RSS Woes
by Tim Faircloth on May 30, 2008, 8:46 am
As most of you may know, I get most of my news from either digg or reddit by sifting through their RSS feeds in Google Reader. Generally it works out well, but there are a few annoyances.
Digg’s RSS feed isn’t quite as buggy, but the only problem I have is that when I hit ‘v’ to view a story on digg’s feed, it takes me to the comments page (hosted by digg). Not only does it require me to take an extra step to get to what I want to read or look at, it takes forever for that page to load and even freezes firefox on my crappy work computer for a few seconds.
Digg, you need to straighten up your act and take me right to the material I’m interested in. I’d prefer you put a “comments” link elsewhere in the item description so I can go there if I want to, but I’m not obligated to do so.
Reddit’s RSS feed is much more annoying, even though the item links are set to get me straight to my action. The biggest problem is the fact that some stories show up several times in google reader; I think it’s because the stories get shifted around on the page so often (as users vote a story up or down), which changes the order of items in the feed and causes my reader to go nuts.
Then again, that could be a problem with google reader, since every item is given a unique “guid” which should prevent such things from happening. They didn’t have this problem before their recent redesign. I wish they wouldn’t break things like that.
I also get annoyed that there’s no description of any of the items, just a link to the comments page (along with a redundant link to the item itself). Isn’t that against RSS standards?
Reddit, get your shit fixed. I’m not sure how it’s done, but Digg doesn’t ever have a problem with repeated items, and I’m tired of guessing what “This is awesome!” means since I don’t have a description of the item other than the title.
King of Uncool
by Tim Faircloth on May 15, 2008, 2:17 pm
I found this article on digg:
10 Items You Think Make You Cool, But Don’t
One major problem I have with this article is that it assumes you’re buying most of these things strictly because they make you cool. I honestly don’t care what people think about me, I buy things because I want or need them.
Another thing about the list is that there’s one or two things on the list that aren’t technically items, but that’s just nitpicky I guess.
There are also several grammatical/punctuation mistakes in the article, but I seem to be one of very few people that actually cares about that kind of thing. It’s also a bit finicky to pick at Joe Blogger’s casual post.
That being said, I think he’s right on target with a few of them — belt buckles, tricked out bikes, hats, and ringtones are generally only purchased for the sole purpose of being cool or showing off.
Anyway, without further ado, here are the “items” I own that apparently make me uncool. I’d like to point out that I don’t use most of these items very often, but apparently just owning them makes me uncool:
- Ironic Belt Buckles - Some time ago someone bought me a Seatbelt Belt. I’ve also got a GI Joe belt.
- Blue Tooth Headset - Anyway, I own one of these things because every now and them I’m doing something that requires use of both my hands and I hate doing the “hold it between your ear and your shoulder” thing. Also, “bluetooth” is one word, not two.
- Guitar Hero - I don’t own this game because I think it makes me cool or it’ll make me a rock star, and I know I can’t play guitar. I own it because it’s fun to play. Hell of a concept, eh?
- Funny Ringtones - I once had Weird Al Yankovic’s “White and Nerdy”, but I stopped using it because I just got embarrassed whenever it rang and wasn’t on vibrate.
So there you have it, I’m the King of Uncool.
Also, I notice I’ve had the same placeholder banner on this page for almost two years… and I haven’t changed the footer either. I’m sure I’ll get around to it someday.
New toy
by Tim Faircloth on May 7, 2008, 5:27 pm
I’m making this post from my new toy — a refurbished 8 GB iPod Touch. Isn’t that awesome?
The joys of pet ownership
by Tim Faircloth on May 7, 2008, 12:48 pm
As some of you may know, I own a cat (named Tomtom), and I have cat doors — one that goes into the laundry room and one that leads from the laundry room to the outside. It’s a nice setup because I can lock her out from the outside without keeping her from her food, or I can give her access to her food without letting her inside and so forth. Usually I just leave them both open so she can roam in and out freely.
There are several problems with the setup. I don’t have those high-tech “only an animal with a special collar can get in” doors, so at times the neighbor’s cats will get inside. My cat doesn’t like that (she isn’t very sociable with other animals), and I think I’m often feeding several other cats in the neighborhood. Generally it’s not a big problem since the neighborhood cats rarely come inside, and I don’t mind giving a free meal out. It’s not like I’m going broke buying food.
The other problem is that Tomtom likes to kill things and bring them inside… I guess she figures I feed her so she needs to share her bounty with me every now and then. More than once I’ve had to play “find the corpse”, a game that can sometimes go on for days because she finds the most ingenious hiding spots for them.
Right after the tornado about a year ago, after a few weeks (I was living in a hotel room at the time, so I didn’t have much time every day to search) of the horrid smell I found a squirrel in the corner of my computer room. That was nasty, but luckily the carpet was being replaced. No harm no foul.
For the past few days I’ve noticed a particularly rank smell in the air in my den. I looked in the usual places, but couldn’t find it. I was beginning to think I’d lost my mind. This morning I happened to peek behind the bookshelf in the corner and found the culprit — a field mouse, probably the same one Tomtom brought in (and I threw back out) a few weeks ago.
The problem with my most recent find is that it had been decaying for several days and was rather “juicy”, and most of the juice had soaked into the carpet underneath the bookshelf (which I moved so I could properly clean the area). NASTY!
In any event, I’ve been scrubbing the spot like a mad man with every cleanser I have on hand, but it seems like the smell is going to stick around for a while.
So… does anyone have any suggestions for getting the smell of a dead mouse out of a carpet?
Other updates
by Tim Faircloth on May 5, 2008, 3:17 pm
So, I’m working on doing a few other things to filter out comment spam to see if I can get rid of this horrendous captcha bullshit:
- Honeypot field — aptly marked (and hidden with css) so valid comments won’t be filtered, but bots will assume that there should be something there.
- Javascript printed field — bots don’t have java, so when they submit it will fail the check
- No comments on old posts — if a post is 90 days old you won’t be able to comment on it.
I’ve also noted that I had a visitor yesterday on an iPhone. It’s a whole new level of geek when people are browsing your crappy blog on the go.
Bottled water
by Tim Faircloth on May 5, 2008, 2:46 pm
What is the Real Cost of Bottled Water?
True, it’s another reason not to buy bottled water, but the subject matter of the above article got me to thinking. Everyone bitches about the price of gas, but in the grand scheme of things gas is cheap. Bottled water usually costs between $1.00 and $1.50 for 20 fluid ounces, but gasoline (at least around here at $3.50/gallon) costs right around $0.55. One gallon of bottled water (at above prices) would cost between $6.40 and $9.60.
But if you do a little poking, bottled water is cheap compared to other products:
- Rubbing alcohol (generic) (16 oz. for $1.33, sale price) — $8.51
- CARNATION Evaporated Milk (12 oz for $1.79) —$11.46
- Gerber 100% Juice Apple (32 oz. for $2.99) — $11.69
- Hershey’s Chocolate Syrup (24 oz. for 2.49) — $13.28
You’re all gonna bitch at me because I don’t factor in packaging, but I say that’s part of the price. I tried to look for the largest portions for each product but my choices were limited since CVS is apparently the only company that posts prices for groceries online.
The point is that we all bitch about the price of gas when it’s actually quite cheap in comparison to all these other products (and so many more).
But then I guess people (yes, Americans especially) are always looking for things to bitch about, but we always bitch about the wrong things. We need alternative fuels so yay for ethanol! Wait, that’s driving up the price of corn? Wait, can’t we use another plant like non-THC producing hemp or lawn clippings? So you’re saying it’s no better than gasoline? Poppycock. We’re making a difference. That’s why my new huge mother truckin’ SUV uses ethanol instead of gas. It gets 15 miles to the gallon, can you believe it?
No, I can’t.
Decreased usability blues
by Tim Faircloth on May 2, 2008, 3:35 pm
So, the spammers have gotten the best of me. I can’t stand it any longer, so if you’ll notice I’ve put a captcha on my comments form.
I know, I know. It means I’ll get even fewer comments, but at least my gmail notifier won’t ding at me every 30 minutes saying I have new mail — from another spammer posting a comment.
There are a few other things I hate about having it there:
- The code generated by the php library is horrible. It’s a table (blech!) inside a div inside another div or something like that.
- The color scheme doesn’t fit my page at all, and it’s centered so it sticks out like a sore thumb.
- It slows down my page load a bit since it pulls stuff from another site and uses javascript. Which I guess I’m dealing with anyway since I have the google analytics code, but I still don’t like it.
I’m not sure if I should modify the existing code to my liking or just hack together my own captcha-like plugin. I think I’ll wind up making my own… so hopefully this abomination will be less horrid in the future.
I’ve also gone through and cleaned out a few hundred spam comments, but I have a feeling I missed a few. If you’re ever browsing the archives and you notice one or two, let me know (if you don’t know my email address, you can put a comment on this post).
RSS Awareness Day
by Tim Faircloth on May 1, 2008, 1:30 pm
I must spread the word!
What’s RSS? I’m glad you asked.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication (at least that’s one theory). Basically it gives web users a way to aggregate stories from multiple sites in one place, which can save you a lot of time and effort. Instead of switching between CNN.com and reddit, you could simply subscribe to the two sites’ RSS feed and keep track of it all day from one place.
Is there a blog you like to read (like mine)? Subscribe to its RSS feed (here’s a link to my feed) and you can stalk your best friends and know minutes after they post something new.
Basically, if you’re on a site and you see that funky little orange square with the quarter-circles on it in the address bar, that means the site has an RSS feed. Click the icon to get to it.
Perhaps it’s a hard idea to understand. I think I’ll let this wikipedia article do the rest of the explanation.
You’ll need an RSS reader to use the feeds. I use Google Reader. Bloglines is another popular one, but I’ve never used it. There’s also several non-web-based readers, but I prefer to have the ability to check my reader from wherever I am.
Now get out there and start using the web like it’s supposed to be used, people!