Posts
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Rhode Island Government Press Releases
I made the Rhode Island Government Press Releases feed of the day at Feedster today. Because everyone should be intimately familiar with the goings on in the smallest state in the US? No, not at all. I put it up because I wanted to showcase a use of RSS somewhere outside of the geekery I’ve been involved in all week long (not that there’s anything wrong with geekery mind you!). Here’s some of the description from the RSS info page on the Rhode Island website:
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"Just" Use HTTP
I heard that the “Just” Use HTTP session by Sam Ruby was good (it was the first day of ETech, which I missed). Not to fear! The slides for the session are online. They talk about a bunch of issues that go in and around trying to use HTTP - character encodings, URL encodings, defaults, case of specifiers, where markup is valid in documents. Working with RSS one quickly becomes intimately familiar with the differences between XML processing as practiced between components of your own application and processing of documents out on the Internet. Notice I don’t say XML processing out on the Internet. Apparently there’s no such thing. So many documents out there are nonvalidating so often that it’s not even worth trying to process them with a standard XML parser.
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Excluding Sites from Feedster Searches
Gregory Blake is one of the latest to complain about all the garbage postings coming out of blogspot.com. That issue was part of the motivation for putting up the changes yesterday to detect result sets dominated by single sources. Of course that only helps if you’re using the website for your searches. But there are a bunch of other tools (like NetNewsWire) that provide shortcuts for subscribing to search feeds. In order to exclude blogspot all you have to do is append -site:blogspot.com to your searches. Here’s a screenshot of what that would look like in NetNewsWire 2.0 beta:
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Coming Home from ETech
This is my post from the plane on the way home from ETech. It was just a day trip, so we’re headed back to Menlo Park already. It would have been great to hang out for longer, but there’s feeds to get indexed and tools to get written. I wanted to get my overall impressions down. Something that Niall said at one point is that he likes to try to put stuff online that really gives people a feel for what living in Silicon Valley is like. I think that’s a great goal to have at times, sharing the experience. So here’s my post trying to sum up what it’s like to go to ETech. Understanding of course that my take on the whole thing might be biased because I’m working with a relatively well known company right now, and I went with Russ, who’s apparently a rock star these days (thanks for introducing me to everyone Russ!).
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Some Changes in the Feedster UI - Detect Dominating Sources
We pushed out some changes to the front end at Feedster. For example, take a look at this search for “slashdot”. If the results haven’t changed by the time you read that, you get a hint on the top of the results page saying that most of the results are from a single source. Namely slashdot.org. And it gives you some links there to either exclude the site, or list only results from that site. The underlying features necessary to do that have been in there, but now we detect the condition and give some links to do what we think someone would want to do in response. We’ve been getting lots of feedback that some searches are dominated by a single source, and in general they’re a source that would better be ignored. So here’s a way to filter the results easily when that happens. And it’s discoverable, not a hidden option that someone has to go looking for, it’s right there when you need it most (hopefully). So does that work out well? Let us know. Are there other conditions we should be picking up?
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Hardare Hacks from the Farside notes
They’re here
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The Easier, Faster Route to Building Mobile Applications
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Introduction to Yahoo! Search Web Services
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Python in your Pocket
Erik Smartt about Mobile Python.
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Mobile Computing On the Edge
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