Tag: Bloglines

Greasemonkey extension for Firefox

Extensions for Firefox are great. There are so many of them, that sometimes good ones hide and pass unnoticed. Greasemonkey received a lot of publicity, but still some people don’t know about it. Greasemonkey allows for insstallation and usage of numerous user scripts that fix problems with famous sites and make certain sites more usable. For example, there are scripts to remove all sorts of advertisements from feeds displayed by Bloglines, make Delicious and Slashdot look better, or add some aggrigated information to IMDb pages. The best thing is that there is no need to restart the browser between installations and removals of these user scripts.

Try it! It probably fixes annoyances that you are complaining about on a daily basis.

akregator RSS/Atom feed reader

While Bloglines is a wonderful service with all bells and whistles, it is not a panacea. For example, it can’t help me with internal company feeds (like development wiki RSS feed), which aren’t open to the general public.

In situations like this, a standalone RSS/Atom feed reader is of great help. KDE provided NewsTicker, which could use RSS and Atom feeds, but the display of new items is terrible. The scrolling thing just doesn’t work. In the latest release of KDE (3.4) a proper RSS/Atom reader was integrated – amarok. It is a really nice application, which integrates beautifully with KDE.

The problem is that KDE 3.4 will be a part of Fedora Linux Core 4, which is not released yet. For those of us, who are using Fedora Linux Core 3, a ready made RPM package is available.

2000 posts

With this post I’d like to celebrate my yet another blogging milestone – 2000 posts. And I am talking about published, public, archived, and available to everyone posts. Not pages, not comments, not drafts. My blogging history goes as far back as October 2001, but that might look a little misleading. More than 1500 posts were written within the last year of blogging – approximately from the end of March 2004, when I decided to post at least one article every day. I am proud to say that until now I didn’t have any gaps, and you can indeed find at least one post for every calendar day from that period.

Needless to say that from October 2001 my blogging tools and habbits changed a lot. I went through a few versions of hand made website, through a number of third-party utilities, to my current installation of WordPress. Originally, I didn’t have any categories. At this time, I have 37 of them. Before noone could comment on my posts. Today I have 570 comments in the database, out of which I wrote 203 as replies to other people’s sayings. My average posts went from few words to few paragraphs. I spend anywhere from half an hour to ten hours blogging every day (reading stuff, writing stuff, fixing stuff, linking to stuff, commenting stuff, moderating stuff, replying to stuff, coding stuff, etc).

I blog primaraly for myself. I keep important information closer to myseslf, logged and organized well. My blog already helped me a few times to locate bits and pieces of information that I’ve long time forgotten. Additionally, there are plenty of people who find things I write useful. Currently I am getting about 2,500 visitors daily. About a half of them are coming back more than once.

Let’s see how far I can take it…

Konqueror and BlogLines

My Firefox gave up on me today after I played a bit with its settings once again. I am still hoping that it will return from the NoGo land without the reset of the profile. In the meanwhile, I fired up Konqueror and decided to use it for a while. It has matured a lot since the last time I used it for web browsing and I can even say that it can handle most of the sites that I use correctly.

The most annoying problem so far is with Bloglines. Clicking on items in the left panel does not work at all. The only way to read new stuff is by clicking on the folders which is way too far from convenient. I have over 500 new items in some folders and loading them all at once doesn’t do me any good.

I’ve googled for the solution for a bit, but didn’t find anything. If you know by any chance how to overcome the issue, please let me know. If I will find the solution myself, I will update this node to include it.

P.S.: I am using Konqueror 3.3.1 from the Fedora Linux Core 3 installation.

Blogroll separated

My blogroll grew a bit lately and started to slow things down. I’ve decided to move it to a separate page – Blogroll. I’ll keep only a handful of links on the right tab. In case you want to see more, there is always a link to it on the sidebar, as well as in the navigation bar.

If you are wondering how I integrated the blogroll like this into WordPress, here’s how I did it:

  1. Create a separate page in WordPress admin.
  2. Update .htaccess file to properly handle permalinks for the new page.
  3. Install and activate WordPress PHP Exec plugin
  4. Export BlogLines profile via PHP Exec plugin, like so: 
    <phpcode>
<?php
   include ('http://rpc.bloglines.com/blogroll?html=1&id=leonid');
?>
</phpcode>

Note: change ‘leonid’ in the above URL to your BlogLines username.