tahpot's blog

Leaving Blogger

2005-06-22T10:09:00.000+09:30

After only being here for a while, I'm moving over to my own domain and to WordPress.
Blogger lacks so many features, the main one being support for TrackBack's. I have moved over to my own domain as well, at chriswere.com It's been a very quick move, luckily wordpress has some support for importing blogger posts, although it looks like i'm stuck without any of the comments. I don't have time to write something to do it at the moment and probably won't be bothered in the future.
The only issue now is working out the best way to redirect subscribers to my blogger Atom feed. Blogger doesn't seem to give much control over it.

This is the last post on this blog, head on over to chriswere.com and subscribe to the feed over there.

Google taking on PayPal

2005-06-21T13:30:00.000+09:30

It appears that Google will soon be talking on PayPal in the online transaction market according to techcrunch.com (article). Google have registered the "Google Payment Corporation" and googlewallet.com has been registered (although the whois entry doesn't look much like Google to me)
PayPal currently have over 72million users so it will be no easy task for Google. Also a large number of PayPal transactions would come off the back of Ebay - what service does Google currently offer that creates online transactions? Perhaps they have some further plans for Froogle in the making?... or will start charging for some of their beta services? Actually what is more likely is they will integrate some sort of payment engine into their adsense program along with a planned classified search system.

More links: Wall Street Journal, USA Today, John Battelle

Calling all Alcoholix

2005-06-20T16:57:00.000+09:30

clockwerx has just launched alcoholix. It is powered by clockwerx's ingeniousness in conjunction with feedmap, multimap and needapub.com (cached)
So what's it do?
Simply enter an adress and it will come back with all the nearest pubs to your location, along with the nearest bloggers in your area!.... so now you can meet up with local bloggers at the local.
I think (not 100% sure) that it currently contains just South Australian pubs, but this can be easily rectified by going and adding the pubs in your local area.

Check it out.

Japanese blogging statistics

2005-06-19T19:03:00.000+09:30

I have noticed the surprising (to me at least) number of FeedTagger users that come from non-english speaking backgrounds. At the very least it has forced me to make sure the next iteration of FeedTagger has all the mult-language encodings etc. all sorted out.
Anyway, Joi Ito has pointed to some very interesting statistics on blogging and overall Internet usage in Japan. These include:

1 in 4 japanese women in their teens and 20's have a blog
72.5% of people have heard of blogs, up from 39% last year.
9.5% of Internet users use RSS Readers.

The actual presentation of these stats is available here.

I'm surprised that almost 10% of Internet users use RSS readers, purely because so many people I've spoken to that are fairly tech savvy haven't even heard of RSS... and 25% of women having their own blog is huge!
There is no doubt that RSS is here to stay and we are going to continue seeing huge growth, especially as increasing numbers of blogs are created. This growth will continue in places such as Japan and start building strong momentum over the coming 6-18months here in Australia.

Programmable search engine: Yubnub

2005-06-17T09:49:00.000+09:30

This is seriously cool: Yubnub
It's like a command line that you can send commands to that perform all sorts of operations such as:

gim "metallica" - google image search for metallica pictures
ls - show all available commands
man xyz - show man page for command xyz

and one that is really fun is tts --voice=charles "hello sir, can i have a pale ale?"

The cool bit is anyone can make their own command and add it to the system so things like this have been added:

wikip metallica - find all wikipedia entries that mention metallica
ASCII metallica - generate a huge range of ascii art for the word metallica
phpfunction - return the manual page for a specific function

For a fair sized list check out the Yubnub golden eggs page.

White Stripes: Get behind me satan

2005-06-16T18:27:00.000+09:30

The White Stripes have released another album "Get behind me satan" to help us through the winter months.
It's quite a change up from there previous rocking endeavours, but still mixing in Jack White's love of blues and skill with classic pop hooks.
They appear to already be touring the album as evident by this photo stream on flickr.

White Stripes on the front of Adelaide's street mag "DB"

MySQL and Python and Unicode

2005-06-13T18:46:00.000+09:30

I have just wasted waaaay to much time (a day) going through the inner workings of unicode, mysql, python (and twisted) - to get something working I assumed would be simple.
I'm going to document it here so I never have to go through it alll again and hopefully help a few others out along the way. Python's unicode support is quite good. For an excellent intro check out End to end unicode web applications in Python.
It turns out my issue was with MySQL. The trick is that everything everywhere should be set to UTF8. The best way to test this is run:
SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'char%';
which should result in something like:
character_set_client | utf8
character_set_connection | utf8
character_set_database | latin1
character_set_results | utf8
character_set_server | utf8
character_set_system | utf8

(having database set to latin1 seemed to be fine, but would be nice if it was utf8)

How can such a thing be achieved? I'm sure there's some settings that can be placed in my.cnf and/or startup to do the above, but I haven't found them yet (and #mysql wasn't a great help either)
My solution for now is to perform the following 3 queries when establishing a connection:
SET NAMES utf8;
SET CHARACTER SET utf8;
SET character_set_connection=utf8;

It is important to do this for all operations, inserts/selects/updates etc. I'll post a better solution when I track one down, but this works for the time being.

EDIT: With Python when establishing a database connection add the following flag: init_command='SET NAMES utf8'.
In addition set the following in MySQL's my.cnf:
default-character-set = utf8

That should fix pretty much everything to utf8 for nice i8n support :)

Future of news

2005-06-10T15:14:00.000+09:30

Mass media is in for a shake-up over the next decade or so. As people become increasingly accustomed to finding relevant news stories on the Internet, traditonal media companies are really going to struggle.

I check posts from FeedTagger every morning, before reading any newspapers etc. and came across this story from an Adelaide website. Basically last night Adelaide police raided a poker tournament in a heavy handed fashion, despit the fact the tournament had been advertised for months, had separate qualifiers run in Sydney and Melbourne casino's etc.

Anway, it became immediately obvious from the adelaide bloggers who posted about the event, that the whole thing was a bit of a farce. What was immediately obvious though was the absolute poor investigative journalism by Adelaide's major news paper - The Advertiser. Their initial story indicated the journalist spent 5 minutes talking to a cop out the front of the raid and wandered off. The Advertiser partly redeemed itself by later giving a much improved account of events.

The story here is not really important. It's that I was able to find out about a news story that happened on my front door via local bloggers. These bloggers gave eye-witness accounts of what happened and linked to others who were there. In addition bloggers link to each other, getting the reader much closer to primary sources. Traditional media generally present an account of what happened, without linking to more detailed information or revealing their sources. This last point will be a huge determining factor, bringing larger audiences to online news mediums.

Yahoo mindset

2005-06-06T11:31:00.000+09:30

via Jeremy:

Yahoo's research dpt has released Yahoo! Mindset. Using the web2 slider concept search results can be changed on the fly to indicate that you are "shopping" or doing "research". Good execution and interesting concept. This web2 r&d stuff is starting to get really exciting - does Google have anything this funky?

Lazy registration (with AJAX)

2005-06-05T08:52:00.000+09:30

Below are my thoughts on a new method of performing user registration to an AJAX web application. In reality it could be applied to any application, but ties in nicely with the AJAX work I do. There's also a possibility that such a method already exists and I haven't come across it, doing some googling though didn't bring up anything.

Anyway, I'm referring to "Lazy registration". One of the problems with a web-based application/service is forcing a user to register. On one hand you want the user to signup so you can create an account in the database and get their email address to confirm (as best as possible) their identity among other things. On the other hand it is imperative to keep the barrier of entry for new users as low as possible. Any registration forms requiring email addresses, passwords, checking an email and entering a code, all inhibit the user from going through with the registration process and generally distract from the task at hand (such as 'Subscribe to RSS Feed xyz')

Lazy Registration
How can we have the benefits of both user registration and having a low barrier of entry? The first step is to have many entry points to grab new users. In FeedTagger I have buttons that say 'Add feed' even when displayed to the general public. With a "lazy registration" model, clicking on such a button would perform the following steps:

Send a message back to server with relevant context of operation (ie: 'Add Feed xyz')
Create a default user account with blank/random username, email, password fields - along with any default settings
Automatically log this new user account it
Load new page with initial operation ('Add Feed xyz') performed and display the first page once logged in
(Optional) When logging in the user set a cookie that never expires

We now have a user that has only pressed one button, but has their own account and can begin personalising everything to suit them!

Once a user is logged in there should be visual clues pointing out the gaps in their account settings. Perhaps a question mark (?) placed next to username and email would be a good start. Clicking that will display an input box with the settings saved. A logout button should be displayed, but clicking on it without confirming your username and email should be discouraged as a user will have no way of logging back in.
I mention the option of setting a cookie that never expires to handle the users login. This allows a user to begin customising their account and save their settings for a long time over multiple browser instances, giving them the longest possible time to confirm their account settings. Much like how Google news customisation works, but with a final registration confirmation step allowing a user to move between machines and have a some privacy/security (login/logout)

Using this "Lazy registration" method we have removed all barriers to begin customising a web application for the user. Anyone can signup without even realising it, but have the option of confirming their registration by entering an email address/username. I see such a mechanism as imperative to introducing new web applications/services to a public that wants things to 'just work'.

Getting started with Nevow and LivePage

2005-06-03T15:06:00.000+09:30

I'm still working my way through the ropes of Nevow (web-app dev toolkit) and LivePage (client/server stuff) and thought I'd share a quick getting started guide.

Setup environment:

If required download and setup Python on your machine
Download and install twisted
Download and install twisted.web
Download and install nevow 0.4.1
Download my example firsttest.tac & firsttest.xhtml

Generally the easiest way to install python packages is to run "python setup.py install" (with root privileges)
To see the code run execute: "twistd -noy firsttest.tac" and twisted will start a server on port 8080. Point your browser to http://localhost:8080/

One of the first things that's important if you come from a PHP/Apache background (like myself) is url's are completely virtual when using nevow. Pointing your browser to http://localhost:8080/index.php will do nothing unless you have a function or object specified in your root document object to handle "index.php" (generally it makes sense to just have /index and have no file extensions)

I've tried to over-comment the two files included in the example. The .tac file is nothing more than a Python file with a different extension indicating it's an application that can be run with "twistd". It defines a root object that is attached to a server object. The root object defines the structure and mechanics of the root page (locahost:8080/).

So what does this little application do?
This very basic application loads a template (firsttest.xhtml) and then fills in the blanks. The template defines "slot" and "render" components that define where nevow can take over and dictate the content.
In addition we build a very simple form that when submitted calls a function in the server. The server then responds by telling the client to display an alert box with a string. That's right, the whole AJAX thing is being done in an OO fashion with clear distinction between client and server roles, with the power of Python!
Although only a primitive javscript alert() box is being displayed there is a permanent link established between the client and server allowing for instantaneous communication. Nevow comes with an example chat application called "Chatola", it's well worth getting that to run with a couple of machines and seeing the pure speed that is possible with Nevow and LivePage.

I'm still getting my head around some of the concepts here, but this seems like the ideal platform for developing future generation web applications. I'm still unsure how to structure a complete application, but I'm sure this will become clearer once writing a few test apps and walking through some more code.

Goatse in the New York Times!

2005-06-03T09:57:00.000+09:30

This picture came up this morning from Joi Ito:

The NYT story was about blogging, but in a photoshoot the blogger (Anil Dash) wore a t-shirt with the words Goatse. For more info try wikipedia:goatse

Nevow: Web application toolkit

2005-06-02T20:59:00.000+09:30

In prepartion for a large scale overhaul of FeedTagger's backend I have been looking around for an efficient way of writing a Python frontend. The backend API is going to be in Python, so I figure the front-end should be as well - for improved flexiblity and speed....

Anyway, I've come across nevow (nou-veau), a web application toolkit that can integrate nicely with the amazing twisted framework. Why is it cool?

Completely OO page rendering
Client-side (AJAX) integration with Python's livepage
Runs as stand-alone server (no apache overhead) using twisted
Excellent template system using XML with integrated data/render methods
Benefits of integration with Python and Twisted

For those serious about web development and working with the best tools it should be checked out. Some links to get started:

Download Nevow from nevow.com
Build and read the documentation in the download
A bunch of really useful links
FAQ's
If all else fails, chat to the developers on freenode:#twisted.web

Feedmap: Geoblog mapping

2005-06-02T13:39:00.000+09:30

Clockwerx has pointed out Feedmap, a new service to show a map (a la google maps) of bloggers locations. Want to find bloggers in your area? Want to find the location of a blogger you're reading? Then there's a blogmap button that can be placed on your blog.

I think the idea is right, but not too sure about the execution. I received a few server errors which put me off. Plus their mapping interface is no match for Google Maps - it's based on some Microsoft technology... In fact the whole site smells of MS, which always makes me wary.

Either way, as clockwerx points out - there's some API's and something useful could certainly come out of it. As they say 1+1 is rarely = 2

Google Adsense slow response

2005-05-31T09:38:00.000+09:30

As I'm sure many have noticed FeedTagger displays Google's Adsense advertisments. This is to prove the business model behind FeedTagger and assist paying the (ever growing) bandwidth costs.... but not all is rosy.

FeedTagger attempts to display ads that are relevant to the feeds or items currently being viewed. At the top of every page there is an iframe that loads a URL unique for the current item on display. This iframe loads Adsense along with the particular items contents, so Google can establish the context for correct ads.

Naturally the majority of the time these adverts were loaded, Google had not indexed the item on display. This resulted in blank adverts or completely out of context ads being displayed. I resolved this by simply adding a refresh of 5 seconds on the iframe because Google could establish the context within that time.

This worked quite well until about a week ago when the speed of Google slowed dramatically - to the point where it now takes up to 20-30 seconds. Such a timeframe is fine for a typical static website, but FeedTagger has millions of items, all requiring Google to check and find relevant adverts.

Why is Google suddenly so slow? I suspect it may have something to do with their google accelerator that has been pulled (some say it chewed up all their bandwidth) and also their pagerank being hacked, forcing them to make some quick action that has affected their systems.

In the meantime I'm working around for FeedTagger so relevant adverts will still be displayed. I'm sure Google will sort out their problems and get back to their usual snappy response times.

FeedTagger goes BETA

2005-05-13T16:44:00.000+09:30

After a bit over a month of flat-out work FeedTagger has finally been launched to the world in BETA form (FeedTagger blog is here: http://blog.feedtagger.com/)

Overall the launch has gone fairly well with a large number of users signing up, along with a whole bunch of feeds and tags. So far the system seems to be holding up well, there were a few minor hickups, but most are sorted out for now.

There is a ton of features that have been suggested along with many others I'm keen to implement. I'd like to thank everyone who is trying FeedTagger and all those who provided excellent feedback.

Hopefully FeedTagger will continue to grow, become more user friendly and support an increasing number of users into the future!

Semantic Web: Who should we tag today?

2005-03-28T22:33:00.000+09:30

I've been doing some further reading surrounding the semantic web. I feel FeedTagger has something important to offer and I am trying to work out how and why. Read on for my thoughts on what will make the semantic web tick...

At the moment technorati allows bloggers to specify tags that relate to particular posts they make. Sure, it's a good start, but technorati are approaching the semantic web backwards. The publisher is describing the content of the particular post which is no different to meta tags that have been around for years. I'm more interested in how other people describe the content.

A tagger of the semantic web should be an external entity looking in. I can't trust the author of an article when he says it's written about 'microsoft', but I can trust google when it has established the context of the page in relation to the other 100 pages that link to it. Even better I can trust 1000 separate individuals that have all tagged the article as 'microsoft', 'longhorn'. A certain level of trust about the content of an article can be established when others tag a souce. This is not possible when relying on the author alone.

An Irish blogger made an interesting comment backing up my theory. He says:
"I think the best part of the Technorati tagging system is the harvest done of other sources such as del.icio.us, furl and Flickr. Whenever I click into tags for Irish blogs, I find the most useful stuff coming from the self-titled tags on Flickr and the social bookmark systems to be better than the hand-rolled tags made specifically for Technorati."

If we take 1000 people and they all attempt to quantify the semantics of a particular object or data set, a computer has a wealth of knowledge previously unavailable. Not only do we know the article is about 'microsoft' we also have 10's maybe 100's of other keywords that can help establish relationships between this article and other articles with similar keywords. Similar results can be achieved through establishing context ala google, but with tagging - nothing beats a human.

Tagging our semantic web now boils down to:- "How do we get 1000 people to all describe the same object?"

People are naturally lazy, they will only go to the effort of doing something if they see some benefit in doing so. We need to develop interactive web applications that offer incentives to users for applying semantics to information. The main incentive is ease of use in finding information they have previously sought or information they want to track regularly.

del.icio.us has done this well. flickr supports tagging, but will never have such powerful semantics as the author is the tagger. There's not enough incentive for other users to go around and tag other people's photographs. I'm moving towards applying semantics to RSS/Atom feeds. What else is out there we can apply some meaning to?

FeedTagger: Progress Update

2005-03-28T12:44:00.000+09:30

After reluctantly taking FeedTagger offline due to numerous hosting issues, I've been fairly quiet. The good news though, is that I've been very busy preparing FeedTagger for re-launching with a brand new interface and many improvements.

I have been generously offered a week for free in an Adelaide data centre to test server load and bandwidth issues. This should provide some solid statistics and debugging information. To give you a rough idea, in the short time FeedTagger was operational there were over 10,000 unique feeds added. Some rough maths highlights my problem:
(10000 feeds) X (25KB average) X (24 updates/day) = 6G incoming traffic/day !

For this reason alone FeedTagger v2 will have adverts provided by Google's Adsense program. I've tried to make them prominent enough so people will click them, but non-intrusive at the same time.

As for a timeline for when FeedTagger will be back up? It's hard to say, but I'm trying to get it up ASAP. Although I'm cautious not to make it available before it's really ready. Hopefully within a week, two weeks at the latest.

To give you an idea of the frontend changes I've taken 3 screenshots:

The backend has had a bunch of improvements, with all the feed processing now being done with Python - a screenshot isn't going to highlight these though :)

Feedtagger colour scheme and layout

2005-03-17T09:00:00.000+10:30

Feedtagger is currently using a layout and colour scheme surprisingly similar to this blog. In fact I originally used this blog layout as a template to speed up prototyping the feedtagger concept.
Most of the feedback I have received has supported the layout, but I received one email commenting that he prefers the black text on white background, much like a newspaper. I think he has a valid point, there are many attractions to the simple layouts and colour schemes employed by Google.
I have no qualms about re-designing feedtagger - it will be a good opportunity to start using more screen real estate. I am concerned however that:
a) Existing users accustomed to the current look, will be turned off Feedtagger by a new design (especially so early in the piece)
b) I'm not much of a designer. I know what I want when it comes to establishing a good UI, but making it look good is not a strong point. Hence why I used an existing template in the first place.

There seem to be several options:

Do a complete re-design and make sure it doesn't look too shabby
Mould the extisting design more towards the look I want in progressive steps (hard if major colour changes occur)
Make the whole site (at least the feed display) a template much like blogger. Attempt to offer my new design and the old design as two default templates, while allowing users to build their own.

Option (3) is probably the best solution, but involves the most work. I'll keep working though my (ever growing) feature implementation list and ponder it a little more I think.

Any other suggestions?

Slashdot Effect

2005-03-15T17:24:00.000+10:30

My recent project: feedtagger.com - I am generating an alarming amount of content very quickly. I am in the process of establishing how/if I can try to get some publicity without the whole system falling over.
The main issues that need to be resolved include:

Managing the 1000's of feeds as they're entered into the system and updated every hour
Serving up very database heavy content (every search/tag/feed view is coming from a database)

I figured that the slashdot effect is a good benchmark. If feedtagger.com can survive the slashdot effect then it should be setup well enough for day-to-day operations. I've found a good article at geek.com that discusses their experiences with the /. effect that is quite interesting.

The result? With a modern web server and plenty of bandwidth it should be quite managable. The large amount of database processing involved for feedtagger.com will have a negative effect, but with a whole machine at my disposal I will have many additional options to index the database for speed.

feedtagger.com & PHP5

2005-03-11T15:50:00.000+10:30

After "launching" (aka telling a couple of people) feedtagger.com I have come across an annoying problem. I am using an RSS/Atom PHP Library called Magpie that is quite good. It uses the inbuilt XML parsing capabilities of PHP5, but unfortunately there is a bug in these XML libraries. As a result whenever my automatic cron job processes all the RSS/Atom feeds in the database it will occasionally "hang" on some feeds.
By hang it causes my hosting provider to email me saying they've cancelled all my cron jobs as their server load has jumped from 0.5% to 50% (The bug causes an infinite loop).
As the problem lies within PHP5 itself I'm in a really tough position. The bug has been fixed in CVS, but I have to wait for the next "stable" release before it is in a state that my web host will upgrade on their servers.

What am I supposed to do? At the moment I'm relegated to regularly checking if the auto-processing is working or not and flagging offending feeds to "skip".

In the meantime I guess I'll work on improving the UI and adding other cool features. (Maybe even clean up and organise the code too)

.... serves me right for wanting to use PHP5 as soon as it came out (or for not doing the whole thing in Python as I breifly considered)

feedtagger.com launched!

2005-03-09T11:33:00.000+10:30

I have just launched feedtagger.com - possibly the fastest concept to creation ever (was it less than a week?)

What's it do?

Aggregates news from unlimited sources
You can apply multiple tags to each source - helping you find what you're interested in
Can browse by feed
Server based so feeds are updated automatically so you never miss anything!
Unread items are highlighted and displayed first
Very quick and dynamic

As it was quickly churned out I still want too do the following ASAP:

Add support for importing all your existing feeds
Allow use of templates for modifiying feed display
Actually provide information on the front page explaining what feedtagger.com is and how it works

Not really sure what this is all about? Sign up for an account and then google for something that interests you. If I was into cycling I would search for:
filetype:rss cycling
or
filetype:atom cycling

Grab one of the links (ending in .rss or .atom) and place it into your account (when logged in click "feeds" under "manage"). Add any descriptive tags (perhaps "cycling,blogs") and your away!
Just refresh your feed and you should start to understand what this is all about.

Go and sign up now!

Web Application Concept

2005-03-01T17:49:00.000+10:30

I've had an idea for a while now (4-6months) of building a web application that would really extend the boundaries - much more so than gmail, google maps, flickr etc. The idea involves combining the power of web databases with rich web interfaces to provide a number of important tasks.

Just for a moment imagine yourself as the manager of a small business that has several IT requirements:

Keeping IT infrastructure costs low
Managing inventory of products
Communicating with customers through email
An online store to sell inventory

In addition your staff does not have an IT background, but is still adept with typical office and internet operations.

Current Solution
As the manager of this business you have two main options.

Employ some additional staff to build from scratch or modify off the shelf software to achieve the various requirements
Locate an external contractor to come in and build said requirements, charging two arms and two legs

These two options are very expensive for any small business, but could provide significant enhancement to the business. Especially reducing costs through using an online store and providing enhanced communication with customers via email lists etc.

Alternative Solution
Using the power of existing web technologies the manager of the business mentioned above could use an online business management service. He/She could login to www.mybusiness.com and use an online application to assist building the requirements already outlined.

The application would be similar to Dreamweaver / MS Access being run through a web browser. I could select "New" from a file menu and select from a number of pre-built templates:

Online store
Inventory manager
Mailing list centre

Each of these templates would provide a stock database structure with well established relationships and a corresponding templated web interface. Using a MS Access like interface the user could manipulate the database to add fields specific to their industry, ideally including some business logic. Perhaps they could employ an external contractor for this (cost wouldn't be prohibitive). Next they move to an "Interface" tab where they use a Dreamweaver like interface to restructure the look and feel of their online store - in addition adding support for the new elements now in the database.

Almost overnight this business is now able to do business over the internet, track customers purchasing habits and send emails to regular customers with the latest specials. Additionally the organisation could use very cheap computers (1-2Ghz era) on any Operating System (no MS licensing fees) to run their whole business through a web interface.

Problems
I have only very briefly outlined this application without going into too much detail. The complexities in building a desktop application such as Dreamweaver are quite large, let alone trying to do it within a web browser environment.

A lot of working I've been doing has revolved around DHTML with XMLHttpRequest communication, but I doubt that could really withstand such a complex application. Some sort of Flash/XUL basis would probably be much better suited to the task

Example interface

2005-02-28T23:21:00.000+10:30

I couldn't resist and am demoing up an example interface for a hypothetical web-based RSS reader.
Features to note:

Filters on the right work just like Google's tag concept. Each RSS feed can have multiple "tags" associated with it
The major filters are at the top with more specific ones listed at the bottom.
Specific filters can be joined together with the current filter(s) displayed at the top
The current feeds to display will be shown in a two column format with the source and date listed
A link to the original URL should exist on the main heading of each feed item
All of this would be dynamic - no page reloads
If a feed has a new listing, it will magically appear via XMLHttpRequest (or perhaps mod_pubsub)

The bottom right (where I have left the links) will probably house some utility functions such as; manage feeds, manage tags, export feeds

PS: Notice the similarities in design? ;)

The demo is here

New tsunami pictures

2005-02-28T13:53:00.000+10:30

New tsunami pictures have been found and are up on CNN. They show the wave as it approaches Khao Lak, Thailand. Unfortunately the couple died during the tsunami.

CNN Pictures

RSS (Again)

2005-02-28T13:22:00.000+10:30

Just to follow on from my previous post about RSS. I'm currently using SAGE, which appears to use Firefox's bookmarks to store links to my RSS feeds. When I click on the feed it downloads it and applies a style to the XML from my local machine and displays it through a tab in Firefox.

It actually seems a bit silly for me to use this application, when I could get the same functionality with a very simple web application. Perhaps www.myfeeds.com/chris would display a nice interface with all the latest headlines from my feeds - that would update automatically without reloading. This would allow me to read my feeds from any computer and also export an XML file of all my feeds!

... I might just go register that domain ;)

5 minute update after post: A quick google search came up with the following services that already exist:

Oh well - I may have to at least try a couple out

15 minute update: It appears that (as I suspected) these services do their job, but not brilliantly and there is a lot of complexity. Bloglines was ugly plus it used frames. Rojo was a little better offering a nice pre-determined list of feeds, but was overly complex and appeared bloated.
Maybe I could hack together a prototype of a Rich Blog App on a weekend.

New Blog - Welcome

2005-02-27T16:34:00.000+10:30

Welcome to my new blog.

Why another one when I host my own already? I feel left out in the bloggersphere and want to use the same tools as most other bloggers. I have been doing a lot of work lately on my projects; QWAD Framework, QWAD Chat and now in search of a cool project to put these tools to use (At least the QWAD Framework)

I have a theory that if I use blogger and other similar "trendy" web applications/solutions that I will find problems that may require fixing or think of a cool way to bring together various young technologies.

This brings me to my new adoption of RSS. I have finally succumbed and started to use an RSS client to track blogs and other feeds (news/sport/tv guides). Perhaps I will finally start interacting with the various members of the web community instead of pilchering their ideas and hacking out my own code (that no-one knows about and uses)

While setting this up I had two thoughts:

Is it self indulgent to subscribe to your own RSS feed? (And no I haven't done that)
Maybe I should setup an RSS feed so that others can see what feeds I have subscribed too? (A different XML format would probably be more appropriate)