RasterWeb!

Fugu is a Mac OS X SFTP, SCP and SSH frontend. It appears to (more or less) be open source since you can use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for any purpose… or so says the copyright file included with it. You can even get the source via CVS.

Since I’m using a new host without SCP access, SFTP will have to do…

I’m sure you know by now that we will soon have no bananas. This is of course disturbing. As you know, in the future we had planned to make apes into servants, sure, some people will say they will be slaves, but really they will be servants. Now it was widely believed that our mistreatment of the servants/apes will lead them to uprise and revolt against us, eventually leading to what is commonly referred to as a Planet of the Apes, where apes will rule over man.

Leading scientists and computer programmers have always held that this is what will happen. Without a doubt.

But… it seems that the whole running out of bananas thing will prevent that. The servants thing I mean. Obviously the apes will uprise and revolt against us when we run out of bananas, and we’ll never even get to have apes as servants. No, your butler won’t be named ‘bubbles’ and bring you a bottle of water while swinging from the chandelier with his tail, instead you’ll be the one with the lobotomy bringing the ape-overloads oranges and carrots.

Honestly, carrots? Sure, imagine going to the zoo of the future and seeing a bunch of monkeys sitting around eating carrots. They won’t stand for it.

Mark my words… our days are numbered…

Mark has an interesting approach at generating revenue through premium services, but here at RasterWeb! we plan on implementing a different approach. We plan on providing the same old content – nothing new or special or groundbreaking – and it’ll only cost one US dollar per day. What a deal! You get all the same stuff and no fancy ‘extras’ or ‘bonus’ material to distract you!

I know what you’re saying, How can we do this, How can the folks behind RasterWeb! afford to pay every reader one US dollar per day just to read the RasterWeb! web site? Well, honestly, we haven’t quite worked that out yet, but know this – we put you, the reader, first. Well, second anyway. Ok, you’re in the top 5 for sure…

So check your mailbox, your one US dollars should start appearing shortly. If they don’t it’s obviously mean that either you’re not actually reading RasterWeb! or we don’t have your personal information on file. If we don’t have your personal information on file just keep waiting, once we get all your personal information on file you’ll be placed on the waiting list for your one US dollars. You should start to see your one US dollars appear no later that 2038.

So basically:

1. We provide content
2. You read the content
3. Profit! (for you, the reader!)

It can’t go wrogn!

For a while now people/organizations with web sites have been trying to determine if they should offer RSS feeds, and if so, how much they should put in them. Are titles only enough? Should there be a description? The full content of a post/article?

We here at the RasterWeb! Laboratories and Grist Mill do the following: Provide an RSS 2.0 file where each item has a title, a description (which is a short manually created excerpt from the entire body of the item) and the full item itself in the content:encoded section. For our purposes, this works well.

Someday (soon?) aggregators should get smarter, and let you choose if you want to see the description (short excerpt) or the whole thing (full text of the content:encoded area.) You can do this right now with AmphetaDesk, though without some extra hacking it’ll affect all channels. I suppose the ‘extra hacking’ would involved adding a pref to each feed for choosing short or long, but that’s an excercise for another time…

Alternately, on the server side, we have people/organizations who are concerned about the costs of providing an RSS feed. People will tell you that a full feed drives more traffic to your site, and while that may be true, not everyone wants to believe that argument. Solutions? Well, there’s gzip, ETags, If-Last-Modified, things, but I had one other idea. Provide more than one feed: One with X amount of titles only (where X is a high number like 20) and one with X amount of titles, descriptions (where is X is a lower number like 10) and one with X amount of titles, descriptions, and full text (where X is 5.)

Our goal is to have all the files be about the same size, and use the same amount of bandwidth. Of course some jerk will subscribe to all three, so we’ll have to have the server be smart enough to deny that. (That’s possible right?)

Other ideas: Provide the full text for the X most recent items, and just the title and description for the rest of the items. What about paying for a full RSS feed versus using the free titles only feed? What about ads in the feed? (Please, don’t kill me!)

As to the question of: How can I get users to visit the site rather than just read the whole thing in an aggregator? What does the site offer? Are there comments? Related items? Useful images? I know that I’ll read Mark’s stuff in my aggregator, but also go to his site to see who is linking to/commenting on his stuff. Same with sites that have Trackback or comments or the like. I’m guessing people/organzations want you to visit their site to up the page views and ad impressions, right? I’d mention something about ads in RSS feeds, but I’m too afraid to mention that idea again.

Anyway, you get the idea. There’s a lot of things that can be done, and most of them haven’t been tried yet. Is interesting problem, no?