did this, I first had to delete a feed, not because of a privacy concern, but because it was a resource that could not be reached by the world, and internal project server. So, I’d propose the following to the aggregator makers, add a way for a feed to be marked as private, so that when I export out my file, it can provide me with a list of public feeds that you subscribe to. It would also be useful for people wishing to avoid the embarrasing “You subscribe to what feed?” question…

I also found some code to build a site outline, as mentioned yesterday. I’m using WWW::SimpleRobot. It just took a few small tweaks to the example to get what I needed. What I’m really after is a spider I can point to a site, and have it show me all the urls it can find, so I can compare it against the files of the site (on my local filesystem) to see what doesn’t get spidered. It’s a search engine robot simulator.

(Note: WWW::SimpleRobot does not respect the robots.txt file, so use it with care.)

I wrote a simple perl wrapper for my md5sum differ idea, and it does work well, but it’s slow, mainly due to the fact it’s checking large files across the network. Not much I can do about that right now, but it’s a start…

Long ago I had a pretty simple perl script that you would point at a url, and it would spider the site and give you an outline. The output was something like this:

• http://example.com/
• http://example.com/about/
• http://example.com/about/foo.html
• http://example.com/contact/
• http://example.com/help/
• http://example.com/help/fee.html

I can’t find that code anywhere. Does anyone have something quick-n-dirty that might work? Let me know…

Here’s my problem: I’ve got this application that deals with loading images, and no one thought to save any useful metadata when loading an image, they just save the name of the image, so on occasion an image will get loaded again after it’s been loaded. This might be fine because the image might have been edited in some way, but if it didn’t change we waste time loading it again. What to do? I suppose the right way would be to actually save the proper metadata for the image, but my short term solution might be this: use md5sum to check the already loaded image, and the image waiting to be loaded, if they are the same, don’t load it, just discard it. Do you see any problems with this idea? (In theory the md5sum should give a fingerprint of the file, and it should be unique, so if that changes, then the images changes.) I won’t be able to do it on the fly, as they are large files, and md5sum is not fast enough, but I can preprocess the list of files waiting to be loaded…

Just off the top of my head, I think the metadata I would save is:

• name
• width
• height
• date created
• date modified
• file size
• md5sum

I’m sure there’s other bits as well, but that’s my quick list.

When using Mozilla for mail, I can choose between reading a message as Original HTML, Simple HTML, or Plain Text. I tend to choose Plant Text. This allows me to see all message using a consistent font, which the choice of face and size that I selected, instead of say, 72 point bright pink Helvetica. This is a feature. This feature appears missing from the version of Thunderbird I’m running… Did I miss it? Is it not there? Please tell me where it is, or if it’s not there, put it in. It’s a good feature. (Looks like there’s probably a workaround.)

Oh, I’ve also put Thunderbird as well as Firebird onto my old Wallstreet PowerBook, replacing Mozilla, at least for a little while, as I test them out a bit more. Thundebird has some odd bug where 85% of the menu bar is rendered in Japanese-like characters, but it still works just fine. (Perhaps the next build will fix that issue.) As I’ve said before, both of these applications are very good, and I’m sure they’ll only get better.

Good Experience has started something called This Is Broken, which looks at things which are, well, broken. From poorly designed web site to confusing signs, things that just plain don’t work right.

The gas station near my house got new pumps recently, and after using it once, I was able to determine a good number of usability issues that needed addressing. Don’t the companies who design and build these things do any user testing?

As previously mentioned, I’ve been using Firebird and Thunderbird on Windows 2000, and so far I’ve got nothing to report. Well, by that I mean, no bad news to report. They just work. Ho-hum. How boring? I haven’t had any spectacular crashes or data loss, I haven’t gotten any virii, or been annoyed by some weird ‘feature’ or bug, they just do what they do.

And in all honesty, we need more software like that…

What, no one could have told me about the GMC Safari?

I’ve been working on this application that manages content. I guess you could call it a content management system, or CMS. What another CMS? Don’t worry, I’m not out to compete with with anyone in the CMS space, it’s something I need for my own purposes. I did look at a number of open-source CMS’s but none fit my requirements at the time. At some point in the future I might release it under an open-source license, but I’m not too worried about that yet. It’s pretty specific in what it does, so don’t worry, you’re not missing anything special.

As for the code itself, it’s nothing brilliant, it’s written in Perl, and uses a few simple tables in MySQL for storage, but it works, and I understand every line of code… on a good day anyway. While we (we being myself and the other person involved in this project) discuss features, I find myself saying:

We could do that, technically it’s not that difficult, and I can think of a number of ways of doing it, but the hard part will be building a good interface to manage it.

And that my friends, is the holy grail, as it were, of application building. It’s not an amazing revelation, we’ve known this for quite a while, but I’ve been thinking more and more about it lately. The key in all of that is the word “good” which is why I emphasized it, I didn’t just make it italic, I emphasized it…

While developing, I’m spending more time dealing with the interface issues than anything else. I too am promoting web standards, I mean, who hasn’t needed a CMS that works in Lynx? Seriously though, I understand the importance of creating valid pages that work, and I also understand that building tools that are easy to use, and powerful, is not always easy. That’s OK, it’s just the sort of challenge I like.