Year: 2002

Linux RSS aggregator search

I’m looking for an RSS aggregator.

I’ve been using HotSheet recently, until I discovered it can’t handle Dive Into Mark‘s RSS 2.0 feed. (There’s no report when a feed fails to load–why have a log file if you’re not going to log to it?–so it took quite a while to determine where the problem lay.) Peerkat can’t handle 2.0 either; at least it reports the number of “bad” feeds, but it doesn’t give a reason–it’s wrong anyway, because if there’s any feed that’s going to be valid, it’s Mark’s. (I’ve also decided, based on the debugging experience I had with it, that I hate reading Python code.)

Amphetadesk does nice things, like conditional HTTP GET, but doesn’t do a lot of the nice things the others will, such as interleave items from different feeds, distinguish old items, limit their displayed length or allow them to be deleted. (Some of these are in the TODO list, but they’re not scheduled for a particular release. Speaking of which, there hasn’t been a release for several months now.)

Straw looks the most promising, but I haven’t upgraded to GNOME 2.0 yet so it’s out for now. Lots of Python, so again I won’t be much of a contributor. I do like that the release changelog is available in RSS (although HotSheet can’t handle RSS 0.94 either, so that feed goes into Amphetadesk too). The time to upgrade may be coming soon, and I will admit to having set a precedent–I replaced my DVD player because I couldn’t watch a certain movie.

Older

You’re older than you’ve ever been
And now you’re even older
And now you’re even older
And now you’re even older
You’re older than you’ve ever been
And now you’re even older
And now you’re older still.

Today’s blog entry

Doonesbury cartoon

Garry Trudeau, Doonesbury

Frame 1
ZIPPER'S BUDDY
What's that?

ZIPPER
Today's blog entry.

Frame 2
ZIPPER'S BUDDY
Get out--you have a web log?

ZIPPER
Yup.  My daily take on what's going on in the world!

Frame 3
ZIPPER'S BUDDY
Wow... that's impressive, dude.  I had no idea...

Frame 4
ZIPPER'S BUDDY
Wait, don't you have to have something to say?

ZIPPER
A common misconception.

Tuesday Night Music Club

Tuesday, October 1

Local bassist Andrew Downing and his group The Great Uncles of the Revolution, at a nice little church in west London.

I’m familiar with Andrew from his stint with Lenni Jabour, and have become a fan of his (and his fellow Uncles Jesse Zubot, Steve Dawson and Kevin Turcotte). Nominally a jazz quartet–bass, guitar, violin and trumpet–they did a full set of original music, followed by a version of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf that was just plain cool.

Tuesday, October 8

Local folk(?) trio Sirens, at the dedication of the Wolf Performance Hall at London’s new central library.

I’m still not sure just how I got invited to this, but I’m not about to complain. Donna, Amber and Jo-Ann did a short set, followed by speeches from the various donors and officials involved in getting the hall built, followed by a Sirens finale. It’s a beautiful location, and there’s no better group than Sirens to have christened it officially. More money in the room than I could count, from Norton Wolf (the hall’s namesake) to the Jefferys (local benefactors) to Lindsey Elwood (the head of the downtown business association) to lots of other names and families I can’t recall.

Tuesday, October 15

Dayna Manning at the newly-painted Club Phoenix.

This is going to happen in about half an hour, along with Holly McNarland and Wide Mouth Mason. I’m not going to be there… something about picking up my parents after their three-week holiday in Slovakia… but I did buy her sophomore CD this evening, and it’s good. Hope she’s going to be back in the area sometime soon. (Dayna, if you’re out there, soon means before another five years pass!) The last time I saw her was when she opened for Colin James on a rainy afternoon at Harris Park–I stayed through the rain to listen to her, then left before James took the stage–so a solo show in her hometown, which is only an hour away, would be just the ticket.

Not about Viking songs or Hormel products

Mark Wickens noticed the same thing that I did today, bogus referrers in his webserver log. Where I just blocked the hosts manually in my firewall rules, apparently he’s making some changes to his Apache config. (The entry has since been deleted; however, he let me know that the Apache changes were similar, just using the Order and Deny rules.)

Hunting for others who’ve seen this, I found a post from Rafe Colburn (via Daypop, which is actually working today) that says I’m not sure what the expected return on such spam is, or why they’d bother with it, but I am somewhat intrigued. He also found this Kuro5hin entry from last year.

Mark has noticed spammers previously and dealt with them in his linkback scripts: There is some attempt made to screen out search engines, bogus referrers, or referrers that no longer link to me for some reason. (The purpose of this is to track conversations and rewards links; people who link to me and then remove the link do not deserve to be rewarded. You know who you are.)

Finally, Stuart Langridge makes reference to the problem in passing, but his post is mostly about Pingback.

Pingback

Ian Hickson has been going on for a while about Pingback. The spec says there are six known implementations; one of these is a server for Movable Type by Stuart Langridge, but I defy anyone to find it on his site. If it’s only for private use, I don’t mind, but in that case why advertise it… and if it’s already written, what does this mean?

(If it sounds like I want something for nothing… well, I guess I do, although I’ll provide whatever I can in return in the form of bug reports, patches, etc. As a friend’s e-mail signature says, humans are tool users, and I’m nothing if not human.)

Not that it matters, of course–trackbacks and pingbacks are just a big popularity contest anyway, right?

The Diurnal Record

We’ve decided to start writing our entries in first person plural (the royal we). Those who find our new style annoying, we believe, need to deal with it and move on. At least we don’t have meaningless graphics and snarky references to others all over the place.

We aren’t XHTML and CSS experts. (We don’t mind taking potshots at those who are, however.) While we’re not above a little self-promotion, our primary goal is simple: to learn about and use Web standards correctly and effectively. We enjoy reading others’ opinions as much as our own, but we won’t fail to call them out on the (rare) occasions when we disagree.

We’re about finished for now, because our head hurts. We know now that this affectation is why some people produce an off-putting holier-than-thou impression. If we write any more like this we’re afraid we’ll freeze this way.