Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Category: Online

  • About RSS

    Warning: technical entry. Feel free to skip if you’re so inclined. Today I’m talking about RSS.

    RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it’s essentially a format for delivering data and content in an XML (read: structured) format. What kind of content? Well, any kind, really. Right now, the types of content you’ll most likely see RSS being used for are weblog entries and news stories (although some might argue that those are essentially the same thing). The important thing is that if you follow the appropriate standards and set up your RSS file accordingly, then any program designed to read/parse/process RSS can deal with it.

    The most striking thing I discovered when setting up the RSS feed for my site was how easy RSS is. I was literally able to build the RSS template file and write the code to parse content from my database into it in less than one day. And you know what? It worked the first time. Yes, it’s that simple. It really is. Dave Winer keeps hammering this point. He’s right on.

    In the last few months I’ve been getting more and more into the world of weblogs and the technologies behind them and the more I read, the more potential uses I see for RSS.

    For example:

    • Setting up an RSS channel on The Brew Site that lists all the recently added or updated breweries.
    • Setting up another RSS channel on my own site here for the free ebooks page—listing all the available ebooks, or newly added ones.
    • eBay. RSS channels by category, or even custom RSS feeds based on keyword parameters.

    Want more examples? Check out Tim Bray’s excellent suggestions.

    So, RSS is an XML file, and it’s really easy and intuitive to set up and use; what’s to prevent me (or anyone else) from setting up my own XML file with my own format and set of “standard” fields and metadata? Well, nothing, really—that’s the beautiful thing about XML. However, were I to set up my own XML data delivery format, who would use it? And how would they use it, much less find out about it? I’d have to generate a critical mass of interest to get people to view it, to write programs to parse it, to support it. Personally, I don’t have that kind of time (or mindshare) to devote to it, though it could be done. (It is being done, in fact. Check out this site to find out more about an alternative format to RSS a bunch of developers are, er, developing.)

    Speaking for myself, though, why bother? RSS is already here; it’s dead-simple; it’s widely deployed; it’s extendable; it’s being used. I can write software to produce RSS feeds from all manner of content and know that it can be parsed and utilized by other software that can (and will) do very cool things with my content that I might never think up.

    Goddamn, that’s cool.

  • Friendster

    I signed up for a new online tool/technology today called Friendster. Maybe you’ve heard of it; it’s “an online community that connects people through networks of friends” for meeting new people. So far I haven’t really figured out what it’s supposed to do for me, because the site is still very much in beta: most of the pages were slow-loading, the people search didn’t give me any results (they’re rumored to have 300,000+ members, so I’d expect some results), and the site just stopped responding to me after several minutes of use each time I tried.

    Perhaps the slowness is due to increased exposure to curious users after the write-up it got in Wired by Xeni Jardin (that’s such a great William Gibson-esque name), though I doubt it. I’ll play with it some more, and report what I find.

    Interestingly, what got me to Friendster was a link on Robert Scoble’s weblog for Tribe.net, which is another beta social/community website that’s making the rounds—and Xeni Jardin (there she is again) on Boing Boing talking about Tribe.net and writing that she won’t be “ditching her Friendster account anytime soon”—all of which made me curious. So I’ll probably go and try out Tribe.net now, too, because Friendster is slow.

    How’s that for making connections and providing links? I think the ultimate social software application is the blog.

  • FUD Alert

    There’s this site called Technofile written by some guy named Al Fasoldt that has this article that I thought was pretty FUDish. I found it because my wife sent me a link to online news source Syracuse.com that had picked up this article. It’s about alleged spyware Hotbar, and after reviewing the article, I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that this Al Fasoldt doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

    Hotbar is apparently similar to the Google Toolbar (which I use at work, and it’s great): a browser plugin that offers information on related sites to ones you are browsing, and additionally allows you to install skins that replace the flat gray on the Internet Explorer toolbar with overlaid graphic images. Okay, no big gotchas here so far.

    But to quote the article:

    But it’s actually monitoring the surfing habits of all users and reporting this information back to a central site so it can be marketed to anyone who wants to buy it.

    Hmmm. Sounds like any other website to me. Then the article mentions a problem with slower browsing and crashing Windows, and that there are problems with popup blockers—Hotbar still lets some popups through, apparently. Interesting, but still doesn’t really raise any red flags.

    Then the article begins spouting off about some “startling admissions” about what Hotbar does, admitted by Hotbar (gasp!) on their own website.

    This is funny: it’s a direct quote from the article again, itself quoting the Hotbar site:

    Here are excerpts from the Hotbar site:

    “For every Web page you view . . . the Hotbar software transmits and stores the following information from your computer to Hotbar: Your IP Address, which may include a domain name; the full URL of the Web page you are visiting; general information about your browser; general information about your computer’s operating system; your Hotbar cookie number . . . and the date and time the above information is logged.”

    Excuse me? This is exactly what every webserver on the internet does! There’s no conspiracy here, no unethical behavior on the part of Hotbar from this excerpt, this is how the web works.

    At this point I pretty much decided this Fasoldt guy has no business writing about technology. All I can see he’s doing is spreading FUD without any real knowledge of how things operate.

    (Out of curiosity, I checked out Hotbar’s privacy policy. It’s pretty standard, and it’s pretty clear that any additional information they collect about you (aside from standard web log data) is something you would know about, since you have to provide it yourself in the registration forms. I know a thing or two about this type of browser application, too, and I’m pretty sure it’s not spyware any more than the Google Toolbar is.)

    Hey Al—you better watch out! I’m collecting your IP address, the pages and files requested, the browser you’re running, and where you came from too! And I track the dates and times! I even track what you search for when you use the search box feature on my site!!

    And oh man, you better avoid any search engine sites, like Google, because not only can they track all those things, they can also track every search term you’ve ever tried, and if they wanted to, they could track what sites you visited from the results list they gave you!!

    Moron.

  • GeoURL

    I just found a neat site: GeoURL ICBM Address Server. You register the latitude and longitude of your web site (or your location if the web server housing your site is elsewhere, as in my case) with GeoURL, and they will then show you all the other websites they have registered in proximity to you. Neat!

    Right off the bat I see that within 4 miles of me is UtterlyBoring.com, a blog site run by another local computer geek.

    Damn, this is what the internet is all about.

  • No clever title

    I love the irony in this Slashdot posting: “XML Co-Creator says XML Is Too Hard For Programmers“. Reads to me like a title The Onion would publish.

    Anyway. The Slashdot post led me to Tim Bray’s weblog, which is pretty cool to me. (But then, I’m a geek and this probably won’t be as cool to you.) This is the guy who helped invent XML. His blog posts look pretty insightful and/or entertaining, and I rather like the design of the site. Simple. Uses CSS for all the layout, no HTML tables. Nice. I need to brush up on my CSS.

    On another note, I’m finally re-launching The Brew Site. I’m working behind the scenes to get all the PHP working and the site active, but I figure if I don’t do this now, I probably never will…

  • Clearing out the Month

    The end of the month is here already? Wow. Turn away for a moment, and the year’s already a sixth over.

    Interesting fact I learned this week in a Wired magazine article about the file-sharing software Kazaa: It’s a company decentralized and scattered around the globe: software code is housed in Estonia, the servers are in Denmark, the domain is registered in Australia, and the corporation— or pseudo-corporation, as it were— is located in the tiny South Pacific island of Vanuatu.

    The part I especially found interesting was Vanuatu itself, which is billed as a tax haven with a strict code of secrecy. Several years ago (okay, along the lines of 10 years ago!), I had a story idea that would involve this obscure little nation I found in an almanac that nobody had every really heard of before, but of course I never really did anything with it, other than file a bit of knowledge about the country away into some dark corner of my brain.

    So now, it seems a bit prescient (only to me, of course, since I never mentioned this story idea to anyone) to find this new stuff out about Vanuatu. It gets the idea gears turning again, and I’m thinking I should blow the dust off this story notion and see how well it dovetails with these new insights.

    Also this week we had a close encounter with the W32.Opaserv.Worm virus on my wife’s computer. Damn thing had been infected with three variants (in the C:Windows directory were three separate .EXE files of the virus: “brasil.exe”, “alevir.exe” and “scrsvr.exe”), and since this machine is running Windows ME (I hate Millenium Edition!!), you had to jump through four times as many hoops to kill the virus as you would for any other system. Watch out for this little bugger. It’s a pain in the ass.

    And how come nobody has registered the sweet domain mybandersnatch.com? 15 bucks on directNIC, people! (Ten points to you if you actually know what a “bandersnatch” is.)

  • Tribute to Gharlane

    A post on Wil Wheaton’s Soapbox made me think of this.

    If you had ever spent any amount of time on Usenet prior to 2001, especially in the geek-populous (hey, I’m a geek, so I can say that) groups relating to science fiction, then you’ve probably read posts from Gharlane of Eddore. As a Usenet poster, he was probably the smartest, most prolific, and most opinionated person I’ve ever come across on Usenet, before and since. Reading his posts were always worth the time, and it’s fair to say that in many ways, Gharlane was Usenet culture.

    Sadly, he died in June of 2001.

    I’ll just quote from the post on Wil’s site:

    *sigh* I miss Gharlane…

  • Beer & Wiki

    I just finished up making a batch of beer, an English Old Ale that I’ll be giving to my Dad for his birthday this year. This is the second beer in as many months that I’ve brewed, and I’ve already got plans for at least two, maybe three more: a Pumpkin Ale (I used to brew this every year around Halloween), a wheat beer for my Mom’s birthday (perhaps a blackberry wheat), and I’ve been thinking about a barleywine in December. Though I’ve been thinking about experimenting with the style and using wheat malt instead of barley malt— a “weizenwine” or something.

    Here is an extremely cool site: Wikipedia.org. It uses the (relatively) new concept/technology of the “wiki web,” and is essentially an online, freely editable encyclopedia. And by “freely editable” I really mean freely editable— anyone (anyone!) “can edit any article right now, without even having to log in” (in their words). It’s true. I had edited their Beer page and added an entry for Barleywine, then added and edited the very page for Barleywine myself, just today.

    And, it’s collaborative. Within three hours of my creating the Barleywine article, someone else had edited it and added links. What more can I say? Check it out.

    Random Web Link: BookCrossing – I just love this concept. Right along the lines of Where’s George?

  • Wayback to Portland

    Went on a business trip to Portland today (for Alpine Internet Solutions, the company I work for) to meet with a new client we recently signed. It’s a big project, potentially high profile… though I probably shouldn’t mention who they are yet. I don’t want to attract the wrong kind of attention too soon…

    Here’s a cool link: The Internet Archive, featuring the Wayback Machine. They’ve been taking “snapshots” of websites for a number of years now (in association with Alexa) that you can search for and view. So you can check out what your favorite website looked like in days past. Pretty nifty!

    Random Web Link: Tilt of the hat to my bro: WildStorm Comics.

  • I’m Batman

    Bat-Sandwich
    So on ReasonablyClever.com there is this Flash-based applet called the Mini-Mizer which allows people to build little custom Lego people out of all sorts of parts. Clearly, I’ve been playing with it.

    The coolest part about it is some wickedly neat things like Star Wars and comic book superhero parts, and some utterly non-sequitous things like some of the items you can place in your Lego person’s hands: a large drumstick, a tennis racket, an electric guitar.

    Needless to say, it’s been eating up my evening, so instead of various other things I had a mind to do, I’ve been sucked into a hilariously simple activity with endless permutations. Ah, viral marketing!

    Everyone should visit Wil Wheaton Dot Net for bringing the Mini-Mizer to everyone’s attention.