Posts from February 2007

Darren Prowse kicked off an interesting discussion asking what makes you unsubscribe from a feed.

This prompted me to revisit my list of my inactive blogs in Google Reader. Normally, I tend to leave most blogs intact because I don't religiously unsubscribe purely because an author hasn't posted in a while. However, I find it useful to occasionally check the status of sleeping blogs to see whether the feed has actually died or migrated elsewhere and prune my subscription list accordingly.

The blog on my reading list, showing the longest period of inactivity is Andrew Campbell's Oracle Stuff I Should Have Known. The last post to this blog was made way back on 24 September 2006.

Now, this is an interesting, technical Oracle blog so I will remain subscribed because the next post could be a gem and might even be imminent. In any case, the beauty of RSS means I will be notified whenever the blog is updated so I don't have to waste any time checking the site for updates.

However, what interested me more was the StatCounter statistics for Andy's blog. Despite not being updated in five whole months, the blog still attracts in excess of 3,000 unique visitors per month.

So that's the secret then. I'm hibernating. See you all in July.

Stuart Brown from the excellent Modern Life asks Why is RSS adoption so abysmal amongst UK newspapers online ?' with some interesting analysis including the staggering fact (to me at least) that Modern Life has more Bloglines subscribers than The Daily Torygraph.

The detailed analysis in this article interested me. I (delude myself that I) am technically literate. I subscribe to around 100 varied feeds and am very lazy. I live in the UK and am interested in News, Sport and Technology.

I always buy a newspaper whenever I commute on a train and every Saturday (to avoid DIY). And yet, curiously, I do not subscribe to any RSS feeds from any UK newspapers (well apart from The Sun's excellent 'Unders The Covers With Page 3 Babes' podcast).

So I just visited the Web sites of the main broadsheets (Times, Torygraph, Independent and Grauniad) to try to determine whether I am missing out.

The Times¶

The Times recently relaunched the TimesOnline site so it will be interesting to see what RSS support is on offer.

Not a good start - no familiar orange RSS icon in the Firefox address bar. No obvious subscription options is visible. Sure enough, the 'Newsfeeds' information is buried down at the bottom of the page as an afterthought.

The Times offers a narrow choice of News (UK and World), Business, Sport, Tech and the ever popular Law. There is no specific feed for 'Football' so I am obliged to take an interest in horse racing, darts and snooker. No thanks.

As Andy Piper noted, the title of the Sports feed is imaginatively titled 'TimesOnline:rss'. Like most UK media providers, The Times provides a partial feed. Sigh.

The Telegraph¶

A promising start. Automatic subscription option available from Firefox to 'Breaking News' and almost every area of the site. There are specific feeds for individual sports and the Football feed is sensibly called 'Telegraph Sport | Football'.

There is a useful help page describing the various subscription options which is useful for newcomers (including a NetVibes module). There is support for Blackberry and a mobile service for registered users (free subscription).

The Independent¶

Like The Times, The Independent does not offer automatic RSS and hides subscription information at the bottom of the page. Range of subscription options but I completely turn off when asked to select the section(s) and then get presented with a feed URL to paste into my RSS reader !

Reluctantly, paste the URL into Google Reader. Again, The Independent offers partial feeds with a headline teaser to lure you to the main site.

The Guardian¶

As Modern Life reported, The Guardian is the longest established and arguably most successful (in terms of the number of online subscribers) of the UK 'quality' press. Automatic feeds are available from each section and the normal range of devices (phone/PDA) are supported with news alerts (free) and a digital edition (softcopy version of the print edition available for paid subscription).

Mini-newspapers are also available for free download in PDF format. I presume this is for transfer to a phone/PDA to read on the train. Howver, I think I would rather shell out for the print edition rather than waste 12 minutes and miss the 07:58 but this is a different format from the competition.

Interestingly, like the New York Times, The Guardian also offers its own newsreader, Newspoint, which seems to defeat the point of RSS but may be helpful for newcomers (or confused readers fed up with trying to subscribe to The Independent).

This sign in my hotel room intrigued me. Every time I entered the bathroom, I gazed at the sign. I found myself entering the bathroom to study the sign when I didnt actually need to use the bathroom.

Was the pipe hot or not ? Unfortunately, this towel rail wasn't listed anywhere on this site. Could the temperature really be as high as 140' F ? How hot is 140' F ?

Finally, just before I checked out, I gave in to temptation, removed the towels and grabbed the silver rail with my right hand.

The appliance was indeed hot, very hot, dangerously hot. Scaldingly hot, in fact.

I stretched my left arm to reach outside the bathroom door around to my laptop on the desk. I then somehow managed to type with my left hand and agonisingly Googled to find out how exactly long I could endure this torture before incurring a third degree burn.

The answer - 6 seconds. Unfortunately, thanks to my restricted movement and the agonising pain, it took me a full 45 seconds to discover this vital fact.

Finally, I could bear it no longer so I released my right hand and sunk it under the blissful sanctuary of the cold water tap at full blast.

I slowly gathered my bags, proceeded to check out (left handed) and told the receptionist that my lawyers would be in touch.

Thank you for your email. I am currently working in a bunker deep underground in the heart of Brussels (near Belgium).

I would normally say Please call me directly on my mobile. However, this secure facility is so secure that no mobile communications are possible.

I would normally pledge to replying to your email on my return. However, I am not quite sure precisely when (or even indeed, if) I ever will return. While I am not literally chained to the desk, the security officer is holding my passport which fills me with a sense of unease and practically equates to the same thing.

The working environment is not ideal. Massive ceiling mounted fans in a server room make for a cool, uncomfortable and noisy environment. Still, this is my punishment for living in an ivory tower far divorced from reality, waving my arms about and drawing architecture diagrams on a whiteboard and I must accept it.

This particular customer insisted that, as a followup to a recent architecture workshop, I return in person to install, configure and test what I foolishly claimed was 'straightforward and trivial'.

From a posting in the Google Reader newsgroup

I have (approx) 383,240 feeds...

This post put me in a quandry. I found the video very amusing so I was torn between leaving a grateful comment on Donnchas blog and awarding the article a (Gold) Star in Google Reader.

But if I only did that, my friend and a couple of (ex-) colleagues who might appreciate the joke may miss it. That would be very selfish. Forgive me Father, but briefly, I toyed with reverting to Web 0.1 (beta) and sending an mass email to 'Friends/Ex Colleagues'.

I compromised by posting an article on my blog referring to Donncha's article so he sees the pingback and gets the credit for spotting the video. So Donncha's happy, I'm happy, everyone's happy.

Well - not exactly because I had to write some additional words on my article to justify its existence. This is exactly the situation that Google Shared Items is for.

These items might be interesting or useful snippets of information quickly noted in passing which I wouldn't necessarily blog about.

I just want to display a RSS feed on my blog for articles like this that I find interesting, amusing or thought provoking. This is trivial to implement in WordPress so I simply grab the feed URL for 'Shared Items' from Google Reader and create an RSS widget to display 'What I am currently reading' on the sidebar in this blog.

Unfortunately, that didn't work. The feed and article names were displayed but the formatting of the links was broken on WordPress 2.1. Curiously, I tried the same configuration on a test blog on hosted Wordpress and it worked fine.

A little research revealed that the WordPress RSS widget does not appear to support Atom 1.0 format (which is precisely the format used by Google Shared Items).

No problem. Just create a Feedburner feed and see if that works. This should automatically, dynamically and intelligently convert the feed format into a format the recipient can digest. Unfortunately, it doesn't. Sigh. Give up in disgust and make a note to ask in the WordPress/Reader forums.

Only you can't give up. You want this to work and this is now a challenge.

Read the Feedburner FAQ which implies that SmartBurner is what you need. This automatically, converts the original feed format for the consumer on the fly. However, SmartBurner is enabled by default so I wonder why it isn't working.

Examine the configuration of SmartBurner. By default, the output feed preserves the format of the original feed (Atom 1.0 in this case). However, it is easy to force conversion to different format (RSS 2.0) by setting the 'Content-Type'.

Revisit the WordPress RSS widget. Success !

So, after all that time and effort, I sincerely hope you both enjoy my 'Google Shared Items' feed.

Throw away that Mavis Beacon touch typing CD.

This hilarious video shows that speech recognition is the key to (not so) rapid application development.

Reminds me of working in tech support and the torture of spelling out Unix commands over the phone to customers.

When I returned from evensong last night, after I had ironed five shirts and read a bedtime story to my loving (but strangely uncommunicative) teddy bears, I sat down with a hot cup of Horlicks to enjoy two hours of high quality Sunday night viewing.

I don't know why but I have always had an interest in 'conspiracy theories'. When I was a lad, I was convinced that

• Marilyn Monroe was killed by the Kennedy brothers.
• Ashley Grimes was a undercover Manchester City spy.
• JFK was assassinated by Norma Jeane Mortenson from the grassy knoll.
• UFO's had landed at Roswell and probably deposited Ashley Grimes.

Of course, that was then. This is now. Back then I was a boy. Now I am a man (sort of). With the passing years, I have matured and changed my beliefs accordingly.

• 9/11 was instigated by the US government in order to invade Afghanistan and Iraq.
• Lady Diana (Princess Of Our Hearts) was assassinated by an Italian Pizza chef, driving a white Fiat Punto on the orders of Prince Phillip (The Greek).
• Kurt Cobain's death was directly or indirectly arranged by Courtney Love.

Imagine my horror, when last night's BBC Conspiracy Files tells me that 9/11 was the work of Al Qaeda terrorist cells coupled with failings by the US intelligence services.

This revelation shocked me. I was stunned. I was struggling to assimilate this bombshell which opened to question so many of my dearly held beliefs. To ease the pain, I poured the Horlicks down the sink and cracked open a Grolsch.

I quickly switched channels to FA Cup Match of The Day in an effort to restore a sense of normality. Another conspiracy - Manchester City had avoided an FA Cup giant-killing and beaten Preston.

That's it. I can't take any more. I am going to bed. Only I couldn't. I had to stay up to watch another deep, probing, investigative BBC program to finally which would surely prove that I am not clinically insane and confirm (or at least keep faintly alive) just one of my conspiracy theories.

Unfortunately,'The last 48 hours of Kurt Cobain' proposed the ridiculous assertion that Kurt Cobain was a manic depressive, heroin addict in denial with wild mood swings, depressed at his sought after fame and cult status, desperate to escape an unhappy marriage but simultaneously petrified of being denied access to his two year old daughter.

After another brief and unsuccessful attempt in rehab, Cobain embarked on yet another drug binge in Seattle before penning a suicide note and shooting himself in the head with a shotgun.

So the fact that Cobain's body had massive amounts of heroin that would have rendered him incapable of pulling the trigger, the fact that another hand wrote the closing line 'Please keep going Courtney, for Frances' and the curious fact that Cobain carefully tidied away his drug paraphernalia when dead are all just examples of yet another conspiracy theory.

OK. OK. I give in. Please stop hurting me, Brin. I now realise that resistance is futile.

Look I did what you asked. I have now converted to Google Reader. Please, no more. I will do anything you want. Please, Sergey - let my wife go.'

Even my son (newly hired Google enforcer) has now installed Google Desktop and is busy indexing the entire contents of the PC.

Just about the only remaining product in the Google portfolio I don't use is Adsense.

Am I a fully fledged Google whore yet ? If not, what else do I need to do ?

'Oh no - you've discovered I am not using Blogger. No Sergey. Please. I beg you. Please, Brin. Show some mercy. Not the pliers and electrical cord. Please stop. Aaaarrgghhh. I give in. Please stop now.'

I am a big fan of Netvibes but also follow the ongoing development of Google Reader with interest. Increasingly, I find myself tempted to convert to Reader permanently.

• Speed - Google Reader has a set of keyboard shortcuts that make scanning a large number of feeds quick. Really quick. While Netvibes also offers keyboard shortcuts, out of habit, I tend to use mouse-clicks to navigate between tabs and articles.
• Flexibility - You can read related blogs that are grouped together (e.g. Oracle, Wordpress), read an individual blog or quickly skim over a river of news.
• Sharing - Occasionally, I want to save an article for future reference or potentially sharing with others. These items might be interesting or useful snippets of information quickly noted in passing which I wouldn't necessarily blog about. The most obvious place to mark these items is right here in the RSS reader as opposed to a static bookmark. The list should (obviously) be visible as an RSS feed. Google's shared and starred items make this easy (single keystroke).
• Flexible interface - I really like the full screen mode and the options for 'list view' where articles are condensed apart from the current article and 'expanded view' (all articles are expanded).
• Statistics - I can't decide whether the trends page about your personal reading habits may actually be useful or just a gimmick.

Here's a Flickr set of annotated screenshots to illustrate the functionality in Google Reader and the flexibility of the interface. I think the recent addition of subscriber counts to Google Reader will show that Reader has a substantial and rapidly growing share of the RSS reader market. Stowe Boyd and Tom Raftery are already noting a Feedburner spike as a result.

Interestingly, Darren Rowse notes that subscribers from Google Reader/Desktop/IG already heavily outnumber the established and popular Bloglines reader.

Looking forward, one feature I would really like to see in Google Reader is feed discovery and recommendations based on readers with common interests and similar reading lists.