Geek On The Mountain


Time Travelers Convention


May 01

Posted: under General.

As I’ve just read on slashdot, MIT is hosting a time traveler convention. On May 7th. Specifically:

May 7, 2005, 10:00pm EDT (08 May 2005 02:00:00 UTC)
East Campus Courtyard, MIT
42:21:36.025°N, 71:05:16.332°W
(42.360007,-071.087870 in decimal degrees)

The whole idea is to make it this huge deal and try to publicize it as much as possible (the site even advises you to “Write the details down on a piece of acid-free paper, and slip them into obscure books in academic libraries!”) so that if time travel is ever possible everyone can meet up next week at MIT. It’s simultaneously the funniest thing I’ve seen all day and terribly creative as well. It’s a great idea on multiple levels here…

Slashdot even has an interesting (or perhaps painfully boring, depending on you I guess) discussion on time travel.

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RSS Feeds


May 01

Posted: under Technology.

I discovered RSS feeds yesterday. Of course by discovered I mean started using. They’ve been around for a while of course and I’ve known about them I just never bothered with them at all. I’m traditionally a bit slow to pick up on new things (though realistically I guess, I jump in before most people…I’m just not in that first couple of percent of “early adopters”..).

I shouldn’t really say I never bothered with them I guess. I actually tried this same thing maybe 6 months ago and didn’t like it so I moved on. In part, I didn’t like the idea of not visiting the actual website and perhaps more importantly the couple of aggregators I checked out at the time weren’t free and were crippled if you didn’t buy them. I was looking neither to pay nor to limp along, so I moved on.

For some reason yesterday I decided to look into it again, and now I like what I see. For starters, I have options of aggregators that work fine for what I need and that are free. (I had one installed already and I didn’t even know it…) On top of that, I’ve decided (I think) that the true benefit is just seeing if a site has updated and I can just go directly to the specific post if it looks interesting.

The aggregator I already had installed was Thunderbird, which I use for email. It displays feeds like the topic names were emails and when you click on them it will load the actual website. I was happy with what I saw just there, but then I found something even better: extensions for Firefox itself.

The first one I tried was Habari Xenu. It’s rated highly on the updates page. I had two beefs with it though. First of all, it’s default stylesheet crammed all of the information together in a really small font. Mind you, I’m running at 1600×1200 here, and if I was at a lower resolution like 1024×768, or even probably 1280×1024, then everything would be much more readable. On the other hand, the data was still all crammed together to closely and was therefore difficult to read. I guess, once again, with a lower resolution this allows you to see a lot on one screen, but 1600×1200 is all about wide open spaces…. :) This is annoying, but it’s likely that Habari Xenu takes a custom stylesheet or some-such and this can be changed. I never made it far enough to find out before my second problem came in to play though. That would be that firefox started crashing. Given, I’ve been using it since it was version .7 (or maybe even .6?.. ) and it’s only ever crashed on me twice. When suddenly it crashes twice in 5 minutes I get rather suspicious…. When I cracked it open for try #3 the first thing I did was uninstall Habari Xenu… problem solved.

The next aggregator I check out was Sage. This is what I’m using now. The default layout is pretty decent, though I’m using a custom stylesheet that I downloaded and then modified a little and it looks more like a blog to me now. Sage works fine for me. It doesn’t seem to auto-update, but that’s not something interesting in just now anyways so it it’s no big deal. The only other problem it has is that it won’t tell you if it there are new items on a feed (there is a button you can click to refresh all feeds). You have to move through each item in order to see if there’s anything new or not.

Like I said before, my theory here is that I can use this to look through blogs and such and see what is new and then go to the blog if what I see looks interesting. In some cases though, blogs publish little to no text for a summary and it’s only useful to see if there’s been an update. At the other end of the spectrum, some blogs publish the full text, so there technically isn’t any reason to visit the blog at all if all you’re doing is reading the content… I’m somewhere in between and my rss feeds are setup to show the first 60 words of a post which I figure is enough to let someone know if the post is something they’re interested in and yet makes them come to the site if they actually want to see it all. Of course, the atom feed shows it all.

What are everyone’s thoughts on this? Is it better to be brief and just let people know that you’ve updated or to just throw the full text out there and let people be free? Rather, I should say, if you use RSS, which do you prefer? I find myself reading the full text if it’s available and not necessarily visiting the site (for all of the last 2 days I’ve been using it…). I can’t help but feel like I’m missing out if I do this though.

I know a few people out there are using to read this (some, though doubtfully all, could be from bots checking for updates though) as I get a lot of hits on the rss indexes. Of course, if someone has an aggregator set to check feeds hourly then obviously they’ll generate 24 hits a day all by their lonesome so lots of hits doesn’t mean a lot of people.

I figure this will be an easy way for me to quickly keep tabs on the things I like to read. Of course, my problem with not doing so has nothing to do with it taking to long to do so every day, but it doesn’t help. Even doing something that only takes 5 minutes on a daily basis is difficult sometimes, but if it takes 5 instead of 10 I’m more likely to do it nonetheless. I’m having too much fun here :) .

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