Month: March 2004

Pop quiz. My last XMLTV fetch contains dates that look like this: “20040404220000 EST”. After weeks of successful operation, the data import failed. Why? Hint: The dates are parsed on import.

Find That Feed is getting a fair amount of traffic from the Weblogs, Journals and RSS section of Fagan Finder. Thanks!

I spent two hours working on my taxes tonight. Just about all of the critical info is entered, now I just have to review and tweak a few numbers with my accountant (aka “Mom”). Taxes seem to get more and more complicated as I get older. Oy.

Scott Johnson: “We’ve just added support for RSS enclosures to Feedster search feeds”. Awesome, Scott! Thanks for bringing us one step closer to realizing Dowbrigade’s video aggregator.

I did a short phone interview with Doug Kaye yesterday about my RSS+BitTorrent and RSSTV projects. The interview is live on ITConversations. The page also links to interviews with Bram Cohen, creator of BitTorrent, and Mary Jo Foley of Microsoft Watch. ITConversations is enclosures-enabled! From the enclosure feed, a direct link to my interview. It’s just over 7 minutes long.

Another question we should all be asking, regardless of what weblogging tool we use is, what will be the default authentication mode for Movable Type 3.0? Defaults are powerful. They can change the shape of a market, particularly when proliferated through a free product. What choice will you make if TypeKey registration is required in order to comment on your favorite weblogs?

Lots of pointers to discussion about TypeKey on Scripting.Com today.

We went to see a beautiful but draining film about the horrors of war last night. We stopped at a deli for dessert afterwards. The movie bummed me out and I wasn’t ready to go home. I asked the waitress if they had any peppermint tea. She said, “all our teas are crappy”. That lightened my mood.

RssReader 0.4d is hereby released. RssReader is TiVo-resident software that displays the contents of an RSS feed on your television. More interestingly, RssReader can schedule recordings from syndication feeds containing RSSTV extensions. This means you can subscribe your TiVo to a community-evolved ToDo list, such as the feed generated by Program My TiVo!
The main addition in 0.4d is the ability to schedule recordings based on network call signs instead of channel numbers. This should give us a better shot at sharing program suggestions across cablesystems. In addition, RssReader now remembers schedule results from previous sweeps, so that the display reflects whether or not a recording attempt was successful on all sweeps since the last TCS restart (infrequent), instead of just the first time a new item shows up.

I have my own questions for Six Apart, in addition to wanting to know the answers to Dave’s.What about the alternative of working with Jay Allen to make MT-Blacklist a standard feature of MT? MT-Blacklist is great software, it works now and has a sizable installed base. Why not invest in making it better, perhaps adding the ability auto-sync to shared blacklists out on the Web? Why a centralized solution instead of a distributed one? I already have a verified identity in my weblog. Why not use that? If Trackback isn’t good enough, why not invest in making it work?