Archive for October, 2007

Random tips & tools (nerd alert)

Tuesday, October 30th, 2007

Nothing ground-breaking here, but I wish someone had told me about these things sooner. Maybe these will help some of you out. Firefox ctrl+1 . . . ctrl+n will switch to that specific tab. ctrl+t (new tab), ctrl+k (search), ctrl+l (address bar) and ctrl+w (close tab) are also musts. You can add new items to [...]

Why it’s hard to work on a feed reader

Thursday, October 25th, 2007

It’s not the writing of the code. It’s not the fetching and parsing of the feeds. It’s not dealing with daylight savings time and encoding issues. It’s not any of that. It’s because you’re always sitting in front of an abundance of interesting things to read. Every time you try to test the latest feature, [...]

Commons Question Time

Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007

I’ve recently begun dvr’ing the weekly Prime Minister Q&A session at the British House of Commons. If you don’t watch it, it’s a half hour long and it’s on CSPAN Wed. mornings at 7am (thus the need for the dvr’ing). I highly recommend it to anyone that either loves politics or enjoys watching skilled trash [...]

RSS is still in its infancy and now there’s proof

Monday, October 15th, 2007

Google Reader recently made the number of subscribers of each feed available to anyone doing a feed search. The results are very interesting. First I’d like to point out that the people that are going around trying to frantically put together leaderboards (like Techcrunch) are wasting their time. The numbers for certain feeds are highly [...]

Going for the win-lose is a bad sign for Google

Wednesday, October 10th, 2007

Valleywag just wrote about something that’s been bothering me for a few weeks now. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url= http%3A%2F%2Fwww.smellypoop.com%2Fpoop.html&ei=7xAM R62WC5mIhAPn3I0w&usg=AFQjCNFsw83KR3JmGnnBi_n89GtI dgWgFw&sig2=Th-qrd3nEEx_368yjwK7cA Google has stopped linking directly to sites in their main search results and is instead passing each url through a really long, gnarly redirect. This is something Yahoo! has been doing for a long time and it’s [...]