So here’s a little experiment. I’ve subscribed to a del.icio.us tag called for:bschoate. If you want to share a link with me, just tag it on del.icio.us using that tag. And sure, why not— Flickr too.
Update: Switching to “for” instead — easier to remember and is in use by others too. Yeah, this breaks the permalink for this entry. Deal.
A while back, I posted a request to Google. I said, “Google, please give me a way to mark up my pages to let your GoogleBot know what to index and what not to index on my site.” Point being that a lot of the stuff on my home page and on weblog entries should not be indexed. I want to decide what Google indexes— not at the page level, but at the paragraph level.
Since Google ignored my plea, I set out to do it myself. After all, it’s my server that is giving Google all this information, so can’t I just limit what I expose to them?
Here’s a thought.
What if Gmail were not just another free e-mail service. What if it were the world’s first e-mail service that paid you for using it?
An intriguing idea, no?
Somehow, someway I missed the news about PubSub.com. It lets you subscribe to RSS feeds that match various subjects. For example, you can subscribe to a feed for the phrase “Movable Type”. The feed is populated by matches against the weblog community (I’m not sure how broad their coverage is, but it includes my site, so it must be pretty complete). They also can create a feed that scans newsgroup posts. It provides close to realtime information. It can also introduce you to new news sources/web sites that you were never aware of before.
Update: Apparently, they currently index 1.1 million weblogs (see comments for this entry).
Also, this post was mentioned over at kwc. Within 7 minutes of that post, I saw it mentioned in my “Brad Choate” PubSub subscription and posted a comment about it. And since my RSS reader doesn’t refresh every minute, I’m not sure exactly how long it took PubSub to find that post. But even at 7 minutes, that’s pretty impressive.
Warning: Use of PubSub services could turn you into a newsjunkie if you aren’t one already.
I’ve been a Dotster customer for a few years now, but the $8.95 domains at Go Daddy are just too much to resist. That’s a 40% savings compared to Dotster. A 75% savings if you’re still using Verisign. I’ve heard good things, so I’m trying a few domains that are up for renewal and we’ll see how it goes.
I will keep using Dotster’s Domain Discover service. Excellent tool for domain name brainstorming.
Interesting. Once I requested the transfer, Dotster offered to renew the domains for $7.99. I don’t know if that’s a standard thing or what, but if you’re needing to renew and you don’t really want to switch from Dotster, you could try it and see if they’ll cut you a deal.
On a side note… remember Parsons Technology? Bob Parsons is the founder and president of Go Daddy. Not sure how he arrived at the domain name, but as long as the service is reliable and cheap, he can name it whatever he wants.
Welcome to my Mozilla resource page.
Adam Kalsey reminded me of Venkman today and I realized it wasn’t on my big Mozilla list, so for those of you that haven’t used it and are still debugging your JavaScript with alert() calls, go get:
Well, since three separate people have gone out of their way to report it to me, I thought I should share the good news. There’s a new Safari beta available (the web browser by Apple for Mac OS X) that adds lots of goodies. Among them are:
Oh and it also includes the fix for the annoying ‘offsite link’ bug that everyone using Safari has seen on this site.
I wanted to check out the web site for the upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean video game from Bethesda Softworks. The link that I was trying came from IGN, and the link they gave me was this which redirected me here. Neither are the site for the new game — I guess they took it down… but what surprised me was that that page that loaded (directly accessible by that second link there) popped up a window. And I’m using Mozilla. That is NOT supposed to happen!
So what’s going on? Well, they’ve found a way around the popup protection in Mozilla by firing the popup action from within their Flash animation. You see, Flash can call JavaScript functions in a web page. It’s a very useful feature for Flash developers, but now it appears this power is being used for evil. I’m really surprised I haven’t seen more of this… the capability has been around since Flash 2.
I was tempted not to link to that site or to discuss this hole in Mozilla’s armor, because I’m sure all the advertisers out there are going to quickly adopt this technique. Here’s hoping the white hats find a way to block these too.
Mark Pilgrim: Auto-content. "Why does this cite-link-quote ('hit-and-run') style of weblogging need to be a manual process at all? Why can't I just click an 'auto-content' button and have my software automatically generate a list of, say, a dozen interesting links and quotes culled from my aggregator subscriptions, 'neighboring' sites, sites discussing the hot topics of the day, and mainstream articles reporting on a small hard-coded list of additional topics?"
Neat idea -- but instead of being completely automated, I would still want to be the one in charge of picking and choosing the items themselves. But it should be easier and it can be. Which is why I asked for Syndirella to support weblog APIs so you could blog from the newsreader.
Here's how I picture it: as you read along you click a button (we'll call it the 'Add' button since we're adding it to a list that will be processed later) for items that you want to blog about. Once they're all selected, you click a 'Blog These' button/menu option (as opposed to the singular 'Blog This' available in some blogger tools). The newsreader gives you a compose dialog, prefilled with elements from the items you selected: source URL, description (or even a portion of the description that was selected when you clicked the 'Add' button), author name, etc. The format used to prefill the composition field might even be templatized to be consistent with the user's presentation style.
Reading and writing go hand-in-hand, so why not put the two capabilities together in a single client?
I'm missing a few RSS feeds -- have you seen them lately?
I'm sure there are more I'm forgetting. Which ones are you missing? Can we exert enough peer pressure to get these guys to syndicate?
And at the risk of starting another flame war, I ♥ zeldman.com but this is the real reason I need a feed for his site.
