Month: August 2003

An Even Non-Funkier RSS 2 Template

I gave Brad’s Non-Funky MT RSS 2 Template a try but it was still too funky for my aggregator, which choked on the resulting feed.

So here it is folks, an even non-funkier template.

Note that it requires Brad’s very excellent MTIfEmpty plugin.

Update 2003-09-12 We’ve incorporated a timezone fix as described by Diego. This uses an RFC-822 timezone plugin from John Gruber

I’ve overhauled my RSS feed and autodiscovery info. I’ve also, I hope, fixed the feed so that items without titles will load correctly into Radio. Finally, I’ve changed the permalink structure so that the date appears in it. I may yet still tweak the permalinks so that all posts from a given day appear on a single page. One step at a time.

Two views of GCC

Two quotes from this Infoworld article about the SCO case:

“The OpenServer compiler is crap. Without (the GCC) they would be up the creek,” said Hans Anderson, the director of software development with Price Data Systems in Louisville, Kentucky.

The proprietary world would have created adequate alternatives to the GCC, had the free software not driven development tool companies out of that market, [Jay Davidow, a reseller with Winnipeg, Manitoba’s Profit Master Canada Inc] noted. “You had companies that made developer tools, but where are they today? They don’t exist.”

More on deletionless aggregator reading


The deletionless reading adventure continues. I’m using the Radio timestamps to see where I left off. I scan down the page until I hit a familiar timestamp. It’s working well.

This strategy doesn’t work as well when you’re adding subscriptions, since you get a big chunk of new stories from each source, potentially spanning days or months. That tends to break up the flow.

Aggregators, or how I gave up deletion and learned to love the scroll wheel

Wired writes about aggregators today. Dave comments.

Yeah, it’s a little bizarre that they didn’t mention Radio in their list of aggregators. I think Radio is one of the better ones and relatively uncluttered by complex, unnecessary features.

Speaking of which, I wonder if Radio really needs the delete item feature. A few days ago I hacked up Radio to make this feature more usable. When I proudly described my accomplishment to Dave, he said “oh, I don’t even use that feature, I just let the old posts slip off the end of the page.”

Huh. In theory deleting should help one keep track of what they’ve read and haven’t read. But we do that perfectly well with newspapers, which have a much more complicated layout. I think I was using “delete item” simply because it was there. The new experiment: no deleting.