Since Boing Boing started including ads in their feed, I stopped reading. And their main page is so horrible that I don’t even read it through a web browser. I never bothered communicating why I really hate advertising in RSS feeds, but there’s writeups at OnFocus and A Whole Lotta Nothing that explain my reasoning better than I could.
A nice bookmarklet for users of Bloglines that allows you to subscribe to any page without having to hit the site. Drag this to your bookmark toolbar: Subscribe with Blogines. Courtesy of warmbrain.
I’ve used feed on feeds (by Steve Minutillo) for a while now, and I tried out Bloglines for the hell of it. Now I’m using Bloglines exclusively. It has essentially the same features, but having it on a server where the feeds are pulled and dished out to all the users makes a lot more sense to me than everybody installing their own aggregator (specifically one that resides on a server). Besides, the amount of feeds I’m subscribing to is growing quickly and it was starting to kill the virtual server I rent. I think Goods switched now as well.
Chie and I went to a Tokyo blogger meeting tonight that was pulled together at the last minute by Dan Gillmor. We met at the Brasserie Ginza Lion, a nice pub/restaurant. Drinks and food were had by all, and lots of decent conversation was made concerning things like blogging as a social tool, intellectual stimulation through television (or lack thereof), and even topics such as Mac OS X. A good time.
At least 16 people showed up - way more than I expected. We had to split into two tables, so we only ended up meeting half the people. The ones I met were:
Like I said, a good time. It was extremely cool of Dan to arrange this, and I hope another meetup happens.
Matthew Mastracci of Grack.com has his RSS feed linked to an XSLT stylesheet so that when a user clicks on the feed icon they’re not presented with indecipherable garbage. That’s a nice touch.
A blog centered around learning the features of Movable Type, targeted at beginners and intermediate users.
Here’s an idea. Imagine a Perl script (or whatever) to handle your RSS feed that understands If-Modified-Since requests. Now have the Perl script only dish out items that have been added to the blog based on the “Since” date. This would save a shitload of bandwidth, and aggregators wouldn’t miss any entries at all.
Hell, this could even work alongside any existing blog installation. Just have your blogging software write out the feed as “base.rdf/xml”, and associate the index.rdf/xml files with the Perl script, which in turn processes and filters the original feed. It could work.
…if comment spam on blogs is more popular right before the monthly Google deep crawls.
Yet another essay link, this time to “Nevermind the Bollocks: Here’s the Wonder Chicken“. Awesome title aside, this is one of the best blog-centric papers I’ve ever read. Go read this. If I didn’t have a blog, this would motivate me to start one.