dria.org

It bugs me when dumb bugs in popular web pages stick around for weeks or months. The folks at GU have been informed of this problem with their headlines in Firefox, but nothing seems to be getting done about it. It makes me cranky:

I’ve been using NetNewsWire all day today, and have discovered two things about it — one good, one bad.

First, the bad: If you’re signed up to a metric crapload of feeds like I currently am and you set NNW to update automatically every 30 mins, NNW will eat your entire CPU if you let it. I’ve cranked the number of concurrent downloads it’s allowed to use to 2, which helps, but not a lot. I’ve also set it to autoupdate every 2 hours instead of every 30 mins.

I’m also paring down on the number of feeds I’m subscribed to. I currently have 1423 unread items in my feeds, and there’s just no way I can keep up on that much news. I need to finesse the list with extreme prejudice.

Now, the good: My wiki has RSS feeds for the Recent Changes and New Pages lists. I, obviously, subscribe to these. NetNewsWire displays these items beautifully and lets me view the entire diff for each change cleanly and at a glance. I love it. Here’s a screenshot, click for full size:

I’ve been a little unsatisfied with my current RSS Feed Reader of choice lately, so this morning, at boolean’s suggestion, I downloaded a copy of NetNewsWire. It’s really everything I ever imagined of having in an RSS feed reader, and more. Seriously.

Top of the list mind-blowing features:

• .mac synchronization ability, including subscriptions and read status. This means I don’t have to do any complicated import/export calisthenics to get my subscriptions on my desktop into my laptop, and vice-versa. If I read something on my lappy, it will remain “read” on compy after I sync.
• Smart lists — I can create a smart list that will show me all articles, for example, that have “Mozilla” in the title from all my feeds. This is utterly brilliant.
• One-click feed subscription when using Safari to read the web. Up in the address bar, an “RSS” button will show up if the page has an available RSS feed (this is somewhat eccentric, mind). Clicking that button brings up NetNewsWire which prompts me to accept the subscription. This is so much easier than the weirdness I had to do before. I just wish this worked with Firefox.
• “Sites drawer” — minor feature, really, but a nice one. The NNW guys have compiled an extremely long list of categorized feeds that you can subscribe to without having to go find them yourself. I’ve now subbed to more feeds than ever before, including several of which I’d not previously been aware.

Those are the core mindblowers right there. The rest of the app is very, very nicely designed, and does everything I’ve tried to do with it (save one minor quibble which is just me being picky and annoying since it involves a feature I wouldn’t have dreamed of, never mind expected before).

If you have a Mac, particularly if you have multiple Macs and a .mac account, I strongly recommend this application. The smart lists and sync capabilities alone are worth the price of admission ($24.95 USD per license, which I will be paying shortly).

I pretty much live in my browser. When I get up in the morning, the first thing I do is get a coffee then fire up XChat, FireFox, and Thunderbird. The last thing I do before I brush my teeth and go to bed is close XChat, Firefox, and Thunderbird. If I’m in front of a computer, I can guarantee you that at least those three applications are open and being used. This is just how things are for me, and how things have been for me for an awfully long time.

Now, about these widgets. Let’s say I decided I wanted a Google search widget. To get it widget, I have to find it (not hard), trust it to be non-malicious (I’m paranoid, so this is a bit edgy), download it, install it (it doesn’t do that automatically), then start it. Assuming it starts and does what it’s supposed to do, it then sits on the Dashboard and quietly sucks up system resources waiting for me to give it something to do. When I do decide I want to use the widget, I have to hit F12, click on the widget to focus, usually click on it again to get my cursor into whatever text box it’s supposed to be in, then type something, then click on the widget again to make it go (or hit enter), then either hit F12 or on an empty spot in the Dashboard to get back to my desktop.

Alternately, I could just click the Google button on my Firefox quickbar, type something in the webform (which happily autofocuses my cursor in the right place), then hit enter.

Maybe you’re seeing my confusion here. There are eleventy billion widgets out there that do things people can already do very easily in their web browser. Google searches, Ebay searches, Amazon searches, LiveJournal updates, etc etc. Widgets do not make these things easier or more convenient, so…I say to you, “Wtf?”

Would someone please explain to me what’s so interesting and/or useful and/or whatever about del.icio.us. I’ve had it bookmarked for weeks now trying to figure out wtf the deal is, and I just don’t get it. It is neither useful nor interesting to me.

Anyone? Am I missing something?

Do any of you happen to know of forum software that has RSS support for individual boards? If you do, let me know here or email me at debatdriadotorg. Thanks.

I got a new cellphone yesterday. I’ve been using Treos for, oh, 3 years or so, getting as far up that gadgetry food-chain as the Treo 600. It really is a great unit — decent phone, data for email + surfing, SMS, full palmOS PDA, upgradeable memory (I have a 128mb SD card in mine), etc etc etc. Tons and tons of features, great, solid, clean-lined little unit, perfect for people on the go.

I’m just not on the go any more. Now, you may say, “But wait, Deb, didn’t you just get a new job that has you traveling more now than you have in the past 5 years?” This is true, but my new job also provided me with a laptop and the ability to work from the comfort of my own home. The result of this is that unless I’m actually out of range of a wireless network, I’m online. It’s not very often, even when traveling, that I’m out of range of a wireless network. So, as long as I have my laptop with me, I almost always have full access to email, web, IRC, chat, and what have you. I don’t need a smaller, more portable system for those things any more.

So, I have a Treo 600 for sale — less than a year old, in perfect condition (it’s had a screen protector on it since day 1), no scuffs, dents, scratches. Original stylus, power adapter, and case included. If you’re a good person, I might throw in the 128mb SD card. Email me if you’re interested — I’m not looking for any specific amount, so just make an offer. Email is deb-at-dria-dot-org.

The new phone I got is a Motorola v551. This is much more suited to my new brand of on-the-go life because it has bluetooth. It’s also smaller, lighter, and really just a lot closer to what I actually need in a phone these days. I also took the opportunity to further cut down my wireless services. After a month of use I’ll reevaluate and cut down whatever else I can. I’m tired of getting slammed with ridiculous data fees. Unfortunately, we have exactly two cell service providers in Canada, and the other one is really, really bad. Just thinking about their crappy service makes me angry. Rawr!

Annnyhow, new littler downgraded phone, older high-end multifunction cellular unit for sale.

In celebration, I present BananaPhone.

What are the Opera Browser people smoking? Microsoft has the big E, Firefox has the cute little fox, Camino has the shiny network-containing bubble/compass, Safari has the shiny compass-containing bubble.

Opera has this guy:

The only possible explanation for this is that the advertising team at Opera decided that viral-marketing-by-way-of- people-making-fun-of-our-ad-campaign was the way to go. If so, it’s working like a charm.

(Wtf is he hitchhiking?)

I’m still sick. Yesterday is somewhat a blur from the mild fever, nasal congestion, random coughing, and a longish afternoon nap. Better today (no fever as far as I can tell), but still definitely not at the top of my game. Bluh.

For fun, I’ve been hacking around trying to design a MediaWiki skin from scratch. It’s…a little complicated. There are a lot of bits and pieces that all have to get jammed into the skin somewhere, which makes it hard to really create something clean and streamlined. I considered cleaning things up a bit by hiding chunks in DHTMLified menus, until blizzard reminded me that hiding things from users is Bad. Scrapped that plan, and hacked together a new mockup. The new one is much better, although doesn’t get rid of the navigation column (which was my original drive for this). Alas.

Next trick is figuring out how to implement it. This is actually the hard part, since I intend to do it all properly using CSS positioning. That’s not so hard in itself, it’s just the cross-browser stuff that could be a pain. Yes, I really am doing this for fun. I’ve been messing around with web stuff since 1997, and I still get a kick out of making a webby things that are cool and work.

In other news, boolean and I have pre-ordered a Family Pack of Tiger licenses. Five licenses for four machines, and one left over for when we finally succumb and get a Mac mini. Some Microsoft-loving journalist reviewed Tiger, and decided that “Tiger isn’t a long-term play, however. Despite its lengthy development time, and promises of ever slower Mac OS X upgrade releases in the future, this new system isn’t a big enough upgrade over previous OS X releases to warrant much excitement”.

Whatever. You can read the full feature list for yourself. I’ve been thinking about it and have realized that Spotlight, with its Smart Folders, is going to change how I use my computer. Dashboard and the Automator are also going to have a massive impact on my daily work habits. The rest of the features are just bonuses, for me.

Speaking of upgrades, Firefox 1.0.3 was released on Friday. Go get it. It includes nine security fixes that you really should have.

Also, Update.mozilla.org (the primary home for Firefox, Thunderbird, and Mozilla extensions, themes, and plugins) has relaunched. Check it out, and get some new toys for your browser while you’re there.

My current extensions include:

• Web Developer
• Adblock
• ColorZilla
• SmoothWheel
• Sage (although I use Tbird for RSS feeds now)
• SpoofStick
• StumbleUpon
• GreaseMonkey
• mozcc
• ScrapBook
• Wikipedia Firefox Extension

I’ll have to check out what else is available now. What extensions do you have installed? Leave a comment!

I have a cold. This started last night, about an hour before bedtime. My sinuses went from “normal” to “wtf?” in no time flat. Now that groggy, headachy, sore-throaty, chilled-to-the-bone sort of floating misery. Hooray.

This is one of the mixed blessings of working out of the home, I suppose. At my old job, I’d just call in sick and stay home playing World of Warcraft all day, taking sporadic naps and just making sure I got lots of tea. Now that I work from home, however, if I’m well enough to play World of Warcraft, I’m physically also capable of working. Mental fitness is a whole other story, of course. I’m already starting to think I’d be best to just get a NeoCitran in me and call it a day.

Later I’ll adjourn to the sofa with the laptop and some tea for a healthy dose of Food Network background noise.

Check this out: iWork Community. I love it when people share stuff. Not much there now, but I could see that becoming a valuable resource over time. I need to make a new template for invoices, if nothing else.