Here is yet another reason why I will trust my personal data to Google any day of the week (and, in fact, do so). Not only they are smart enough to be the best today, but they have this extra brain to care about tomorrow.
Here are news from the Official Google Blog : Opening up the Google Web Toolkit.
Two domain names that I own will expire today – informerss.com and informerss.net.
This is a new experience for me. At the moment, I own about 25 domain names. Until now I wanted them all and some more. The above two, for example, were registered when I was working on an RSS aggregator with a few of my friends. We had some ambitious plans, but it didn’t work out quite as well as we wanted. The project is long stalled and forgotten.
The expiration of domains brought back a lot of memories of fun times. Some small part of me wants to renew the domains and keep them just for the sake of memories. But a bigger and stronger part of me says that memories are in my head and in my blog, and that I don’t need to spend extra cash, no matter how little of it, for keeping useless junk. There is plenty of it for free.
Anyway, farewell to InformeRSS project. It was fun. There are some useful bits left over, which I already found use to in some other projects. Some parts will be available as open source and under GPL license a bit later, when I’ll have the time to review and pack them properly.
And more domains that I don’t want anymore will be expiring in the next six month or so. Saving all that money won’t make me richer, but it will make my life easier, with less trash to carry forward.
I have met an expert of the fourth dimension today. He was a very average looking guy, driving a really small minivan. His really small minivan was half the size of one parking space. The expert of the fourth dimension managed to park his really small minivan to occupy four parking spaces. Not even a bike could fit in.
I was amazed. I wanted to talk to him, to understand him, to learn from him. But being an expert he was, he probably thought that he was about to be kicked and punched. So ran away and disappeared in what many believed was a fourth dimension…
There has been much said about the fun of open source. Not many though do understand what it was said about. So, here is a quote from /etc/httpd/conf.d/ssl.conf file of Apache web server configuration, that was shipped with Fedora Linu Core 5 (it’s safe to assume that many other Linux distributions have the same file):
# Do NOT simply read the instructions in here without # understanding what they do.
Makes you smile, doesn’t it?
Just one simple sentence, and you can feel that there are real people behind the project, not some faceless corporation. People, who care. People, who have their own opinions and attitudes.
Do NOT simply read … without understanding …
I have yet another change in my RSS habits. I now use two RSS aggregators.
As I mentioned before, my primary RSS reader now is Google Reader. It works perfectly for all those hundreds of feeds that I want to read, tag, search, and share. Every so often, Google developers add useful features and fix those few bugs that there are.
But, as good as it is, Google Reader isn’t perfect. Or maybe that’s just me with my weird needs and wants. One of the things that I missed from the time I migrated from Bloglines was the possibility to rearrange and sort feeds and folders in any way I want. Google Reader sorts everything alphabetically, and while it’s fine for some feeds, it doesn’t work for the others. In Bloglines I had a number of options for sorting, one of which was manual. I could put feeds and folders in precise order I needed.
Why do I need this? Because there are some feeds that I want at the top of my feed. These are feeds from my projects, and from the people I know personally. I want them all in a specific order, so that I can quickly look navigate through and find stuff that I need. Everything else can be tagged and sorted alphabetically. I don’t care.
Another feature that I missed in any online feed reader is custom update interval. Most online RSS aggregators update feed information either by time (1 hour or more), ping (not all feed generators do that), or request (“Click here to update feed”). There are situations though, when I want full control over feed update interval. For example, if I know that there is a heated discussion at Dmitry’s blog going on right now, I should be able to tell my RSS reader to fetch comments feed every five minutes. I’ll slow it down later on.
On the other hand, Google Reader does such an excellent job on all the other feeds that I didn’t want to leave it. So, with that in mind, I decided to use two aggregators.
The choice for the offline reader fell on Akregator – RSS reader for KDE. I created two folders “Projects” and “People”, with subfolders for each project and person that I wanted monitored, and subscribed to all the feeds. I then unsubscribed from those feeds at Google Reader to avoid dups.
I’ve been using two aggregators for the last few days and it seems like a perfect setup for now.
P.S.: I am subscribed to 300+ feeds, if you are interested. Some of these are updated once a week, others 400 times a day (think Flickr groups).