Author: Nick

The good and bad at Facebook

So Facebook doesn’t want to play nice and just give you RSS feeds for a user’s status updates. Used to be you could do that, but not so much any longer. It appears you may be able to generate a status feed using the Graph API, but that’s seriously overkill for my needs. Besides, who wants to write a graph parser when RSS parsers are a dime a dozen?

At least they haven’t nuked the user notifications RSS feed. Not yet, at least. Once they do, there’s always this.

So long RSS?

I’ve been tinkering with pulling all of my generated content on other sites into a single, browsable, About Me kind of page here on SRT. On the flip side, I’ve been toying with how to create a nice portal that collects all of the various bits of content people I like create on various social media sites so i can participate more precisely in these sites. READ: be more private about what I consume from Facebook and its kin.

So imagine my surprise when I read this on Metafilter. Mozilla is killing their browser support for automatic RSS feed discovery. Because, ostensibly, people don’t use RSS.

Hrm.

I would complain but I no longer use Mozilla browsers and the browser I use doesn’t support auto-discovery either. Which is sad. On the other hand, I already have more incoming RSS traffic than I can conceivably manage. Combining it with email has the benefit of helping me scan news more quickly but the drawback of making inbox management daunting.

So I’d say that RSS isn’t really dead. I’d agree with the article that there are better ways of integrating RSS with standard browser behavior. I also agree that the browser doesn’t make the best RSS client. I would argue, however, that the browser is the best way to auto-discover RSS and that pulling this feature is kind of short-sighted given that there isn’t really a hue and cry to disappear that little orange button from the location bar.

Momma’s got a brand new detergent

Listened with whatever word it is that describes amusement crossed with shock and dismay to this NPR story about phosphate-free dishwasher detergent on my way in to work this morning. One Mrs. Sue Wright of Austin, Texas, single-handedly made my day when she flexed her reasoning prowess thusly:

I’m angry at the people who decided that phosphate was growing algae. I’m not sure that I believe that.

You have to listen to the story to get the full effect of the delivery of that line because, man, it’s glorious. I’ve listened twice now, mostly because I’m sure I just keep missing the part where NPR enumerates Mrs. Wright’s biochemistry credentials. At least they did us the honor of not correcting Mrs. Wright’s grammatically interesting sentence.

PandoraJammin’

In which our humble narrator lays out an ambitious web portal plan under the guise of a paltry review of PandoraJam.

Just today I decided I’m making a commitment to keep iChat open when I’m online just because it seems like I need more distractions in my life. nickspictsatbfp in the event you’re in the same frame of mind… Anyway, this created the need to have my status message be updated with what I’m currently listening to. In iTunes, you get this for free. In Pandora–what I’m always plugged in to–you don’t. Enter PandoraJam, a useful stand-alone app to listen, scrob, and update. Free version seems to do everything I need so we’re all good on that front.

The upshot of all of this it seems is a strong urge to rearrange stuff on my vanity domain (the very same one you’re reading this blog post from). I want to keep the blog but would like to rebrand and rename it I think. Primarily, though, I want to create a dynamic about me page that pulls from all of my various online presences into a portal of shameless self-promotion. Kind of like Facebook, only without it being on Facebook. I also want to write a new portal for myself that pulls from around the web into a single page that I can use as a springboard.

It’s not a new idea by any means. My first web page did the same basic thing. The coolness of this one, however, is that it is more aggregator than springboard. It should also help clean up my inbox as I presently consume > 500 RSS posts a day via my collection of feeds. I do this because I want to archive the damn things, but, after a few years of usage, I haven’t really used the archive in any meaningful way.

Besides, I’m feeling sad about the decline in my webmonkey skills, having primarily written C# and Java the last few years. I haven’t the faintest clue as to CSS and HTML5 support in modern browsers, much less the degree to which they successfully implement W3C standards. In all, this would be a useful learning experience now.

So…we’ll see how far any of this goes given Cataclysm went live earlier today and the holidays are just around the corner.

2NP6 Coffeenomics

Historically:
Three coffee pots, two regular and one decaf = one half-filled decaf, one empty regular pot sitting on a burner that is on and one nearly empty regular pot

This week:
Two coffee pots, one regular and one decaf = one half-filled decaf and one regular with barely enough coffee to cover the bottom of the pot when I go get coffee. wonder how we ended up short one pot…

Today:
Four coffee pots, two regular and two decaf = one half-filled decaf, one regular pot with half a coffee mug’s worth and two empty pots sitting on the counter

Every single damn day:
I start a pot of regular coffee and then go wandering around the campus at work looking for a floor that is better able to manage it’s coffee supply/demand.

Corollary:
Take up drinking decaf as there’s always half a pot laying about no matter the time of day.

While at lunch…

Passed by some teapartier peeps on my way to lunch today. Reading their signs reminded me of a little poem I have hanging on my cubical wall. This little ditty came from a Mad magazine published at some point in my childhood–a photocopy of which I’ve lugged around to every cubical job since, roughly, the turn of the century. I’ll reproduce it here:

The Super Patriot
See the Super Patriot
Hear him preach how he loves his country.
Hear him preach how he hates “Liberals”…
And “Moderates”…and “Intellectuals”…
And “Activists”…and “Pacifists”…
And “Minority Groups”… and “Aliens”…
And “Unions”…and “Teenagers”…
And the “Very Rich”…and the “Very Poor”…
And “People With Foreign-Sounding Names”.
Now you know what a Super Patriot is.
He’s someone who loves his country
While hating 93% of the people who live in it.

I loved Mad as a kid.