Site News

So I alluded to some problems I was having when combining Planet d00dism and Netflix‘s activity RSS feeds. However, based upon how the planet site currently looks, I overestimated the the effect that the deficiency in their feeds would pose. You may notice that the first entries of Netflix are in a big clump. Obivously, all those movies didn’t go out and leave at the same time. This appears to have happened because Netflix doesn’t use the optional pubDate field of the RSS 2.0 format. ...

After thinking a lot about how to implement my own Erikkregator, Marshall recommended RSSMix. Now, that was an excellent suggestion. However, that only solves the problem of the RSS feed. I wanted to have a webpage to go along with it though. At that point, if I was going to be programming with an RSS parsing library, I might as well be mixing my own RSS feed. That sounded extremely painful though. That’s why I was glad to come across a slick piece of software called Planet. ...

Tiger users can user Jabber usernames with iChat AV 3.0. What’s the point of that? Well, AOL can’t listen in on you for one. Second, it’s decentralized. Should AOL go belly up, we’d all be fairly screwed. With Jabber, a single service provider can go down or disappear and everyone else can keep jabbering. Jabber also allows for chat gateways. For example, you can talk to MSN users through it. Melvin Rivera has written an excellent tutorial to get this set up. ...

I promised a feature review last night and between a not so great commute, reinstalling software, and upgrading the Pismo, I never got around to playing with Spotlight, nevermind take screenshots or write it up. In fact, I barely had time to catch House. I’d promise to get around to it tonight, but I have a softball game, some email regarding getting my own place to reply to, and a W-9 to fill out.

The transition from iPowerweb to Dreamhost is complete. I got an email from iPowerweb telling me that they were happy to renew my subscription to their service for another year. Well, considering I’d already migrated the site I thought that might be a little silly. I had to call them and let them know that they were fired. As I sat there on the phone listening to muzak, I went over how this conversation would go in my head. I figured that they might ask why and I thought that I’d just mention all my issues from last summer. I’m not an unreasonable person, but after having to explain to their brain dead staff half a dozen times that my problem was not an inherent problem in WordPress or any of the plugins I was using with it. If their attitude was going to be that the problem was that I didn’t use their provided software, I knew I’d be having a problem. ...

The transition is nearly complete. The weblog transition is done, now the other parts of the site must be fixed.

I will not be doing any lame April Fools Jokes on this site today. Sorry. The Management

I got an email from Don MacAskill, CEO and Chief Geek (his words, not mine ;)) over at Smugmug. He informed that they are working on feeds for their content, which is absolutely terrific. I’ll be able to add more pictures and eliminate my little lack of inline-block support problem. As a little side-note, Don was also very friendly in his email, so anyone passionate about sharing their photos should check out their service.

I’ve started work on the Tag Central project I talked about previously. It currently uses the various RSS feeds that the suppported sites spit out. Unfortunately, this also means no Technorati tags. Unless I’m totally out of my mind, they don’t supply easily accessed RSS feeds. Right now, I’m not using a database, but instead just using the standard file based caching built into MagpieRSS which is processing all the feeds for me. Space may become an issue if this site becomes popular. I’d hate to not cache, but as I’m not getting paid for this yet, I can’t afford to use gigantic amounts of space. ...

Listed under Pages and Site Sections are some new additions to the site. I’m giving you all the tools to stalk me online. You can see what I’m doing with 43 Things, the music, movies, and games I have in my library, if I’m sitting in front of computer with the webcam, the movies I’m getting from Netflix, an assortment of pictures at Flickr, and now the music I’m listening to at the music section. Web services at 43 Things, Netflix, and Flickr supply the data in those respective sections. The library is powered by Delicious Library and DeliciWeb. The webcam is powered by EvoCam. Finally, Recent Tunes supplies the data for the music section. ...