Signed up with BlogLines

I have set up myself an account with BlogLines.com. This is one of those excellent new services that help to deal with the amount of sites (and blogs therefor) a civilized human being processes every day. What you do is create yourself an account and subscribe to lots of feeds (RSS/Atom/whatever). Whenever there is an update in any of your feeds, you are notified by any way of your choice. You can get titles, just summaries, or complete articles from your feeds straight into BlogLines interface. Basically, this is like the usual RSS aggregator, but online.

The good part about it, is that notification programs (tiny bits) are available for about everything there is – Windows, Mac OS X, Unix/KDE, web applications, and whatever else. The API is also open, standard, and accesible. You can integrate your feeds to any of your applications. There are perl, python, and ruby modules available. And much more.

Another good thing is that you can share all or part of your feeds for others to see. This helps in exchanging good links without the need of notifying everyone every time. People at BlogLines took this even further. They have created a huge database of feeds which you can search for topics, phrases, interests, etc. They even suggest you feeds based on your current subscriptions. That’s pretty cool. Never will you ever have a time with nothing to read any more.

Those who still don’t have a blog, can use BlogLines for blogging too. These all is very tightly and nicely integrated. My BlogLine blog even has a nice URL: http://www.bloglines.com/blog/leonid. Of course, I won’t be needing that functionality for now, but who knows what’s coming.

And, of course, these all is free.

I suggest you go sign-up too!

P.S.: My public feeds are shared at http://www.bloglines.com/public/leonid

Critique of Where Perl 6 is Heading

There is an article at FreshMeat.net that talks about Perl 6 and the way the development is going. The author is mostly against this way. The article is followed by a number of comments both in favour and against of the points stated. There is also another discussion at PerlMonks if you are interested.

I do have my doubts about Perl 6 too, but I havent’ yet looked into it seriously. Perl 5 is way more than enough for me and I don’t see myself changing to anything any time soon. I’ll let you know if I’ll change my mind of course.

Minor usability improvements

I have made minor changes in the templates and skins used for this site. From now on, ‘Add comment’ or ‘X comments’ links will take you directly to the comments posted after the article. There is a new linked marked as ‘Permanent link’ which will take you to the page with full article (as ‘Add comment’ used to before). This change should make it easier for you to navigate the site as well as provide a more standard interface. ‘Permanent link’ is something you can find on many sites and many people are used to it too.

I have also removed the ‘Mail to a friend’ link, since it wasn’t working and I wasn’t going to make it work anyway. Spammers can now focus on some other site for their attempts. Thank you for your attention though.

Let me know if there is anything else I can do to improve the site. (It doesn’t mean that I will do it, though. But I will at least know.)

Picture of the day

SnickersI guess you must be pretty tired of sunrises, sunsets and ships at sea. Well, if you aren’t – I am. I started the day with photographing yet another ship in the sea, but decided that it is enough and I should no more. At least for now.

Quick trip down to cafeteria and snack machine provided me with two bars of Snickers chocolate, which turned out to be a couple of lovely subjects. Decorating these was really easy – just put both of them on a piece of white paper from the printer. Set is ready. Now I wish I had a number of different lights with different output power and colors. But I hadn’t. So I played with opening and closing the windows, turning the office light on and off, and using on-camera flash. I guess it worked. I made about 20 shots out of which I have selected three. All three were slightly touched in Gimp. And here they are – the results.

Zivania Symposium in Nicosia

Sodap ZivaniaThere is a rumor going around that there will be Zivania Symposium next Friday (22 October 2004) in Nicosia, Cyprus. If anyone knows anything, please let me know via comments or an email so that I could share it with the rest of the world.

I am particularly interested in how this symposium will be organized and what will be in there. Will it be just a set of top management talking about lega regulations? Or will there be a tasting session? Music and food? And stuff like this. Also some information on exact location would be much appreciated.

Updated (18 Oct 2004, 20:15): Place: Town Hall Gardens, Eleftheria Square, Nicosia, Cyprus. Time: 19:00. Thanks to Vips U.